Postscript: Material Itineraries in Southeast Asian Urban Transformations

What can STS contribute to understandings of urban transformation? Cities are, above all, places where the built environment mediates human experience to such a degree that it is impossible to ignore. STS offers a way of analyzing the materiality of the built environment that situates it on the same plane as social relationships, rather than treating it as a vessel holding the content of urban society. While there was a time in STS when theorizing was caught up in debates over technological determinism vs. social constructivism, the current wave of STS scholarship as represented in this volume has taken its cue from actor-network theory and charted a different path. It repatriates the “missing masses” (Latour 1992) of things–and even other species–to the field of social analysis, but it does so without “black boxing” (Latour 1987) them or seeking to make them subordinate to a sociological master-term, such as Society, Economy, Capitalism, or Neoliberalism. By taking seriously the agency and “propensity” (Jullien 1995) of things, it profoundly decenters the various modalities of anthropocentrism that commonly undergird urban studies. The overall effect of this can be akin to an ontological shift, revealing cities as complex agglomerations of humans, buildings, vehicles, plants, water, concrete, microplastics, chemical compounds, and so on. As shown in this volume, these agglomerations are not static but are in continual motion, with their constituent elements forming more or less enduring assemblages at various scales, some of which connect elements within the city to one another or to the city’s rural hinterlands, and others of which connect it transnationally to other regions and cities.

This analytical approach seems especially apropos for the study of Southeast Asia and its cities in particular. Southeast Asia as a region has long been understood to be a place where elements from the polities, cultures, societies, and religions of South Asia, East Asia, and the West have come into contact and become layered upon one another, fused together in new ways, and recast through processes of “localization” (Wolters 1999). In this respect, it is a region where scholars have been accustomed to seeing what Jensen (Introduction) describes as “mutually interfering, heterogeneous assemblages.”

Southeast Asian cities, moreover, are places where infrastructures seem to refuse to recede into the background, making their materialities continual subjects of reflection. In many larger Southeast Asian cities, this is because rates of urbanization have far outpaced sustainable infrastructure development and city dwellers are thus continually contending with, and adapting to, the material limits of their cities. The contributions to this volume provide numerous examples of this: in Bangkok, commuters are forced to find ways to navigate and respond to repeated flooding and a sinking city (Sangkhamanee); in Vientiane, proponents of electric vehicles confront a relative lack of paved roads and end up scaling back and re-directing their ambitious plans (Namba); in Hanoi, residents grapple with the public health implications of growing medicinal herbs in what have become toxic soils (Mohacsi); and in Phnom Penh, where the noise and disruption of a building boom keeps even elite foreign residents on the move in search of stable housing (Jensen), ballooning urban waste gives rise to a well-organized, informal sector system for waste picking and recycling (Eitel). And then there is Jakarta, where–as Jensen describes in the Introduction–the challenges of infrastructure have become so great that the government has revived plans for the construction of a new capital city, analogous to Brasilia, far from Java. In all these cases, a persistent attentiveness to materialities serves to highlight how heterogeneous assemblages of people, things, discourses, and imaginaries come into being, connect with–or disconnect from–one another, adapt or fail to adapt to their surroundings, and change over time. The apparent unruliness of much Southeast Asian urban transformation thus begins to take on more patterned, discernible forms.

The concept that anchors this approach in this volume is “material itineraries” (Jensen, Introduction). The term itinerary suggests a journey passing through different points. In this context, it is capacious enough to encompass socio-material journeys through time as well as through space. Jensen’s article, for example, traces the itinerary of Phnom Penh’s building boom through a series of key moments in the city’s history, but it also provides an account of how he and others were repeatedly pushed from neighborhood to neighborhood by the disruptions wrought by massive Chinese investment in the city’s real estate sector. Similarly, Eitel’s article traces some of the key moments in the life journey of a woman whose waste picking provides her with a sense of “freedom” (143) that other work did not, but it also describes the socio-spatial movements of plastic waste from home to street to waste picker to depot and onward into transnational circuits of recycling. The capaciousness of the concept thus allows the analyst to be something of a flâneur of actor-networks, moving through time and space across these heterogenous assemblages in a peripatetic manner.

