ABOUT THIS BOOK

A study of the forces that shaped Jakarta into the city it is today.

Indonesian writer Seno Gumira Ajidarma has called Jakarta a city of a thousand dimensions. A megacity of 30 million under threat from rising sea levels and temperatures, Jakarta and its resilient residents improvise and thrive. This book teases out some of the dimensions that have given shape to contemporary Jakarta, including the city’s expanded flexibility in accommodating capital and labor, and the consistent lack of planning that can be understood as a result of both politics and the poetics of governing in the region. Jakarta is essential reading for those seeking to understand one of Asia's most dynamic cities.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Abidin Kusno is professor in the faculty of environmental and urban change at York University, Toronto, and former director of the York Centre for Asian Research.

REVIEWS

"The urban is a mellifluous, often malevolent, cacophony of enactments, encumbered by plunder, and enlivened by singular inventions—a process no more illustriously embodied than by Jakarta, which has never been as brilliantly explored nor exorcised as in Kusno’s meditations on urban governmentality as a means of ruling from the middle of things, a constant re-arrangement of oscillating fragments and power relations still fumbling for a universal ideal."

— AbdouMaliq Simone, The University of Sheffield

"Richly textured, revealing, brilliant and original, Abidin Kusno’s Jakarta constitutes an object lesson in urban analysis, where memory, archetype and self, generate complex substrata to our understanding of cities. Jakarta is a revelation, a new way of exposing the invisible, and a method of talking to the multitude and the common in all of us."

— Alexander Cuthbert, University of New South Wales

"Placing his personal experiences of the metropolis in conversation with western social theory, Kusno conveys the insights that thinking through Jakarta makes possible. This essay collection, examining Jakarta’s everyday life, complex spatiality, variegated stakeholders and political, mobility and environmental challenges, will enable the reader to appreciate how Jakarta works."

— Eric Sheppard, University of California

"[A] wide-ranging yet in-depth study of the city and its multi-dimensional challenges contains a felicitous mix of theoretical investigations grounded in real-life examples. . . Kusno shows what can be done when people come together, whether in the face of flooding, traffic or the desire of government and developers to flee the city. Left alone, the people who call Jakarta home will very likely flourish."

— Urban Studies Journal

"No scholar has more persuasively assessed the transformation of twentieth century Jakarta (and urban Indonesia in general) than Abidin Kusno. Jakarta: The City of a Thousand Dimensions brings his analysis to the present through a
critical appraisal of how the urban environment and governance have been shaped since Indonesia’s transition to decentralization."

— Planning Perspectives

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication List of Figures
Preface
Introduction: A City with a Thousand Dimensions: Theory, Practice, Subjectivity
1. Middling Urbanism
2. The Rule of Many Orders
3. Roads, Rhizomes and Regimes
4. Where will the Water Go?
5. A New Assemblage City
6. Urban Politics
7. Islamist Urbanism
8. Escape from Jakarta: The Future Redux
9. Jakarta: A Conversation
10. Our Streets: Reflections on a Pandemic City
Afterword: On “Multitude” and the Urban Question: A Reading in a Time of Pandemics
Bibliography
Index