This article explores a conjunctural approach to comparison as a means to capture the complexity of the processes shaping metropolitan land transformations in a city of the global South, comparing ...the co-implicated actions of developers and local residents across central and peri-urban Jabodetabek. A conjunctural approach shares with some other forms of comparison the ambition to build new theories and challenge existing knowledge. Rather than controlling for the characteristics of units of analysis as in conventional comparison, a conjunctural approach attends to the broader spatio-temporal conjuncture. It involves highlighting unexpected or overlooked starting points for comparison, attending to inter-place, inter-scalar and inter-temporal relationalities in order to identify shared general tendencies as well as particularities and to chart their mutual constitution. Grounding this comparison iteratively puts local knowledge and observations in conversation with already existing theories. Deploying these principles in a socio-spatial intra-metropolitan comparison, we show that economic speculation on land and property is complexly entangled with actors’ socio-cultural speculations, as they seek also to realise aspirations for distinct peri/urban futures. Economic speculation deepens already existing inequalities in wealth and power differentials between and among developers and kampung residents. The erasure of informal settlements and displacement of their residents is supplemented by the ability of other kampungs and select residents to take advantage of spillover opportunities from the formal developments built on former kampung land. Distinct central city and peri-urban landscapes are emerging, shaped by differences in the social ecology of land and local governance and planning regimes.
Across cities of the global South, major initiatives are underway to assemble
land from informal settlements in order to make it available for large-scale
infrastructure and commercial real estate ...projects. Driven by global city
aspirations, profit-seeking developers, demands from emergent middle classes for
modern residential, consumption and recreational spaces, and, last but not
least, the availability of finance, these land transformations seek to commodify
and enclose residential urban commons and involve the displacement of thousands
of urban residents. Through an examination of two field sites, a ‘legal’ kampung
where land is being acquired through negotiations between kampung residents with
land rights and developers’ land brokers, and two ‘illegal’ kampungs whose
residents were evicted in the name of flood mitigation, we conclude that the
default theory for explaining these processes—accumulation by dispossession—is
inadequate for capturing the variegated and complex nature of such processes. By
thinking through Jakarta, we seek to provincialize the dominant concept of
accumulation by dispossession, proposing an extension that we suggest is better
attuned to capture the distinct features of Southern cities: Contested
accumulations through displacement.
Jakarta’s great land transformation Herlambang, Suryono; Leitner, Helga; Tjung, Liong Ju ...
Urban studies,
03/2019, Letnik:
56, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
We analyse dramatic land transformations in the greater Jakarta metropolitan area since 1988: large-scale private-sector development projects in central city and peri-urban locations. These ...transformations are shaped both by Jakarta’s shifting conjunctural positionality within global political economic processes and by Indonesia’s hybrid political economy. While influenced by neoliberalisation, Indonesia’s political economy is a hybrid formation, in which neoliberalisation coevolves with long-standing, resilient oligarchic power structures and contestations by the urban majority. Three persistent features shape these transformations: the predominance of large Indonesian conglomerates’ development arms and stand-alone developers; the shaping role of elite informal networks connecting the development industry with state actors; and steadily increasing foreign involvement and investment in the development industry, accelerating recently. We identify three eras characterised by distinct types of urban transformation. Under autocratic neoliberalising urbanism (1988–1997) peri-urban shopping centre development predominated, with large Indonesian developers taking advantage of close links with the Suharto family. The increased indebtedness of these firms became debilitating after the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. Thus post-Suharto democratic neoliberalising urbanism (1998–2005) was a period of minimal investment, except for shopping centres in DKI Jakarta facilitating a consumption-led strategy of recovery from 1997, and the active restructuring of elite informality. Rescaled neoliberalising urbanism (2006–present) saw the recovery of major developers, renewed access to finance, including foreign capital, and the construction of ever-more spectacular integrated superblock developments in DKI Jakarta and peri-urban new towns.