The focus on material itineraries also emphasizes the highly contingent nature of socio-technical change in these urban settings. While the term itinerary can in some contexts refer to a plan for a journey, the main emphasis in this volume is on tracing material transformations as they unfold or have unfolded, without presuming a telos. The factors at play at any particular juncture of transformation are themselves heterogeneous. What enables the housing boom in Phnom Penh is to some degree shared interests between state agents and developers, but also a fragmented, multi-layered, and incomplete regulatory regime that creates “pockets of speculative possibility” (Jensen: 216) that catch the interest of foreign investors and local citizens. Similarly, the emergence of medicinal plant gardens in Hanoi can be traced in part to the deforestation wrought by Chinese timber companies, but it is also connected into a desire among a rising urban middle-class for “natural” (coded as Vietnamese) herbal products, and the enabling work of ethnobotanical and ecological experts enthused by the idea of using social enterprise as a means to protect traditional knowledges from extinction (Mohacsi: 203). In such accounts, the more structural factors driving urban change–such as those that derive from the changing political economic relationship between China and the Southeast Asian region–are recognized, but so too are cultural, discursive, chemosocial, and ecological factors that come into play at various points and at various scales.

This analytical openness to contingency has long been a hallmark of STS scholarship on sociotechnical change but it takes on a more pronounced form when the focus is not just the life cycle of a given artifact but the many interrelated assemblages that make up the fabric of the city. In Bijker’s (1997) early studies of the bicycle and the lightbulb, for example, we were offered compelling arguments against teleological accounts of innovation and diffusion, but the way the case studies were narrated and analyzed served to constrain the range of possible contingencies, not least, by locating them within the scope of social determination.

Namba’s article is the one that most closely resembles this earlier STS approach. The article describes an ambitious plan by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) to build a large electric vehicle infrastructure in the city of Vientiane, Laos. The project enrolled a wide range of actors but then encountered successive unforeseen contingencies and ended up as a very small, and ultimately unsuccessful project focused on electrifying tuk-tuk’s in the heritage town of Luang Prabang. Namba (177) ascribes the failure of the project to the “thinness” of links in its overextended actor-network, which meant trust was weak and there was little sense of shared interests among the actors involved. While this may indeed be the case, it is also evident from this account that, Namba herself, as an observer who was following the project from its early stages, was anticipating that it would end in failure (173). Although the particular contingencies that obstructed the project may not have been known in advance, the overall trajectory of a failed, top-down technology transfer development project was itself sufficiently recognizable as to elicit little surprise in the observer. This could suggest that even as our methodology for analyzing sociotechnical change expands to take account of a fuller range of heterogenous actors and contingencies, the actual dynamics of this change may continue to follow well-worn pathways that remain susceptible to more conventional accounts.

The possibility that material itineraries may end up following more routinized and predictable paths is also explored by Eitel in her article on the material itineraries of waste in Phnom Penh. Eitel highlights the importance of what she calls “infracycles,” defined (cit) as “sociomaterial constellations through which the quotidian flows of persons, goods, tools, ideologies and ideas are organized in a recurrent and circular manner, thereby functioning as an actual lived infrastructure.” Waste collection and recycling involves many of these overlapping and interdependent infracycles, each of which may involve the material alteration of waste as it passes through. While Eitel emphasizes the importance of self-organization among waste pickers and is cautious about assigning too much coherence to the overall organization of waste collection infracycles, it is nonetheless evident from her ethnography that patterns of repetitive interdependent practices have, over time, produced a fairly stable, at least partly functioning, infrastructure. Indeed, the infracycles she describes have qualities that seem to make them highly susceptible to a functionalist analysis.

