Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. xii, 319 pp. (B&W photos.) US$27.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-8166-9336-8.
This is a wonderful book. Although at first glance a complex, multifaceted, and intricate portrayal of contemporary life in Indonesia’s sprawling capital of Jakarta, Simone’s major accomplishment with this book can nonetheless be easily and briefly summarized: it is an insightful description and theorization of urban informality, though one which is written without referencing the literature, terminology, or conventional discourses of this problematic field. From my perspective, this alone is a tremendous step forward, as informality since its putative discovery in Africa in the early 1970s, has inherently been defined in terms of what it is not. The informal, as the “not formal,” is thus a negation, a déjà vu, a pathology, which necessarily gives a Eurocentric underpinning to this most colonial of topics. By starting over again, by re-articulating the informal, but without the terminology and all the baggage that has been dragged along with it over the decades, Simone has given us a refreshing book to read, refreshing not only for its lively descriptions of what life is like in Jakarta, but for its theoretical insights into current practices of urbanism more generally.
What do Jakartans do? How do they get by? How do they provide for their own livelihoods? How do they interact with others? How do they engage with and shape the city? How does the city shape them? Such questions comprise basic lines of inquiry posed by Simone and his Indonesian collaborators in hundreds of in-depth interviews over multiple districts of the city. By thus building up an understanding of the city, the urban, through careful ethnographic observation and inquiry, Simone articulates the nature of urban life and the urban economy in a manner that neither undermines nor reinforces the received wisdom regarding all that is grouped under the heading of informality or its variants. Though without labelling it as such, this is informality on Jakarta’s own terms.
A persistent theme throughout the book is that of complexity, of how multiple possibilities at every turn—from the jumble of households that occupy minimally serviced high-rise flats, to the pervasiveness of brokers, of market intermediaries, for just about every kind of good or service, to the street gangs that engage in near-ritualistic forms of violence, to the ghosts who tend to concentrate in certain districts and certain blocks of flats—continually defy expectations, forcing the observer to step back and reconsider how they understand and interpret what they observe. This is an important point, though not so much for the sake of emphasizing how difficult it is to analyze the city than for challenging our ideas of what might constitute urban theory and how it can be applied in practical terms. Theory by its nature is a form of simplification, a fitting of the rich complexity of reality into constraining boxes of models and expectations. How does one develop theory without undue reductionism? How does one engage with or allow for the complexities of reality to somehow be expressed in a theoretical register while still permitting the basic outline of the theory to shine through, if not to dominate?
To this end, Simone’s writing style itself is part of the journey, bringing a richness of expression to a city as complex and contradictory as Jakarta—as would be the case, for that matter, for any other city of such scale and diversity. He is given to long, multi-clause sentences and to strings of adjectives, which oftentimes include jarring juxtapositions (not unlike the city itself, I should add). And as one means of simplifying complexity for the sake of the reader’s understanding, Simone tends to use a technique that economists would recognize as a form of “stylized facts”: vignette-like descriptions of one or another possibility as one might expect to find it on the ground. In the case of Jakarta, and in the case of this book, however, such stylization tends to be a means for exposing and perhaps beginning to understand the contradictions posed by life in Jakarta, of the opportunism and collaboration, the duplicity and dissembling, that allows the city to keep chugging along in spite of itself.
The book (again like the city itself), is not structured in a strictly linear manner, but instead is organized into four concept-based chapters: the Near-South (Simone’s attempt to address urban theory’s conceptual split between the so-called Global South and Global North, and to situate Jakarta, and other cities, within it); the Urban Majority (a recognition that what might otherwise be overlooked as an in-between group, neither impoverished nor necessarily “middle class,” constitutes the core of the city’s population); Devising Relations (a nuanced treatment of the social relations which are necessary for economic exchanges to occur, or what others might refer to as the social embeddedness of the informal economy); and Endurance (which perhaps can best be described as an analysis of the scaling up—and the spatialization—of such relations from individual to collective levels). Simone ends the book with a rather brief exploration of the policy implications of the book’s theoretical stance, which also places a heavy stress on complexity, in that how “policy work” is done (or should be done) is necessarily reflective of the complex, complicated, and at times contradictory nature of the urban as we may understand it in the case of Jakarta. Although the conclusion is not the strong point of the book, the basic observation that the people of Jakarta, as elsewhere, should seek to shift away from practices of increasing individuation toward more collective solutions to urban problems gives a clear and very fundamental criterion for finding a way forward.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in urbanization and the social change it implies in the Global South (or the Near-South as Simone would have it), especially in Southeast Asia and especially in Indonesia. The insights and analysis of this book are by no means limited to Jakarta, though, so I hope it finds a large readership among urbanists of every stripe. And for anyone with a professed interest in urban informality or the so-called informal sector, this book should be mandatory reading.
Michael Leaf
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada