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We respond as the Jakarta Collective to Prathiwi Putri’s constructive critique of Leitner and Sheppard’s research on Jakarta’s kampungs, to make visible the broader cluster of scholarship surrounding their research. Deploying six binaries, postcolonialism versus neoliberalism, non-capitalism versus capitalism, agency versus structure, displacement versus dispossession, and individual versus collective action, Putri suggests that Leitner and Sheppard stress the former while neglecting the latter. By taking the field seriously, we argue that the research of the Collective approaches these dialectically, teasing out their complex interrelations. Changes in Jakarta’s kampungs reflect its hybrid more-than-capitalist political economy, at the intersection of US and Chinese influence. The displacement of kampungs and kampung residents’ practices subsidize capitalism but they also contest its norms. Residents’ agency is significant; some gain but others lose, they act individually but also collectively. Highlighting more-than-capitalist practices opens up possibilities for alternative futures rather than simply documenting capitalist hegemony.

 

Peri-urbanization is transforming the urban-rural interface of metropolitan areas across the global south. Large-scale planned developments and infrastructure projects result in the widespread displacement of residents and the disappearance of agricultural fields, vegetable plots, and small enterprises. Through multi-year fieldwork in eastern peri-urban Jakarta, we shift the optic from the large players driving these transformations—developers, land brokers, and investors—to examine how residents of peri-urban settlements (kampungs) respond to unexpected developments and manage the uncertainties associated with market-induced displacement. We conceptualize their practices as everyday speculation, extending speculation beyond its financial meaning to include social and cultural aspects. Both displacees in relocation kampungs and holdouts in kampungs subject to displacement make the most of emergent spatiotemporal rent gaps to devise ways to improve their livelihoods and accumulate wealth, but they also attempt to realize their social and cultural aspirations of reproducing kampung ways of life characterized by dense social networks and commoning practices such as mutual aid. Speculation reinforces pre-existing economic inequalities among kampung residents but is not obliterating social and cultural values that contest the norms of neoliberal global urbanism. Scaling up from everyday speculation by individual households, we identify three paths of kampung transformation that are concatenating across a shape-shifting speculative kampung landscape that coexists in a complex and synergistic relationship with the planned developments. Understanding residents’ everyday actions is thus important to grasping the full scope of peri-urbanization. 

Under the designation “platform urbanism,” there is growing scholarly recognition that platform intermediaries are reconfiguring urban industries, processes, and relationships through the collection and manipulation of big data. Central to realizing this economic project is financial speculation on platforms’ ability to coordinate network effects—a phenomenon in which the more users there are in a networked system, the more valuable and useful it becomes. In this paper, I argue that while the existing literature recognizes the importance of network effects, it has also adopted a limited conceptualization that understands platform firms as the primary agents generating and capturing the economic benefits of network effects. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Greater Jakarta, Indonesia, I work to expand this understanding through attention to the social lives of network effects—the ways in which platform architectures are always embedded in social relations created and sustained in everyday urban life. I show how ride-hailing drivers have attempted to mitigate the risks of their work through building socio-technical networks of their own, for their own purposes. Doing so reveals that it is not only platform firms and venture capital that speculate on network effects; rather, a range of actors in the city-region seek to tap into driver networks to advance their own social, political, and economic ends. In conclusion, I suggest that attending to these practices opens up space to reframe platform urbanism beyond its current preoccupation with macro political economic analyses, while also establishing new lines of inquiry for “speculative urbanism.”