Mapping and the politics of informality in Jakarta

ABSTRACT

Recent research has argued that, rather than viewing the “informality” of settlements as an empirically stable phenomenon that can be readily defined and measured based on legal and institutional criteria, informality should instead be viewed as a sociopolitical construct produced by the state in the interests of territorial control. This paper examines the implications of the increasing accessibility of geospatial data and technology for state framings of informality. We specifically ask how state actors have sought to define the “legitimacy” and “formality” of settlement types in mapping, how these mapping efforts have related to change and continuity in discourses and debates within the state about the idea of informality, and how the political dynamics that inform the production of informality have shifted through interactions with communities. We focus on the case of Jakarta, examining recent efforts to map “irregular” settlements, “slums” and “kampung” through an analysis of spatial data, interviews with bureaucrats, and a review of literature on community-based countermapping. We find that mapping efforts apply diverse definitions of informality, based variously on legal/regulatory, developmental, or morphological criteria. These efforts are shaped by the path-dependent interests of varied state agencies in legitimizing and enabling state territorial control.

KEYWORDS:

• Informality
• mapping
• geospatial data
• urban politics
• Jakarta

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As the discussion that follows will reveal, our respondents within state bureaucracies frequently used these terms interchangeably with the term “informal”, although some provided detailed explanations of the variation in meaning among these terms.

2 We follow Fitzpatrick (2007) in using the term autochthonous rather than customary to refer to these claims, as customary institutions no longer govern land relations in many communities. Legal protections of autochthonous claims are generally founded on the recognition of customary (adat) tenure in Indonesian land law. However, as will be discussed later in the paper, the erosion of adat institutions has led to the gradual marginalization of these claims in state bureaucratic practice, even though the legal status of many such claims are not reliant on the existence of adat institutions.

3 Because this map represents the entire administrative unit in which areas identified as slum settlements are located, it is not possible to determine the total land area of such settlements from these data.

4 Our interviews usually took place in the formal setting of a conference room, and often took the form of a presentation of the mapping methodology followed by questions and discussion. As a result, they provided insight into prevailing discourse in the hierarchical and mission-driven context of the institution, but shed less light on the views of individual bureaucrats. The level of candidness of respondents also tended to correspond to their rank within the organization.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation’s Geography and Spatial Science Program [award number 1759596].