Maximum exposure: Making sense in the background of extensive urbanization

Abstract

Building upon notions of extended urbanization, the essay reflects on the sensory implications of what it means when urbanization becomes extensive, i.e. when decision-making is subject to a multiplicity of forces that make coherent narratives about what is taking place problematic, while “extending” an enlarged field of opportunities as well as constraints for individual livelihoods. As many residents of Jakarta provisionally settle in distant peripheries and eke out an uncertain endurance in urban core working class districts, while operating across larger swathes of territory in search of opportunity, increased reference is made to the background. This is not only a diffuse, uncertain object of residents’ attention but a strategic way of sensing how their everyday lives are being folded in to multiple disparate trajectories of urban remaking and a concrete terrain of operations. As such the essay, through an engagement with residents in one of Jakarta’s long existing working class districts, explores what it means to inhabit the processes rather than places of urbanization and how their experiments with new ways of being exposed to all that the city may posit opens up new itineraries for navigating the city, yet also holds together a sense of purpose and well-being.

Geographies of land use: Planning, property, and law

“…Thus, a focus on the ways that land use is actually practiced on the ground becomes a central focus for scholars like Simone (, , ) who has elucidated upon the everyday informal and experimental tactics used by urban residents in using and making the city. At the same time, Simone has been joined by others, such as Vasudevan () who join the call for a reconsideration of actually occurring urbanism in light of the informal and improvisational structures of cities of the global south (see also Stacey, , ).…”

Moving urban political ecology beyond the ‘urbanization of nature’

“…This exploration responds to the call for resisting the reduction of what goes on outside cities to the dynamics and processes that emanate unidirectionally from cities ( Keil, 2018a ). Suburbanization here is defined as a function of what Lefebvre called extended urbanization (2003) (for an elaboration see Monte-Mor, 2014a , 2014b ; see also Keil, 2018e ; Simone, 2019 ), which includes all manner of processes of peripheral urbanization and has as a common denominator a combination of non-central population and economic growth with urban spatial expansion ( Ekers et al, 2012 : 407; Keil, 2018d : 11; McGee, 2011 ). Realizing the contentious debate around naming urban peripheries worldwide ( Harris and Vorms, 2017 ), we choose suburbanization as the umbrella term used in a comprehensive fashion in critical studies in global suburbanisms for the last decade.…”

Regionalizing the infrastructure turn: a research agenda

“…There are important distinctions between the infrastructural experiences of the Global North, South and East (e.g., Pilo, 2019;Schindler & Kanai, 2019;Shen & Wu, 2019), but seemingly distinct global conversations about growth and decline, connectivity and marginalization, investment and disinvestment are all grounded in the capacity of infrastructural systems to sustain our collective urban futures (Coutard & Rutherford, 2015;Filion & Pulver, 2019). In other words, infrastructure is a central element that makes the urban possible in its myriad forms; from the planetary reaches of extended urbanization to the concrete experience of urban life from Jarrow to Jakarta (Simone, 2019).…”