Material Itineraries: Southeast Asian Urban Transformations

On 27 August 2019, Indonesia’s president Joko Widodo announced that the country’s capital will move from huge, sprawling Jakarta in Java to East Kalimantan. While Widodo emphasized that the reason was to address inequality and tap into Borneo’s potentials—a highly worrisome prospect from an environmental perspective—he also noted that Jakarta is currently overburdened. He was referring to the city as the national center of business, finance, communications, services, and governance. However, Jakarta is also “burdened” in other ways. It suffers from air pollution and lacks sufficient drinking water due to shallow aquifers. Aside from that, like Bangkok, it is slowly sinking.

The vignette sketches an exemplary situation for 21^st Century Southeast Asia. In search of better lives or driven by environmental disasters and climate change, people flock to the metropolises. It is estimated that by 2025 more than half of the planet’s urban population–some 2.5 billion people–will live in Asian cities. Jakarta, Hanoi, and Phnom Penh all bear witness to the uneven growth of Southeast Asian middle classes with increasing disposable income and changing consumer profiles. Meanwhile, the urban population deprived of durable housing and access to functioning infrastructure is also growing quicker than ever. According to an ASEAN report (2015: 34), Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Bangkok, and Ho Chi Minh City are among the world’s most unequal cities.

The wave of Southeast Asian urbanization ties together demographic changes with global economies, geographies, and climate change in complex activity trails (Jensen 2017a) and infrastructural patterns. As unsustainable production and consumption accelerates, cities face increasing problems with air pollution, waste management, traffic gridlock, flooding, and lack of clean water or stable electricity. Since the smooth transport of goods required by free trade favors coastal cities, economic and population growth has intensified in tandem in urban centers like Bangkok, Manila, and Jakarta. At the same time, their coastal locations in deltas or on flood plains also leave them–and their critical infrastructures–vulnerable to Anthropocene effects, from rising sea levels to storms and floods. This series of effects play together with another one pertaining to water supplies. Where adequate supply networks are missing and industrial estates pump up ground water with limited or no control, the resulting land subsidence combines with sea level rise to further destabilize urban sources of freshwater. Along Jakarta’s coast land subsides from 9.5 to 21.5 cm annually (Chaussard et al. 2013). Due to pollution, congestion, sinking water tables, rising water levels, and increasing temperatures, the Indonesian capital may soon be on the move.

None of these issues are either purely technical, environmental, or political. Instead, they inhabit a different topology of profoundly entangled material itineraries. The aim of this special issue is to develop forms of analysis adequate to such entanglements. The contributions provide us with tools and concepts including infracycles and emergent naturecultures (Eitel), urban assemblage and irritated atmospheres (Sangkhamanee), projectification and the dangers of extending networks through thin links (Namba), the mutual cultivation of people and plants, and lateral connections between herbal medicine, urban ecologies and planetary health (Mohácsi), and the reciprocal transformation of material flows and perspectives as shaping urban kaleidoscopes (Jensen).

Across their topical and conceptual diversity, as I will further indicate, they also offer illustration of the rich conceptual and empirical possibilities that emerge if one provides the intensively discussed notion of “Asia as method” with a material dimension and orientation: Asian cities as method.

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Despite a rapidly growing interest in STS in and of Southeast Asia,¹ urban transformation and infrastructural politics remain relatively underexplored topics in the field. Given the centrality of these themes and the questions they raise for quite a wide variety of scholars working in anthropology, geography, sociology and urban planning (e.g. Bunnell and Goh 2018; Mrázek 2002; Roy and Ong 2011; Schwenkel 2018; Shatkin 2018; Simone 2014), the gap seems the more surprising.

However, the situation is changing.² One recent EASTS issue examined how social and political change in the Indonesian archipelago is mediated by knowledge production (Amir 2017). Another has explored the varied relations between East and Southeast Asian polities through the lens of “subimperial formations” (Chiang 2017, see also Liu 2017). Both issues contribute to the important task of decentering STS (cf. Chen 2010).

