Night and the city: Clubs, brothels and politics in Jakarta

Abstract

This article analyses the significance of Jakarta’s night venues, defined in a narrow way (bars, clubs and prostitution complexes). They represent not only forms of modernisation and their acceptance in a city from the developing world, but they show how usual means of controlling the night have different understandings and produce different types of arrangements, regarding where one is located. We show how informal agreements are central to ordering the night and to governance processes, and how they produce different types of territories within an Indonesian context. The first part draws a topography of the night-time economy in Jakarta, showing how the evolution of the venues reflects both the growth of the metropolis and Indonesia’s different political regimes. Then the paper analyses the inner (dis)organisation of the venues and neighbourhoods in which they are concentrated, before assessing the meaning of the policies aimed at creating order in the city at night, showing how appearances of order take precedence over the effective planning of the metropolis.

Night as Fragmenting Frontier: Understanding the Night that Remains in an era of 24/7

“…While the urban night in these spaces shows a replication of the Western spread of the neoliberal night time economy, there is also an emergent informal economy operating alongside this process: ‘one can observe informal modes of appropriation, negotiation and democratisation performed by pedestrians, shoppers, vendors and entrepreneurs during the laissez‐faire hours of the night’ (Yeo and Heng , p724). A similar situation is found in Jakarta, where ‘informality is central to the night zones’ and any ‘new regulations appear as a means of renewing agreements and negotiating arrangements’ (Tadié and Permanadeli , p482). In other words, as with the daytime city, any global spread of ‘the night‐time economy’ does not produce a same urban neoliberal model, but a series of hybrid forms always containing moments and elements of difference that fall outside of capitalist control.…”

The ‘exotic’ phenomenon of the American Bar in interwar Berlin and Prague: Re-reading the concept of place

“…Day-time centres have a character differing from night-time centres because the latter are only concentrated in certain parts of a town (Pixová 2011;Mozr 2017). From this perspective, it is possible to find many works focused on geographies of the urban night (Bianchini 1995;Edensor 2015;Grazian 2009;Gwiazdzinski 2015;Hadfield 2015;Howell 2000;McKewon 2003;Shaw 2014;Tadié 2015;Van Liempt et al 2015). However, there is no article or book, which could evaluate the production of 'nightlife economy' in the same original way as this paper, because the American Bar represents a unique luxurious place of the night-life and plays a major role in this kind of economy in the interwar period (Mozr 2017).…”

Continuous Production and New Forms of Labour: A Case for Reclaiming Public Time

“…A number of disciplines and perspectives are represented in existing literature. These include (among many others) studies on the urban hardware of information and communication technologies (ICTs) (Graham, 2001), the night-time city (Eldridge, 2019; Dimmer, Solomon, & Morris, 2017; Shaw, 2015, 2018; Tadié & Permanadeli, 2015; Thomas & Bromley, 2000; Lovatt & O’Connor, 1995), social impacts of mobile technologies (Hampton, Goulet, & Albanesius, 2015; Paiva, Cachinho, & Barata-Salgueiro, 2017; Hatuka & Toch, 2016; Green, 2002; Townsend, 2000), the relationship between time, space and community (Stephens, 2010; McCann, 2003; Calhoun, 1998) and spatial effects of temporal politics (Kitchin, 2019; Charbgoo & Mareggi, 2018; Moore-Cherry & Bonnin, 2018; Mulíček and Osman, 2018; Simone & Fauzan, 2013; Stavrides, 2013). These scholars have examined in great depth the processes through which social and political forces contest the meaning of time and act upon it—causing it to be compressed, sped up, broken, divided into fractions, reorganized as rhythms, appropriated, revalourized and invoked strategically.…”