JAKARTA: The City of a Thousand Dimensions | By Abidin Kusno

Jakarta evokes ambivalence but is still an irresistible magnet. At independence in August 1945, its population was less than 1 million. Now, depending where the boundary is drawn, its conurbation exceeds 30 million, more than the population of Australia. How is such a “great wen” to be comprehended? There is no simple truth, unless it be the satellite view on a rare clear night, and then only momentarily, because the city is a shape-shifter. The closer one approaches, the more complex the reality. This book’s figurative subtitle is “City of a Thousand Dimensions,” of which the author selects a few and mixes them with overviews and theoretical reflections.

Although having grown up at the other end of Java, author Abidin Kusno has lived and worked in Jakarta as an architect and project manager and knows the city closely. Now a professor at York University in Canada, he writes as both an insider and outsider. This collection of essays is as thoughtful a recent account of Jakarta as may be found. An enjoyable preface and introduction lead from the personal into the book’s main themes, then successive chapters explore the nature of the kampung community, traffic and congestion, flooding, new towns, urban politics, Islamist urbanism, and the proposed relocation of the capital, followed by the author in conversation, including his reflections on the impact of the pandemic and a thoughtful neo-Marxist discourse on urban theory.

What ties all this together and what might interest a reader with little or no acquaintance with Jakarta? The main theme of “middling urbanism” attempts to clarify discussion of urbanism in Southeast Asia. McGee’s observed hybrid of desa-kota (village-city) settlements on the urban fringe is at best a starting point. Kusno suggests that “irregular settlements” (kampung) are their complement at the urban core, and in their similar condition, and the “culture of governance” is a middling form between the village and the formal city. He elaborates this proposition with a blend of history, ethnography, and theory to argue that kampung emerged as a “negotiated relation between capitalism, the state, and civil society” (45) that economize on the urban overheads of collective infrastructure. In the last chapter, he proposes that kampung are the Indonesian form of the “urban multitude.”

A related theme is urban governance. In chapter 6 (“Urban Politics”), Kusno argues that since colonial times the state has governed kampung communities by exemption, in effect sub-contracting powers. The logic is not only that kampung provide cheap housing for the city’s labour force but also, since democracy was restored in 1998, that those communities are a massive bloc of votes. Chapter 7 (“Islamic Urbanism”) recounts ways in which this bloc was mobilized to topple a reformist Christian governor who was portrayed as insensitive to kampung grievances and accused of blasphemy against Islam. Nevertheless, large tracts of kampung have been obliterated and turned into roads, offices, malls, and luxury housing, with their inhabitants driven to the outskirts (thereby demonstrating the nexus between urban core and periphery). The survival of kampung is a matter of ongoing negotiation.

A third theme is transcendence. In chapter 5 (“A New Assemblage City”), Kusno sketches the Lippo Group’s initiative to develop the Meikarta high-rise new town to the east of Jakarta. Even more dramatic is the central government’s commitment to a new capital in East Kalimantan (chapter 8). Nusantara is intended to be a futuristic capital city that transcends Jakarta’s historic layers, contradictions, and seemingly intractable problems.

A limitation of the book for non-Indonesian readers is that the author nowhere properly locates Jakarta. About 10 million people live within the borders of the Capital City Province, perhaps another 10 million commute and another 10 million live and work across the other two provinces and various municipalities and districts that make up the conurbation of Greater Jakarta (Jabodetabek). Of which city or cities are all these people citizens? Voting is transacted by registration but driving or riding a vehicle is a more complex negotiation, likewise dealing with periodic floodwaters or managing a business, because state power is a patchwork of three levels across the urban region.

The urban condition can be construed in a more empirical way. In ‘”The Rise of a Middle Class” (Indonesia 39 [1985]), I suggested that urban classes should be studied in terms of their mode of consumption, and that in Indonesia, as Kusno also observes, the sharpest distinction between middle class and kampung families is ownership of and parking for motor vehicles. Middle-class families drive cars while kampung families ride motorcycles or use public transport, a choice dictated by income but also the narrowness of kampung laneways. At the other extreme, gated communities are still a version of surburbia. A new town of apartment towers (Meikarta), however, is a new urban form in Jakarta and a different mode of consumption that, at a price, insulates from the daily challenges and health hazards of living in Jakarta. So do the air-conditioned shopping and entertainment malls that now dot the city and are also, for brief periods, a welcome refuge for climate-stressed kampung dwellers.

A limitation of the book is that Kusno does not set Jakarta in any comparative context, either within Indonesia or internationally. Why has Greater Jakarta retained so much of its kampung, or Rio de Janeiro its favelas, while other cities have denigrated and bulldozed their so-called slums? Kusno is agnostic as to whether Jakarta is unique but does not pursue this line of inquiry, which would be open-ended and probably unsatisfying. Wisely, he leaves that judgement to his readers. Not the least merit of the book is that the author does not impose his own perspectives but opens conversations. Whether or not the reader is familiar with Jakarta, there is much with which to engage.

Howard Dick

University of Melbourne, Melbourne