This special issue pursues a similar decentering agenda from a somewhat different angle: by scrutinizing the rapid transformations and redesigns currently taking place in Southeast Asian urban metropolises. The emphasis is on the diverse material itineraries through which such changes are accomplished (see also e.g. Elinoff 2017; Jensen 2017a; Namba 2017; Sopranzetti 2014).

The present introduction outlines the distinctiveness of this approach along two interrelated conceptual and methodological axes: in relation to Southeast Asia as a loosely bounded area and as a heuristic “method,” and in relation to cities as specific matters of concern for STS inflected by urban theory.

1 Toward Asian Cities as Method?

As is well-known, the notion of “Asia as method” was put forward in a 1960 lecture by the Sinologist and cultural critic Yoshimi Takeuchi (2005). Takeuchi (2005: 165) did not dismiss Western ideas but rather provided the “Orient” with the task of further elevating “those universal values that the West itself produced.” The implications of that argument are by no means evident (Morita 2017b) and indeed commentators often refer to the enigmatic ending, which emphasized the impossibility of giving a clear definition of what Asia as method meant (Takeuchi 2005: 165). Half a century later, however, the cultural studies scholar Kuan-Hsing Chen (2010) developed an influential argument that redirected Takeuchi’s original orientation toward an agenda of deimperialization. Here was a powerful contribution to decentering and provincializing the West (Chakrabarty 2000) via a sustained Asian focus.

Chen (2010: 18) located East Asian nations within a nested neocolonial and imperial hierarchy, understood as a structure of domination within which stronger powers use political and economic interventions to subdue and control weaker ones. Centrally, these nations remain in the thrall of imperialist desires. Thus, the notion of subimperial formations captured the idea that countries relatively low in the imperial hierarchy, like Taiwan or Korea, have tended to take advantage of those even lower (Vietnam twenty years ago, say, or Cambodia today) in much the same ways as they have themselves been taken advantage of (18).

Because Chen takes for granted that sub-imperial formations exist, he has no need to ask mundane questions about their material shaping or practical maintenance. Strikingly, he raises the question of whether a Taiwanese alliance of state and capital actually succeeded in building any sub-imperial formation only to immediately dismiss it, preferring instead to inquire about how cultural imaginaries allow actors to find their zones of comfort within structures of domination (Chen 2010: 19). The various activity trails, contingent processes, and heterogeneous material itineraries that enable something like “structure” to provisionally concretize are left dangling, unexamined.

As this suggests, although Chen provides much clarity compared with Takeuchi’s gnostic ending, to the STS scholar his analysis raises some serious warning flags. For one thing, the presupposed imperial structure of domination, a pyramid scheme in which power is cleanly distributed from top to bottom is starkly at odds with an STS analytics attuned to the complexities of making relations, and focused on the dangers and possibilities of translation and emergence. Rather than maneuvering within a fixed frame or structure, STS scholars observe actors involved in weaving hybrid networks, or attempting to unravel those others have made. As for cultural imaginaries–imperialist or otherwise–they are undoubtedly important. Yet, this is not because they mediate between lively agencies and fixed structure, but rather because they are part of actors’ diverse repertoires for making and breaking relations with others–whether human or nonhuman–and thus integral to shaping and reshaping assemblages.

It could be argued that Chen paints the notion of Asia as method into a corner. The valuable, appealing aim to open up alternative, deimperialized imaginaries encounters severe obstacles by being located within a determining and, apparently, more or less inescapable structure of domination. Everybody ends up pursuing the same desires, only with somewhat variable means.

Nevertheless, Asia as method holds other potentials (see also Anderson 2012). Alongside its emphasis on fixed structure, runs a process of relativization attuned to Asian intra-referencing (Chen 2010: 275), which resembles what in STS has been called lateral comparison (Gad and Jensen 2016, see also Mohácsi this issue). As Howard Chiang has noted (Chiang 2017: 474, drawing on Lionnet and Shih (2005)), this line of thinking induces curiosity about “minor-to-minor forms of lateral connectivity” that do not (precisely!) “always have to be routed through a center.”

