This article takes as its starting point the burning down of traditional markets and clearance of squatter communities and street vendors that took place in the major Indonesian port city of Surabaya during 2007-08. It is argued that a legible landscape facilitating intervention, simulation and passage now marks a city where malls and hotels linked into new accelerated networks of unobstructed streets form the dominant presence. Using recent anthropological investigation from a poor neighbourhood and broader economic analysis of urban trends, the article demonstrates that while this landscape both displaces the poor and generates unprecedented revenues for the municipal government, it also contributes to a delegitimization of the city's municipal administration as it struggles to extend a legible gaze over the city's poor neighbourhoods.

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This article links motorbike use with the work and living conditions of young migrant women in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) to highlight an example of the social and economic consequences of migration-assisted economic development in Southeast Asia. It traces a woman's life from her teenage years in the market of a small seaside town in Vietnam to her purchase of a motorbike, migration to HCMC, move into a rooming house, and work in a major department store as a cosmetics saleswoman. The reflections on urban life by the woman and her roommates lead the author to consider the notion that the condition of the unregistered and temporary migrant is like that of the unrequited wandering ghosts (co hon), which are said to invisibly roam the city's streets. While the author details the political economy of marginalization that situates the migrant saleswoman, he also shows how she struggles within it to constitute herself over time rather than in the present and to free herself from abstraction-producing social categories, both old and new. This article details the experience of a migrant saleswoman in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) as an example of the restricted right to the city that is emerging from migration-assisted economic development in Southeast Asia. Using biographic and ethnographic research, I trace the woman's life from her teenage years spent working in a market in the small seaside town of Long Hai, to her purchase of a motorbike, migration to HCMC, move into a rooming house, and work in a major department store. As the woman and her roommates share their reflections on urban life, I imagine the city as a place of ghosts, where the migrant saleswoman lives unregistered in temporary accommodation and in a struggle to constitute herself as a person in a state of becoming rather than siCritical Asian Studies

After a couple of weeks in March characterized by unclear public health messaging, the government cracked-down by closing Australia's borders and forcing people to self-isolate at home and exit only for work, food or medicine. Those already infected and those with whom they have been in contact must stay in quarantine for a fortnight, avoiding all physical contact with the outside world. Police took pursuit cars off the empty freeways and put them into the neighbourhoods to find and fine groups of more than two people; they put helicopters and drones over suburban backyards to check for non-cognatic groups; and they put cyber security experts on to the task of analysing smartphone location data to determine people's whereabouts. Those who transgress the new self-isolation laws are punished with a fine of AU$11,000 and a possible six-month prison sentence -stiff penalties in a city where people hold enormous personal debt and little if any savings. The strategies seem to be working: the city's comparatively low number of infected people is increasing at a slow manageable rate, its streets are empty and the number of people tested

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