Writing Past Colonialism Series. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013. xxxii, 268 pp. (Figures, Illustrations, maps.) US$60.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-3745-7.
Abidin Kusno’s third book on the history of architectural forms and spatial practices in Indonesia, After the New Order, establishes him as the foremost architectural historian of Indonesia. In this volume, Kusno continues with the trajectory established in his prior books, identifying the connections between a politics of collective memory, ideological presences and influences embedded within the architectural and the actual lived outcomes of such temporal-spatial collisions. After the New Order’s erudition and comparative potential is evident not only in the literatures cited (e.g., political philosophy, literature, anthropology and history), but also in providing readers access to a variety of urban practitioners, Indonesian thinkers, Asian thinkers, as well as Dutch, North American and Australian scholarship. The periodization of the book as “after” the New Order situates Kusno’s effort to prove, through careful historical research, the evidence for how present-day conditions of floods, traffic and displacement are legacies—the combined result of the Indonesian state’s negligence and governance. Thus, Jakarta is not, as many of its critics and inhabitants argue, a city “without a plan.” Rather, Jakarta is a place of uneven development, where the discourse of urbanization has until recently been regarded as an elite and statist domain.
Kusno’s longue durée approach is applied throughout the 7-chapter, tripartite book, yet the material feels resolutely contemporary as it deals with Jakarta’s ongoing urban ecological problems of scarce affordable housing, limited access to public services, floods and traffic, even providing us with glimpses into the last two impactful gubernatorial reigns of Sutiyoso and Fauzi Bowo. Thus, it is a forward-looking book, particularly concerned with the fate of the rakyat (the People, but more aptly the poor and dispossessed) under state and private schemes to regulate, formalize and ultimately displace them. Jakarta’s growth upward (chapter 7: Housing the Margin) and outward (chapter 5: The Coast and the Last Frontier) show spatial politics to be urban realizations of applied state power, and even, as was true during the New Order, the result of presidential fiat. Against this backdrop of state-led modernization, the informal arrangements of vernacular and grassroots adaptations appear as unplanned aberrations and disturbances. As Kusno argues, state initiatives targeting social mobility and affordable, “modern” vertical housing for the poor are often selectively successful in their stated aims but remain effective machines for transforming large areas of urban space, reclaiming and “upgrading” coastlines, and presenting “greenwashing” campaigns. After the New Order offers the sobering thought that the social project of housing the poor is too often dominated by a logic of making the poor invisible to the rest of the population. In doing so, he shows the intertwined histories of massive state projects used to imagine a different urban modernity and the population flows and displacements that precipitated and resulted from such policies. The book brings to mind Mike Davis’s haunting thought in Planet of Slums (2006), that the urban poor are celebrated for all the wrong reasons (as capable of self-governance) and passed over because of their fragmented capacity for self-representation.
The first section of the book, titled “Longue Durée,” contains two chapters: chapter 1 on the history of City Hall, and chapter 2 on the ruko, or shophouse. These chapters showcase Kusno’s skill in combining a historical approach with a more ethnographic one. Similar to his analysis of the posko(command post) (Abidin Kusno, The Appearances of Memory: the Mnemonic Practices of Architecture and Urban Form in Indonesia, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), chapter 2 uses the ruko architectural form as a historicizing device to analyze Chinese identity and national belonging through the colonial and postcolonial eras. Here, he situates the conventional, resolutely utilitarian and now repellently splendid structures of (Chinese) commerce that are identified with Chineseness in the national imaginary, and shows how the ruko’s desirability eventually transcends its ethnic roots, leading to even more lifestyle exclusive structures such as Islamic ruko. Yet as a reader I found the “identity and morality” (xviii) aspects of the book’s argument to be its weakest, since ethnic and “moral” (i.e., religious) claims have had the least impact on the kinds of class-based displacement that Kusno is concerned with. The book returns to safer ground in the remaining two sections, “Time Remembered/Time Forgotten” and “Spatial Conjunctures.” There, Kusno has relaxed his stance toward his patented concept of “nationalist urbanism” to allow for more complex formations of middle-class participation, private capital and international factors in Jakarta’s development. Even as he focuses on elite instruments of urban development, including the zoning of globalized, capitalist spaces (EPZs in the Jabotabek area) and exclusive superblocks and malls, the book offers glimpses of hope, from the NGOs who agitate against city officials and private developers, to the growing capacity of the rakyat to seek housing rights in the democratic era. Two significant contributions to our understanding of Indonesian urbanism appear here. The first is Kusno’s chapter theorizing the “periurban fringe” (chapter 3). As other authors have argued, the peri-urban is a hybrid zone characterized by the appearance of “desa-kota” (village-town) and the aspirations of permanently transitional subjects (Erik Harms, Saigon’s Edge: On the Margins of Ho Chi Minh City, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Kusno analyzes the peri-urban as a “space of exception” that has become a buffer zone of negligent governance, a form of indirect rule in which the poor and the working classes subsist without right to citizenship claims, but remain with the prospect of the city dangled before them. The second significant and new argument that Kusno presents is his ecological framing of urban issues (chapter 6: Green Governmentality), a frame that has become more popular in planning discourse in Indonesia, albeit without the critical lens with which Kusno views “Go Green” campaigns.
The interview that appears as an epilogue is as informative and rich in data as the chapters themselves. The banter between Etienne Turpin, an urbanist studying Jakarta, and Kusno draws together the major themes animating the book, including urban informality, the agency of the urban poor, lingering modernism, and climate change. Here, Kusno eloquently explains why the rakyat’surban struggles must be seen in broader political frames of social justice and climate change. The book is as appropriate for an undergraduate readership as it is for experts, in large part due to the author’s clarity of thought and writing. I would recommend that especial attention be paid to the epilogue, where the author’s lively voice demonstrates the extent of his intellectual engagement with urban Indonesia.
Doreen Lee
Northeastern University, Boston, USA
pp. 362-364