With a bit of tweaking, this puts us on the path of what might be described as Asian cities as method. Indeed, Chen’s (2010: 23) suggestion to multiply “the objects of identification and construct alternative frames of reference” has a direct counterpart in studies of the “worlding” of Asian cities. Cultural imaginaries, too, have a role to play, though not as quasi-determining psycho-social dispositions. As Peter van der Veer (2018: 278) notes, “imaginaries are intricately tied to spatial flows as itineraries, migrations, and peregrinations. Movement through space, rather than a statically defined identity characterizes the agents in these social imaginaries.” In lieu of Chen’s probing analysis of what might catalyze a deimperialization of identities and subject formations, STS studies–with inspiration from the historian Rudolph Mrázek (2002) and others–aim to understand how imperial, colonial, and other kinds of desire, fantasy, or imagination are molded and translated in lateral movements between divergent urban practices, potted administrative systems, and more or less incongruent infrastructural forms (Jensen 2017a). Material realities as well as “lines of consciousness” (Goh 2018: 305, emphasis in original) emerge from cities.

2 Lateral Comparison and the Worlding of Asian Cities

Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong’s (2011) pathbreaking edition Worlding Cities: Asian Cities and the Art of Being Global doesn’t mention “Asia as method” once, but it does offer a sustained analysis of “Asian city-making” and, indeed, of the “making and unmaking of the reference: Asia” itself (Roy 2011: 323). The volume explored how Asian cities provide reference points for one another as they undergo diverse transformations, while also maintaining tight connections with “global regimes of value” and intense involvements in the making of new “regimes of truth” (Roy 2011: 326–328). Singapore, for example, has been a widely emulated “model,” at which planners and officials from Bangalore to Dalian and Surabaya glance as they envision the futures of their cities (Huat 2011). Such urban processes are conceived as forms of “worlding,” which always entail local adaptations and unpredictable effects.

Along similar lines, recent studies have paid close attention to the imaginaries and future-shaping practices of Asian real-estate speculation, what Gavin Shatkin (2018) describes as the creation of Cities for Profit. The anthropologist Erik Harms (2016), for example, contrasts the luxury and rubble of two different areas of Ho Chi Minh City, and Sylvia Nam (2017: 648) depicts Phnom Penh as a speculative city in which “visions of futurity and fantasies of profits” drive real-estate experiments that fragment the cityscape. Recognizing the co-existence of “many Asias,” the geographers Bunnell and Goh (2018: 10) likewise emphasize the importance of Asian inter-referencing, not only regionally, but in terms of the construction of global images for urban futures.

As Bunnell, Goh, and their contributors, insist, however, even as Asian cities are remade from the top-down – by planners, policy experts, and entrepreneurs, they are also shaped by the everyday practices of inhabitants negotiating changing circumstances in pursuit of their varied dreams and projects. Rather than a “generalized aesthetic effect of capitalism” (Ong 2011: 210) or imperialist desire (sensu Chen 2010), urban transformations are translated and negotiated as multiple actors exercise their imaginative capacities through comparisons with cities elsewhere.

The “worlding” analytics, and its later off-shoots and mutations, opens the possibility of bridging literatures. On one side, the depiction of unstable practices, unfolding without reference to any single extant center connects with Chiang’s (2017) extrapolation of Asia as method as taken with minor-to-minor forms of lateral connectivity, and Daniel P. S. Goh’s (2018: 308) suggestion that “sideways agency” is exercised as people navigate the “hollowed out urban spaces formed by authority.” On the other side, the emphasis on the construction of, and controversies over, new regimes of truth and value locate us in the immediate vicinity of STS. So, too, does the emphasis on worlding, or as might be said: ontological transformation (Jensen and Morita 2015). From the vantage point of STS studies attuned to sociotechnical modifications and nonhuman agency, however, there is yet more to say about materiality, the movements of people and things along slowly congealing activity trails, and about material itineraries.