我们分析了自 1988 年以来雅加达大都市区发生的剧烈土地变迁：中心城市和城郊地区的大型私营部门开发项目。这些转变受到了雅加达在全球政治经济进程中不断变化的交汇位置和印度尼西亚混合型政治经济的影响。虽然受新自由化的影响，但印度尼西亚的政治经济是一个混合型的形态，新自由化与大多数城市长期存在的、富有韧性的寡头力量结构和竞争共同发展。三大持续性特征塑造了这些转变：印度尼西亚大型企业集团的开发部门和独立开发商的支配性优势；将开发业与国家行为者联系起来的精英非正式网络的塑造作用；外资对开发业的参与和投资稳步增加，尤其近期加速增长。我们确定了三个以不同类型城市转型为特征的时代。专制式新自由化城市规划期（1988-1997），城郊购物中心开发占主导，此时印度尼西亚大型开发商利用了与苏哈托家族的密切联系。1997 年亚洲金融危机之后，这些公司因债务增加而变得脆弱。因此，后苏哈托民主新自由化城市规划期（1998-2005）是一个最小投资时期，可资一提的只有雅加达的购物中心促进了从 1997 年开始的消费主导型复苏策略，以及精英非正式性的积极重组。重新调整的新自由化城市规划期（2006 年至今）见证了主要开发商的复苏，包括外资在内的融资渠道重新建立，以及在雅加达和城郊新城镇建设更加壮观的超大型综合开发项目。
Under the influence of the discourses and practices of global neoliberal urbanism, municipal administrations worldwide aspire to make their cities world class spaces, where informality is an ...anachronism and poverty can be made history. In this essay, drawing on fieldwork conducted in Jakarta, Indonesia, San Francisco (California), and Seattle (Washington), we address the question of how a geographic relational poverty approach can help us understand, or at least expand ways of thinking about these processes by attending to urban informality and the politics of poverty. Informality, a pervasive feature of the global South and North, functions as a survival strategy whereby the monetarily poor can compensate for their lack of income through commoning. Market‐driven, state underwritten urban development initiatives for housing those with wealth is limiting the conditions of possibility for the monetarily poor, and informality. This is compounded by emergent political discourses rendering informality as inappropriate, and the monetarily poor as undeserving of a right to the city. Yet long‐standing more‐than‐capitalist and communal informal practices pursued by the urban poor remain effective and necessary survival strategies, supporting residents whose presence is necessary to the city and whose practices challenge capitalist norms.
Neil Smith's Scale Jones, John Paul; Leitner, Helga; Marston, Sallie A. ...
Antipode,
January 2017, Letnik:
49, Številka:
S1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
In this essay, part of a special issue acknowledging the scholarship of Neil Smith, we trace his contributions to conceptualizing scale. From his important foundational text, Uneven Development, to ...his later works that fashioned a more malleable, constructivist, and socio‐cultural approach, Neil Smith made lifelong contributions to our understanding of the processes of scale production—contributions that have forever altered how we understand the relationships among space, capitalism, and politics.
Small towns throughout the rural upper Midwest have been experiencing dramatic economic restructuring and an unprecedented influx of new immigrants of color, triggering conflicts and tension between ...almost exclusively white residents and the new immigrants. Analyzing the roots and content of white residents' responses to their encounters with new immigrants in a small town in rural Minnesota, the concept of spaces of encounters draws attention to the relational quality of identities and attitudes and the active role of emotions and spatiality in processes of Othering and racialization, as well as the potential of the encounter to disrupt preconceived boundaries and racial stereotypes. White residents racialize immigrants and space, although the specific form taken by processes of racialization is inflected by individuals' social positionality and place identities and by longer term and broader scale racial stereotypes and dominant discourses about immigration, race, and nation in the United States. The racialization of immigrants defends white privilege and culture; recovers an imagined idealized place, past, and future; and establishes that belonging to the national and local community is conditional on immigrants conforming to white American values and norms-an assimilationist imaginary that runs up against the multicultural and multiracial reality of the town. Residents' reflections on their own racial prejudice and different forms of racism, as well as intimate social relations they forge with individual migrants, hold promise for social relations that transcend differences across racial and cultural divides.
