Urban evictions, public housing and the gendered rationalisation of kampung life in Jakarta

Abstract

The dispossession of urban communities across class and racial lines is a global phenomenon linked to the expansion of international investment in the development of ‘exemplary’ city space. However, city evictions are also historically informed and gendered processes which are continuous with past colonial and postcolonial urban rationalisation projects. Drawing on testimonies of women evictees in Jakarta, as well as interviews with public housing managers, this article details the gendered nature of the rationalisation of urban life in the context of a contemporary evictions regime. We argue that the rationalisation of urban space serves to sharpen the gender order by placing material constraints on women's roles, limiting their economic activities and defining them as hygiene‐responsible housewives. Further, and in turn, the limited provision of ‘rusunawa’ public housing, which we show to be a gendered spatial and social transition informed by state doctrine on the family, provides the state with justification for dispossession itself. Finally, women's everyday acts of refusal and resistance show not only that kampung forms of social life continue to be preserved in Jakarta, but also that rationalisation itself is a negotiated and contingent process.

Worlding aspirations and resilient futures: Framings of risk and contemporary city‐making in Metro Cebu, the Philippines

“…Such trends and discourses are not unique to Cebu but reflect a pattern that can be observed across the country and beyond (see Tilley et al, , this issue). In her insightful investigation of disaster‐induced evictions in Pasig City of Metro Manila, Alvarez () notes similar flood‐focused preoccupations, not only in terms of the municipality's flagship mega infrastructure projects, but also in the haphazard delineation of risk and danger zones to target urban poor communities living near or along waterways and legitimise their eviction from these spaces.…”

“…These efforts to ‘promote functional, safe and environmentally friendly urban areas’ (ALMEC Corporation Oriental Consultants Global Co., : ES‐3) are presented as desirable and beneficial for all of Cebu's residents. However, in reality, they are likely to have a profound implication on the lives, livelihoods and mobility of the urban poor, as Tilley et al (, this issue) discuss in the context of Jakarta. In fact, as I reveal below, a closer analysis of the framing of urban poor communities in the discourse regime underpinning Mega Cebu thwarts its self‐acclamations of inclusion and resilience, exposing dynamics of dispossession bolstered by the mobilisation of a revanchist discourse that stigmatises the urban poor through ascriptions of disaster risk to legitimate their exclusion from the city.…”

Space Grabs: Colonizing the Vertical City

“…Affordable high‐rise housing exists but has its own problems: it typically fails to serve the specific needs of the urban majority, such as the need to engage in informal economic activities, isolates people from their social networks, and can have detrimental effects on the psychological wellbeing of individuals. Interviews with public housing residents in Jakarta have shown their dissatisfaction with living in high‐rise public housing (Leitner and Sheppard, 2018, Tilley et al ., 2019). 9…”

International political economy and international political sociology meet in Jakarta: Feminist research agendas seen through everyday life

“…Second, this intersection between the sociocultural and the political economic was also observable in how the shift to the rusunawa public housing was marked by forms of rationalisation whereby the lives of the urban poor were rendered ever more legible to the state. 18 Rationalisation of life takes many forms: CCTV surveillance and policing of everyday activities such as waste disposal and commercial activities, obliging people to set up bank accounts in order to pay rent and bills, ID cards with tenant details placed on each apartment door in the high rise, and a resettlement programme that in itself is shaped by ideas about the ideal family type and women's roles within the household (i.e. small family units, in which women are 'housewives' only).…”