From the perspective of ‘worlding,’ it is possible to see Jakarta as a dreamscape shaped by comparative imaginaries and tethered to regional and global regimes of goods and values. There is still more to say about its enormous, continuously expanding sprawl, however, for it is shaped by material itineraries as well. From this angle, Jakarta elicits what might be called a paradox of flows. From one side, the city offers vivid testimony to the dynamics of demographic change, as people from across the archipelago are driven towards, or are attracted to, the fraught possibilities of life in urban interstices (Simone 2014). From another, the intersection of those flows with other ones—of cement, water, and weather, for example—gives rise to the ongoing destabilization of the city itself. While people and goods move to the city, it appears that it is now the city itself that will have to move. How can STS contribute to better analyses of such itineraries and their consequences?

3 Material Itineraries

It seems important, then, to find some way of materializing Asian cities as method. Moreover, this provides an opportunity to connect Chen’s de-imperializing concerns, in some form, with recent STS interventions in urban studies and infrastructure. This issue pursues that agenda by paying close attention to the various activity trails and material itineraries through which urban change is brought about. What might that look like?

As it happens, this is not the first time the Indonesian capital has been about to move. In 1957, President Sukarno had plans to create a new capital in Palangkaraya in Central Kalimantan, much like Brasilia had been built from scratch in Brazil. At various later moments, others have proposed to maintain Jakarta as the capital but detach some administrative centers, or to move it elsewhere. Then, as now, the reasons have included overpopulation, pollution, gridlock, the spread of slums, depleting water tables. Over the last decade, several massive floods have increased the urgency.

That the capital has so far not moved though Jakarta’s problems have not decreased is testimony to the extreme difficulty both of solving the environmental problems of megacities and of moving capitals. Neither of these are easily “doable problems” (Fujimura 1987). For different reasons, there is significant resistance to moving the capital both from those who are heavily (emotionally or financially) invested in Jakarta, and from those who foresee environmental catastrophe on the receiving end in Kalimantan. And yet the idea of capital transfer won’t go away. So this is the analytical conundrum. While the usual suspects: neo-liberal fantasies of perpetual growth, crony capitalism, and, indeed, imperialist desires, all play their parts in imagining the future of Jakarta, this future is not overdetermined by any of them. It would, after all, be much more convenient and less risky for everyone involved to not have to contemplate moving. And yet, it seems increasingly unavoidable to do so. Because Jakarta’s streets are gridlocked. Nothing moves. The air kills. The water levels are depleted. The city is sinking. Nonhuman agency is everywhere in plain view.

And so, the implication is clear. When it comes to urban transformation, the issues are not encompassed by the conventional categories (and targets) of critique such as capitalism, neoliberalism, or imperialism. Every urban site is an effect of flows and relations, activity trails and material itineraries with propensities that overflow space and undermine intentions. Here is a view of urban ontological transformation with no endpoint in sight. In the words of the urban theorist Tony Fry (2017: 35), we are faced with an image of the city as a continuous designing event, generated “from its moment of conception to the everyday major and minor designed additions made to it during the course of its existence.” While Jakarta may appear more or less stable at the surface, its durability must be understood in terms of “meta-stability” as defined by Gilbert Simondon: permanence as nothing but “the stability of becoming” (cited in Scott (2014: 126) see also Fisch (2018)). As Jakarta meets climate change, even the ability to maintain stability through continuous transformation may be on the wane.

