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1. A political ecology of speculative urbanism: The role of financial and environmental speculation in Jakarta’s water crisis

   https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X221110883  

   Colven, Emma (July 2022, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space)

   Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital, is increasingly characterized by luxury real estate developments and high-profile infrastructural projects made possible by economic liberalization and finance capital. Yet these developments have contributed to Jakarta’s struggles with chronic flooding, land subsidence, and water shortages. This paper contributes an empirical study of the spatial-temporal dynamics of speculative urbanism and the associated impacts on water resources and flood events in Jakarta. I use an urban political ecology approach to analyze mainland and offshore development. First, I show how financial speculation generates flood risk and the overexploitation of water resources, producing uneven socio-spatial distributions of risk. These transformations in Jakarta’s hydroscape in turn threaten to undermine the city’s viability as a site for speculative investment. I thus show how speculative urbanism can be threatened or disrupted by nonhuman agencies. Second, I illustrate a second form of speculation, which I refer to as environmental speculation. As Jakarta’s water crisis has cast doubt on the future of the city itself as a place of habitation, the state explored an ambitious and potentially lucrative coastal defense project, while private developers have engaged in land reclamation. The turn toward offshore development illustrates how environmental speculation creates new opportunities for capital accumulation. I advance two arguments: first, in order to capture the full costs of speculative urbanism, it is imperative that urban scholars attend to its ecological dimensions. Second, an urban political ecology approach advances our understandings of speculative urbanism by illuminating its contradictions and limits. 

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2. Speculative urbanism and the urban-financial conjuncture: Interrogating the afterlives of the financial crisis

   https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X211016003  

   Goldman, Michael (April 2021, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space)

   This article proposes an analytical–methodological approach to understand this historical conjuncture of speculative urbanism in which global finance capital plays an increasingly important role in urban transformation. Whereas the scholarship on urban financialization makes sharp distinctions between what occurs in the global North and the South, portraying the process in the South as one of subordination or peripheralization and in the North as mature and stable (although volatile), this article seeks to demonstrate that the North–South divide is less effective as an explanatory power. Instead, it presents an analytical approach that is attuned to the relentless dynamism and inter-scalar hyper-mobility of finance capital working across the postcolonial map—in other words, a relational–conjunctural approach. The article suggests the method of “following the financial strategy” by analyzing urban forms and projects as processes constituted by the nexus of practices in finance and city planning. It looks closely at finance’s use of inter-scalar financial tools (such as arbitrage, interest rate swaps, collateralized debt obligations, and currency hedges) across borders, sectors, infrastructures, and conditions, as mediated by national and international state actors. The value of this analytical–methodological approach will be illustrated through notable financial transactions occurring in and across cities to emphasize their speculative and financial characteristics—specifically highlighting investments traversing cities of Spain, the USA, and India. The focus here is on financial strategies emerging from the detritus of the 2008 global financial crisis and shaped by the expanding discursive-material formation of speculative urbanism. 

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3. Articulation work: Value chains of land assembly and real estate development on a peri-urban frontier

   https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X221107016  

   Gidwani, Vinay; Upadhya, Carol (June 2022, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space)

   If the entanglements of real estate and finance capital are pivotal in ongoing urban transformations in cities of the global south, then a less visible but equally vital dimension is the process of land assembly on which residential and commercial real estate speculation and development are premised. This paper pries open the value chain of land assembly that underlies these transformations in a rapidly expanding peri-urban frontier of Bengaluru, India. Drawing on detailed interviews with land market intermediaries, operating across different scales, who were instrumental in assembling agricultural land for a large apartment complex, the paper shows how existing forms of social power and local knowledge are harnessed to create inter-scalar linkages that enable the creation and extraction of value in Indian real estate. It makes the case for understanding the economic and cultural work of intermediaries in animating land's value chain as ‘articulation work’. Finally, the paper assesses the varying forms and quantum of value that are generated and captured by different actors in the value chain, which stretches from the landowning farmer up to a major real estate company, to reflect on the micro-dynamics of speculative urbanism and agrarian urbanization. 

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4. Jakarta’s great land transformation: Hybrid neoliberalisation and informality

   https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098018756556  

   Herlambang, Suryono; Leitner, Helga; Tjung, Liong_Ju; Sheppard, Eric; Anguelov, Dimitar (April 2018, Urban Studies)

   We analyse dramatic land transformations in the greater Jakarta metropolitan area since 1988: large-scale private-sector development projects in central city and peri-urban locations. These transformations are shaped both by Jakarta’s shifting conjunctural positionality within global political economic processes and by Indonesia’s hybrid political economy. While influenced by neoliberalisation, Indonesia’s political economy is a hybrid formation, in which neoliberalisation coevolves with long-standing, resilient oligarchic power structures and contestations by the urban majority. Three persistent features shape these transformations: the predominance of large Indonesian conglomerates’ development arms and stand-alone developers; the shaping role of elite informal networks connecting the development industry with state actors; and steadily increasing foreign involvement and investment in the development industry, accelerating recently. We identify three eras characterised by distinct types of urban transformation. Under autocratic neoliberalising urbanism (1988–1997) peri-urban shopping centre development predominated, with large Indonesian developers taking advantage of close links with the Suharto family. The increased indebtedness of these firms became debilitating after the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. Thus post-Suharto democratic neoliberalising urbanism (1998–2005) was a period of minimal investment, except for shopping centres in DKI Jakarta facilitating a consumption-led strategy of recovery from 1997, and the active restructuring of elite informality. Rescaled neoliberalising urbanism (2006–present) saw the recovery of major developers, renewed access to finance, including foreign capital, and the construction of ever-more spectacular integrated superblock developments in DKI Jakarta and peri-urban new towns. 

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5. Mega-urban politics: Analyzing the infrastructure turn through the national state lens

   https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X221087713  

   Shatkin, Gavin (August 2022, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space)

   Recent studies have focused attention on the proliferation of plans in the Global South for massive infrastructure investment to accelerate peri-urbanization and link together networks of proximate cities. This paper proposes that a focus on the national politics of the infrastructure push is an essential starting point to understand this trend, both because the national state plays a constitutive role in the processes that are shaping emerging urbanity, and because national states are themselves being transformed by this moment. In pursuing infrastructure-driven extended urbanization, national state actors seek to capitalize on moments of opportunity presented by shifts in the investment priorities of transnational financial actors, and by advances in infrastructure and logistics technologies, to gain power through the formation of political regimes based on economic growth and the distribution of rents from land development. Hence extended urbanization proceeds not as a gradual and linear process, but is instead marked by waves of disruptive and politically contentious reforms and plans intended to enable real estate, infrastructure, and logistics megaprojects. The current wave of political projects around extended urbanization is marked by distinct features, including the increasingly fragmented and decentered nature of transnational finance, and geopolitical dynamics associated with the emergence of an increasingly polycentric global order. It is consequently marked by geopolitical competition to shape emergent state agendas of extended urbanization, and by increasing variegation in the models of infrastructure-driven extended urbanization that state actors adopt. The paper illustrates these arguments with examples from Southeast Asia's mega-urban regions. 

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