Market-Induced Displacement and Its Afterlives: Lived Experiences of Loss and Resilience

Abstract

We examine residents’ lived experiences of market-induced displacement from informal settlements and of their afterlives in greater Jakarta—the creeping displacement of residents under pressure to sell their land rights to developers and land brokers. We interrogate four aspects of these displacees’ afterlives: housing, livelihoods, rentiership, and commoning. Displacees relocate to cheaper kampungs where they can improve their housing quality. Such individualized gains are counterbalanced by social dispossession: a collective loss of the sociality and mutual aid of kampung living. These experiences are unequal, shaped by households’ differentiated sociospatial positionalities, their agency and resilience, and the larger political economic context. These differentiated experiences are marked by loss, mourning, and hardship but also by the possibilities that displacees create in resettlement: efforts to maintain and re-create kampung ways of life that contest neoliberal world-class urbanism’s emphasis on individualism. Conceptually, our findings question the common partitioning of displacement into voluntary and involuntary; highlight displacees’ conflicting experiences and practices, taking advantage of the exchange value of land while carving out spaces of mutual aid and care; identify the importance of expanding conceptions of dispossession to encompass social and affective registers; and challenge representations of displacees as passive victims of accumulation by dispossession.

我们研究了市场导致的大雅加达地区居民迁离非正式居住区的经历及其迁离之后的生活。迫于向开发商和土地经纪人出售土地权利的压力, 这些居民进行了缓慢的迁移。我们调查了迁移之后生活的四个方面：住房、生计、收租和互助。迁移者搬迁到更便宜的村落, 并在那里改善住房质量。这种个体化的收益被社会剥削所抵消：村落生活的社会性和互助性的集体丧失。这些经历是不均衡的, 取决于家庭的不同社会空间位置性、行为和恢复力以及政治经济大环境。这些不同经历的特点不仅是失落、哀痛和苦难, 还有再安置中迁移者创造的可能性——维持和重建村落生活方式、与新自由主义全球城市主义强调的个人主义相抗衡。从概念上讲, 本文的结果质疑了将迁移划分为自愿的和非自愿的普遍做法, 突出了迁移者的矛盾经历和行为——利用土地交换价值的同时还开辟了互助和关怀的空间, 确定了将剥削概念扩展到社会主张和情感主张的重要性, 质疑了迁移者是剥削积累的被动受害者的表述。

Examinamos las experiencia vividas por los residentes de los asentamientos informales que hacen parte del desplazamiento inducido por el mercado, y de sus vidas posteriores en el área de la gran Yakarta –el progresivo desplazamiento de los residentes bajo la presión de enajenar sus derechos de la tierra por desarrolladores urbanos y agentes inmobiliarios. Abordamos cuatro aspectos de la vida posterior de estos desplazados: la vivienda, los medios de subsistencia, el rentismo y la comunalidad. Los desplazados se reubican en kampungs más baratos donde pueden mejorar la calidad de sus viviendas. Estas mejoras individualizadas se ven contrarrestadas por la desposesión social: una pérdida colectiva de la socialidad y de la ayuda mutua por la vida en los kampung. Estas experiencias desiguales están marcadas por la pérdida, el duelo y las dificultades, pero también por las posibilidades que los desplazados crean en el reasentamiento: los esfuerzos por conservar y renovar el estilo de vida del kampung, que retan el énfasis del urbanismo neoliberal de clase global sobre el individualismo. Conceptualmente, nuestros descubrimientos cuestionan la común división del desplazamiento en voluntario e involuntario; destacan las experiencias y prácticas conflictivas de los desplazados –aprovechando el valor del cambio de la tierra y al mismo tiempo creando espacios de ayuda y mutuo cuidado; identifican la importancia de ampliar las concepciones de la desposesión para abarcar los registros sociales y afectivos; y cuestionan las representaciones de los desplazados como víctimas pasivas de la acumulación por desposesión.

Key Words:

• commoning
• Jakarta
• relocation
• social dispossession
• urban displacement

关键词:

• 互助
• 雅加达
• 搬迁
• 社会剥削
• 城市迁移。

Palabras clave:

• desplazamiento urbano
• desposesión social
• reubicación
• Yakarta

Acknowledgments

The field research would not have been possible without our collaborators. In particular, we thank Dian Tri Irawaty (UCLA), Wahyu Astuti, Melinda Martinus, Liong Ju Tjung, Herlambang Suryono (Tarumanagara University, Jakarta), Sam Nowak and Dimitar Anguelov (UCLA) for their fieldwork and Michelle Tirtoatmojo for help with transcribing. We also thank Sam Nowak and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts. Our special thanks go to the women and men who shared their experiences with us.

Notes

1 In Indonesia, informal urban settlements are called kampungs, the Bahasa Indonesia term for village.

2 In Jakarta, these include formal rights (e.g., use rights, the right to build and freehold) and indigenous (adat) rights.

3 A second body of work on development-induced displacees’ afterlives examines displacees’ subject-formation and spatial practices (Rogers and Wilmsen 2020).

4 AbD theorizes capitalism as continually creating new accumulation opportunities by commodifying capitalism’s outsides through extraeconomic coercion (eminent domain, slum demolition, land grabbing, etc.; Ghertner 2014).

5 Arisan, which translates as social gathering and cooperative endeavor, is an informal rotating credit collective. Geertz (1962) documented these in the early 1950s, but they have survived neoliberalization, to be reinvented in new social spaces.

6 This arisan was created by displacees and run by women, who thus made up 90 percent of our central city interviewees.

7 Lurah, RT and RW. A lurah is an appointed official in charge of a Kelurahan (the lowest level of district government). Within Kelurahans, RTs (Rukun Tetangga, neighborhood association) and RWs (Rukun Warga, citizen’s association) are locally elected neighborhood representatives.

8 We were unable to interview brokers, who proved highly elusive. They often live in the same kampung and are perceived as locals, yet we were consistently unable to secure their addresses or phone numbers from other residents.

9 Menteng Atas residents’ income varied widely in our interviews (US$100–3,000 monthly), as did the size of their property.

10 The previous kampung became Rawa Banteng Lama (lama translates as “old” in Bahasa Indonesia) and the new one was named Rawa Banteng Baru (“new”).

Additional information

Funding

We acknowledge support from the U.S. National Science Foundation (Grant BCS-1636437).

Notes on contributors

Helga Leitner

HELGA LEITNER is a Research Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095. E-mail: [email protected]. She has published on the politics of scale, citizenship, and belonging; politics of difference and race relations in urban multicultures; social and environmental justice activism; urban resilience; and most recently on urban land transformations, livelihoods, and finance capital in cities of the Global South.

Eric Sheppard

ERIC SHEPPARD is the Alexander von Humboldt Chair of Geography at The University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095. E-mail: [email protected]. His scholarship embraces geographical political economy and sociospatial theory, currently focusing on uneven geographies of capitalist globalization, more-than-capitalist practices, southern urban theory, urban social movements, and urban land transformations.

Emma Colven

EMMA COLVEN is an Assistant Professor in the Department of International and Area studies at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK 73019. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research explores the urban political ecologies of water, real estate development, and adaptation.