Jakarta: Drawing the City Near by Abdulmaliq Simone (review)

While Christopher Silver’s Planning the Mega City, Jo Santoso’s Jakarta’s Fifth Layer, and Abidin Kusno’s After The New Order¹ have made valuable contributions to expanding our knowledge of the macro-scale processes of urban planning, state formation, and urban development in Jakarta, Abdulmaliq Simone’s Jakarta: Drawing the City Near makes an important contribution to examining everyday urban life in Jakarta. Simone approaches the city as an urban scholar and sociologist whose research examines the everyday politics of urban life in cities across the global South. In contrast to a wealth of studies that examine the urban poor in Southern cities, Simone’s book is distinguished by its focus on those residents occupying the space between extreme wealth and poverty, which he refers to as the city’s “urban majority.” Simone draws on research conducted over multiple years in Jakarta, during which time he carried out interviews, engaged in participant observations in several neighborhoods, and collaborated with the Urban Poor Consortium, an Indonesian non-profit. He also draws on research (surveys of neighborhood residents and interviews with residents, planners, security guards, and managers of mega-developments) conducted in an urban laboratory through a partnership jointly run by the district councils of Senen, Kemayoran, and Johar Baru; the University of Tarumanagara; and the Rujak Center for Urban Studies. By illuminating the daily practices and procedures by which the city continually operates, Simone’s book offers a refreshing take on a city often unfairly caricatured as dysfunctional and disaster-prone.

In this book, Simone subtly rejects the dominant theoretical concepts and categories of mainstream urban studies, such as the global South and neoliberalism, contending these cannot capture the “complex processes of urban change or the multitude of practices” of urban life (2). The book therefore makes an important contribution in its effort to engage with Jakarta on its own terms. The result is a series of “mid-level concepts,” around which each chapter is shaped: “the near-South,” “the urban majority,” “devising relations,” and “endurance.” Simone argues that these mid-level concepts are able to illustrate practices not fully captured by dominant categorizations. For example, observing that many residents employed in the formal economy depend on income earned “off the books,” such as renting a room to migrants or operating a warung (shop, stall) out of their house (87), and that formal businesses often depend on subcontracting informal labor to cut costs (196), Simone demonstrates how informal and formal economic activities often occur within the same spaces. He therefore argues that these spaces cannot be labeled as either strictly one or the other, formal or informal. Similarly, he observes how residents forge fragile collaborations and contingent relations with one another not due to a shared ethnic or religious identity, but instead on the basis of necessity such that “everyday negotiations seem to ‘forget’ ethnicity as soon as they begin” (139).

Chapter One introduces Simone’s concept of the “near South,” intended to connote a space “neither of the global North nor of the global South” (34). Simone examines the contradictions and ambiguities that he regards as central to urban development in Jakarta: seemingly unproductive projects operating as so-called “self-contained” developments place enormous pressure on the city; developers manipulate or lie about occupancy rates to manufacture the success of their ventures; and land transactions are, in practice, governed more often by money rather than the nearly two thousand distinct pieces of legislation designed to do so. While Simone exposes illegal or unofficial practices, he refrains from defaulting to a discussion of corruption, instead reading these processes through the lens of uncertainty. In doing so, he illustrates the centrality of these practices to the daily working of the city, rather than evidence of Jakarta’s dysfunctional nature.

The concept of the “near South” stands to have great utility for urban scholars studying cities in Indonesia and across the so-called “global South.” By refusing to read Jakarta through the lens of informality or illegality, Simone invites...