Advocating a provincialization of critical urban theory, we seek to move beyond current polarizations and disputes over the basis of urban theory, creating space to take seriously the possibility ...that no single theory suffices to account for the variegated nature of urbanization and cities across the world. Such provincialization requires a serious engagement with both mainstream and critical Anglophone urban theory, challenging the seeming naturalness of knowledge claims through rigorous theoretical and empirical scrutiny from the standpoint of peripheral perspectives located outside the core. This entails recognizing the existence of a shifting ecosystem of critical urban theories, putting these into even‐handed critical conversation with one another. The collective resilience of urban theory will be dependent upon ongoing engagement across such diversity. At the heart of such an ecosystem are shifts in practice, seeking a new comparative analytic that destabilizes the universalism of the dominant norm, against which all other exemplars are to be compared, with the imperative of taking the field seriously.
In response to calls by scholars to deepen theoretical engagement in research on Alternative Food Networks (AFNs), in this article we critically discuss and assess major theoretical approaches ...deployed in the study of AFNs. After highlighting the strengths and limitations of each theoretical approach, we provide an alternative framework – which we refer to as the Geographical Political Ecology of Food Systems – that integrates the contributions that have emerged in the study of the alternative geographies of food with an understanding of capitalist processes in the food system. We do this by bringing together literature on the political ecology of food systems and multiple spatialities, including Doreen Massey's understanding of space as a heterogeneous multiplicity and Eric Sheppard's conceptualization of sociospatial positionality. We utilize research on agrarian change and AFNs in Eastern Europe to elaborate this approach. We argue that this new perspective helps navigate tensions in AFN scholarship, and provides new avenues for research and action. We focus particularly on the ability of AFNs to provide a sustainable livelihood for participating farmers, thus far a neglected topic in AFN research in Europe. Keywords: Alternative Food Networks, Eastern Europe, spatialities, positionality, livelihoods
Abstract
We propose an epistemology for conjunctural inter-urban comparison, stressing the dialectical relationship between the general and the particular. We spatialise conjunctural analysis, ...avoiding methodological territorialism by extending the explanatory framework outwards in space to incorporate inter-territorial connections and supra-territorial scalar relations. We then provide three guiding principles for conjunctural comparison: an open starting point, a three-dimensional socio-spatial ontology and the general/particular dialectic. Illustrating this with comparative fieldwork on urban land transformations in Jakarta and Bangalore, we stress-test received theories and develop Inter-scalar Chains of Rentiership: this mid-range concept clarifies shared tendencies across the cities, particularities differentiating them and their inter-relations.
The papers and commentaries constituting this special issue offer new insights into speculative urbanism from the perspective of two southern metropolises. Based on an international and ...interdisciplinary collaboration comparing speculative urbanism in central and peri-urban Jakarta (Indonesia) and Bengaluru (India), and interrogating the literature triggered by a seminal 2011 paper by Michal Goldman, this issue extends existing speculative urbanism scholarship in four ways. First, the papers in this special issue take a multi-scalar approach, placing speculative urban practices within the broader spatio-temporal conjunctural contexts shaping their emergence. Second, extending currently economistic framings, they show how speculation also is socio-cultural. The diverse actors engaged in speculative urbanism do not simply seek to accumulate wealth; they do so with aspirations in mind for differentially imagined, but yet-to-be-realized, urban/peri-urban futures. Third, they highlight how speculative urbanism involves a broader range of actors than the usual suspects (developers and financial institutions), including land brokers, individual landlords, the state and its actors, and residents displaced from informal settlements. Fourth, they draw attention to diverse objects of urban speculation; not only land and property, but also more-than-human phenomena such as urban socio-ecologies and socio-technical networks.
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