There are important indications throughout the volume of other domains where the theoretical contingency of Southeast Asian urban transformation seems to be getting constrained in patterned ways. Jensen’s Introduction highlights demographic shifts in the region and the fact that coastal cities like Bangkok, Manila and Jakarta are seeing immense growth while also experiencing some of the most direct effects of climate change, such as flooding and rising sea levels. Also notable is that a number of the contributions to the volume highlight the important economic–and in some cases political–role played by China in shaping the overall context of urban development in the region. As Jensen puts it: “These days, China is everywhere in Cambodia” (224). Based on the contributions from Mohacsi and Namba, the same also seems to be true of Vietnam and Laos. Jensen rightly goes on to point out that any attempt to understand the role of China in this regard must take account both the multiplicity of actors involved and the varying timescales of their involvements. Indeed, this cautionary advice is important in all Southeast Asian cities, where historical connections to China always run deep. At the same time, it is quite striking how big a role recent Chinese capital investment in industry and infrastructure in the region plays in three of the five cases in this volume. These dynamics will continue to merit close attention in the decades to come.

While a focus on material itineraries can help us to see important patterns within processes of urban transformation, it also has the potential to open up our thinking to a more radically holistic view of cities and their place in our environment and the world. It does this by allowing us to see connections across domains that conventionally remain analytically separated. This starts, clearly, with the boundary between the social and the material, but it can extend across other domains and dimensions too, including the phenomenological and the affective, for example, or the global-scale and the microscopic (Jensen and Morita 2016).

Some of the most interesting moments of the analyses in this volume are those when the tracing of a material itinerary reaches a threshold point, and then jumps across a boundary of this kind. In Eitel’s article, for example, the tracing of the material itinerary of plastic first passes from infracycle to infracycle, but at certain points it leaves these infracycles as leakage,

[o]ozing out into urban twilight zones, [where it] becomes part of only partly perceptible aggregates in the ground, in the canals, and in the air. Oozing and leaking, waste becomes elements in emergent urban naturecultures to the detriment of urban health. (149)

Here ordinary waste becomes microplastics, leaving the socio-economic circuits of self-organized recycling and entering into environmental domains, where it takes on a new importance in relation to public health. Similar threshold moments are found in the material itineraries of pharmaceuticals, as described by Mohacsi, which “move through, and are mediated by, the metabolism of the user before being flushed down in toilets and released into public wastewater systems […] and end up in the same rivers as […] agrochemicals” (199). As these illustrations show, tracing material itineraries across such thresholds provides a far more holistic and multi-scalar understanding of urban transformation than would be possible if the analysis ended where the domain of the social leaves off.

A very different set of threshold moments is evident in Sangkhamanee’s evocative article on Bangkok’s cloudbursts. Sangkhamanee characterizes Bangkok’s urbanity as “a multiplicity of ecological, infrastructural, political, and affective assemblages” and describes how rain “precipitates” a chain reaction across these assemblages–from street-level flooding, to transport infrastructure failure, to unwanted human/non-human interactions, to city dweller frustration, to critiques of government online, and finally, to government apology (154). While in some of these reactions the chain is established through a clear material itinerary (e.g. from rain to flooding), in others the relationship is more complex, as when the “affective surplus” (165) of people’s frustration with street-level infrastructure is displaced onto discourses of critique on digital platforms. Whereas Mohacsi’s and Eitel’s articles showed how material itineraries can be followed out of the social realm, via leakages, and into the soil, water and chemistry of the environment, Sangkhamanee’s article traces a similar itinerary in the opposite direction: from water in the clouds through material and affective assemblages and finally precipitating meaningful political dialogue between Bangkok’s city dwellers and their governor.

If we understand the focus on material itineraries to enable an STS approach to urban transformation that recasts the flâneur as an explorer of heterogenous urban assemblages, rather than just streets, it is evident from the articles in this volume that these explorations will not only help us to better understand the patterns of urban stability and change, they will also lead us to interesting and unexpected conclusions.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joshua Barker

Joshua Barker is Associate Professor of Anthropology and former Director of the Asian Institute at the University of Toronto.