The edited volume Urban Cosmopolitics (Blok and Farías 2016) was a sustained STS intervention in urban theory. In contrast with approaches that trace “urban developments” to root causes in political economy (capitalism, neoliberalism, etc.), it apprehends cities as consisting of a multiplicity of mutually interfering, heterogeneous assemblages (Farías and Blok 2016: 18–19). The conceptual framing wove together a concern with “agencements” consisting of material and technical devices, “assemblies,” understood as the contingent processes through which urban concerns emerge and manifest, and “atmospheres,” which simultaneously refers to the ambience and felt experiences of urban living and the climatic conditions of life-support and survival provided by cities (34–35, see also Sangkhamanee this issue). Since urban worlds are not seen as “ultimately” determined either by imperialism and its desires, or by neoliberalism and its fantasies, they are inherently multiple. Their composition is inevitably uncertain and conflictual, which means open-ended, in a manner that invites experimentation with new conceptual repertoires and modes of intervention.

On this point, urban cosmopolitics converges not only with urban assemblage research (McFarlane 2011) but also with recent STS studies of infrastructure (Harvey, Jensen, and Morita 2017), which have focused on how relational worlds are contingently shaped by the interactions of numerous entities–multispecies, technological, and political–that often happen surreptitiously, to the side of overt techno-politics, while quietly giving shape to categories such as economics or politics, which are so often used to explain them. In Jakarta, for example, the provision of urban services like transport and water, while it can be defined as a technical or political problem, clearly cannot be separated from still emerging climate effects. Rather, environmental disruptions generate what Atsuro Morita (2017a) has described as forms of naturally occurring infrastructural inversion, which make the complex entwinement of natural and socio-technical domains abundantly clear, not only to the discerning eyes of STS scholars but also to the many citizens, industrialists and politicians that are now struggling to deal with these momentous new urban concerns and forms of politics.

The contributions to this issue scrutinize the material itineraries through which urban transformations–urban permanence through becoming–are concretized. Neither inter-Asian comparisons nor global dynamics fade away, and certainly economics and politics, capital and labor, continue to play their parts. These parts, however, are depicted as deeply interwoven with what Elinoff, Sur, and Yeoh (2017: 581) describe as the “intensive flows” of waste, water, traffic, plants, and construction.

In “Oozing Matters: Infracycles of ‘Waste Management’ and Emergent Naturecultures in Phnom Penh,” Kathrin Eitel offers ethnographical examination of informal waste-picking in Cambodia’s capital. In the absence of a well-functioning formal infrastructure of waste management, she depicts “infracycles” that bring together diverse constellations of people, materials, and ideas as waste-pickers make their daily rounds. While these infracycles operate as a bottom-up lived infrastructure, they do not fully encompass city waste. Testifying to the porosity of “nature” and “culture” (e.g. Jensen 2017b) as waste materials continuously “ooze” and escape, they become elements in emergent urban naturecultures.

A different material overflow is at the center of Jakkrit Sangkhamanee’s “Bangkok Precipitated: Cloudbursts, Sentient Urbanity, and Emergent Atmospheres,” which deploys ethnography as a “material diagnostics” for understanding Bangkok floods. The paper analyzes flooding as an effect of assemblage, emerging where amphibious urban ecologies, insufficient drainage infrastructure, transport systems, and masses of moving people meet. In turn, he vividly shows how other effects and affects, like an irritated urban atmosphere, emerge from the floods. Thus, Bangkok rainfall elicits what Sangkhamanee calls a perturbed sentient urbanism. Overflowing street levels, the irritated atmosphere becomes digitally transplanted to social media, where it is forcefully expressed as matters of urban concern and critique.

Taking the reader to Laos, Miki Namba’s “Material Itineraries of Electric Tuk-Tuks: The Challenges of Green Urban Development in Laos,” presents some quite different scenes of urban transformation. Her ethnography explores a green Japanese development project aiming to introduce electric vehicles to the country. Originally envisioned to induce large-scale transformation of Lao transportation networks as part of a green sustainability agenda, the project ended with a few rusting vehicles in a shed in the world heritage city of Luang Prabang. Centering on the various ways in which the project network was extended and cut, Namba shows the creation of many “thin” links, characteristic of “projectification,” to be a major problem. Unable to survive beyond the project, the electric vehicles offer a cautionary tale about the difficulties of green urban transformation.

