Uneven Urbanisation: Connecting Flows of Water to Flows of Labour and Capital Through Jakarta's Flood Infrastructure

Abstract

This article analyses processes of uneven urbanisation by looking at flood infrastructure. Combining the conceptual frameworks of uneven development with the political ecology of urbanisation, we use flood infrastructure as a methodological device to trace the processes through which unevenness occurs within, but also far beyond, the city of Jakarta, Indonesia. We do this to show how the development of flood infrastructure in Jakarta is shaped by the logic of capitalism through mutually implicated tendencies of socionatural differentiation and equalisation. These processes render waters, resources and labour as similar across places and times to produce different spaces for different populations, within and beyond city boundaries. This theorisation reveals how the urban inequalities (re)produced by flood infrastructure are intimately linked to inequalities (re)produced through the urbanisation of the non‐city.

Pipe dreams? Practices of everyday governance of heterogeneous configurations of water supply in Baruipur, a small town in India

“…In turn, how do gendered relations govern the use and access as well as material configurations of infrastructure? To bring out a gendered understanding of differential access to water, we followed studies on gender and class (Crow and Sultana, 2002; Sultana, 2009), intersections of gender, caste and class (Birkenholtz, 2013).…”

“…Our paper draws on an in-depth qualitative examination and comparison of the everyday governance practices and politics around the formal 1000-foot deep tube wells and the public stand posts. These are used as 'methodological device' (Batubara et al, 2018(Batubara et al, : 1189 to reveal intangible socio-political practices that relate people to highly uneven water flows within and across neighbourhoods and enmesh them within locally contingent governance regimes. We collected field data from December 2016 to August 2018 from three wards (nos.…”

History, Colonialism, and Archival Methods in Socio-Hydrological Scholarship: A Case Study of the Boerasirie Conservancy in British Guiana

“…Though offering critical insights into the potential future impacts of floods, these modelling-based studies take for granted both the construction of vulnerable flood subjects and the histories of infrastructure and environmental management that shape these vulnerabilities [33][34][35][36]. As a result, the social inequalities and operations of power which produce vulnerability to floods go ignored.…”

“…As a result, the social inequalities and operations of power which produce vulnerability to floods go ignored. Flood infrastructure-which may be considered to include storm-water drainage systems-produces and reproduces material inequalities between populations, particularly in urban areas [35,36]. As Batubara, Kooy, and Zwarteveen argue, the technical and value-neutral language used in the examples above can be used to justify or obscure highly political decision-making processes through which new vulnerabilities are produced while existing ones are made more concrete [36].…”

“…Flood infrastructure-which may be considered to include storm-water drainage systems-produces and reproduces material inequalities between populations, particularly in urban areas [35,36]. As Batubara, Kooy, and Zwarteveen argue, the technical and value-neutral language used in the examples above can be used to justify or obscure highly political decision-making processes through which new vulnerabilities are produced while existing ones are made more concrete [36]. As technical practices (i.e., modelling) continue to be offered to governments and emergency management teams as an easy solution to flood risk problems, understanding the inequalities which may be embedded in them and the ways in which they might produce new inequalities becomes vital to understanding how they might be framed, considered, and applied [37,38].…”