Compared with the thin links prevalent among the electric tuk-tuks of Laos, Gergely Mohácsi’s “Toxic Remedies: On the Cultivation of Medicinal Plants and Urban Ecologies” focuses on urban sites dense with relations, organic and otherwise. The scene is set in a herbal garden on Bãi Giữa, Hanoi. The garden is an exemplar of chemo-social configurations: a place where East Asian herbal medicine, polluted lands, environmental activism and the emergent interests of urban subjects with new health concerns all converge, and where people and plants are mutually cultivated. As Hanoi’s public health becomes environmental, some of its urban arrangements in turn come to illustrate what planetary resilience might entail. Thus, Mohácsi also illustrates the lateral mobility between worlds of many kinds of knowledges and methods.

In my contribution, “Phnom Penh Kaleidoscope: Construction Boom, Material Itineraries and Changing Scales in Urban Cambodia,” we also briefly encounter gardeners, who used to work small plots of land in Phnom Penh. They have been evicted from Koh Pich as part of the city’s construction boom. And just as at Bãi Giữa, the ex-gardens of Koh Pich appear as sites of lateral connection. Previously, there was no conceivable measure between people quietly planting vegetables and wealthy foreign investors.

The material itineraries of construction created this measure. It is but one among innumerable construction effects, from the modularization and segmentation of urban space to the filtering of populations, which ripples across Cambodia’s urban spectrum. Meanwhile, material itineraries also catalyze new perspectives–on the (im-)possibilities of urban life, on “the Chinese,” or on what the future has in store for Cambodia–for different people. As tuk tuk drivers, journalists, politicians, and researchers are simultaneously engaged in assembling at most partially connected urban scales, Phnom Penh emerges as a kaleidoscope.

In different ways, each of the contributions to the special issue deepen our understanding of how material itineraries are shaped and how they, in turn, give form to divergent forms of urban transformation. These itineraries introduce different kinds of novelty into cities, they repattern relations, and they open new venues of becoming, both creative and destructive. As material itineraries stabilize, they become the often-unnoticed tracks and grooves on which urban politics, economics, and subjectivities run. This is why the following articles can also be read, individually and collectively, as experiments in turning Southeast Asian cities into a method of inquiry. They can be seen as laboratories that explore some of the socio-material and natural-cultural processes that quietly provide cities with their distinctive permanence through becoming.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Casper Bruun Jensen

Casper Bruun Jensen is an anthropologist of science and technology currently residing in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. He is the author of Ontologies for Developing Things (Sense, 2010) and Monitoring Movements in Development Aid (with Brit Ross Winthereik, MIT, 2013) and the editor of Deleuzian Intersections: Science, Technology, Anthropology (with Kjetil Rödje, Berghahn, 2009) and Infrastructures and Social Complexity (with Penny Harvey and Atsuro Morita, Routledge, 2016). His work focuses on climate, environments, infrastructures, and speculative and practical ontologies.

Notes

¹ There has been a notable emphasis on biomedicine (e.g. Grant 2016; Ong and Chen 2010; Porter 2019; Wahlberg 2014) with forays into ecology and conservation (e.g. Lowe 2006; Pauwelussen and Verschoor 2017).

² Over the last 15 years, a growing body of literature has examined Southeast Asian technology development (Morita 2017a), water infrastructures (Sangkhamanee 2017) and delta ontologies (Morita and Jensen 2017) in Thailand, anthropogenic rivers in Laos (Whitington 2018), and political infrastructures (Barker 2017). The present issue builds on this emerging body of literature in tandem with the STS literature on infrastructure (Harvey, Jensen, and Morita 2017) and urban assemblages and cosmopolitics (Blok and Farías 2016) to develop an analytical and empirical apparatus adequate to task of making sense of the astounding urban designs and transformations in contemporary Southeast Asian cities.