Majority Time: Operations in the Midst of Jakarta

Abstract

Across many cities of the so-called Global South, the primary responsibility for constructing spaces of inhabitation has fallen largely to residents themselves. Although these cities have been largely remade through the intensive segregations precipitated by property markets, many substantial traces of the continuous incremental renovations and readjustment of everyday life remain vital. It was not just a matter of households building their own homes. Affordability meant density. Densification was not just of bodies of techniques necessary to provide an array of affordances. This meant the intermixing of measures, angles, calculations, impulses, screens, surfaces, soundscapes, exposures, folds, circuitries, and layers, as instruments for associating things, bringing things into association, where things get their 'bearings' by having a 'bearing' on each other. But these associations required their own rhythm and time. Focusing on different heterogeneous districts in inner city Jakarta, the paper explores these mixtures of temporality and how they are materialized in local built and economic environments. The time that worksIn the fields of urban development and change many assumptions are made about the capacities of residents to bring about improvements in the conditions of their lives. This is particularly the case for residents living in rapidly expanding urban mega-regions where complex rearrangements of life outpace the ability of policy-makers and institutions to always manage these transformations. The bulk of these assumptions centres on various organizational imaginaries -that is, the capacities of residents to organize in ways that identify and secure their collective interests and rights. If only residents were better able to pool their time, efforts and assets into more proficient investments and organizational capacities, then, the assumption goes, would they be better able to make the city something that works for them (

Continuous Production and New Forms of Labour: A Case for Reclaiming Public Time

“…A number of disciplines and perspectives are represented in existing literature. These include (among many others) studies on the urban hardware of information and communication technologies (ICTs) (Graham, 2001), the night-time city (Eldridge, 2019; Dimmer, Solomon, & Morris, 2017; Shaw, 2015, 2018; Tadié & Permanadeli, 2015; Thomas & Bromley, 2000; Lovatt & O’Connor, 1995), social impacts of mobile technologies (Hampton, Goulet, & Albanesius, 2015; Paiva, Cachinho, & Barata-Salgueiro, 2017; Hatuka & Toch, 2016; Green, 2002; Townsend, 2000), the relationship between time, space and community (Stephens, 2010; McCann, 2003; Calhoun, 1998) and spatial effects of temporal politics (Kitchin, 2019; Charbgoo & Mareggi, 2018; Moore-Cherry & Bonnin, 2018; Mulíček and Osman, 2018; Simone & Fauzan, 2013; Stavrides, 2013). These scholars have examined in great depth the processes through which social and political forces contest the meaning of time and act upon it—causing it to be compressed, sped up, broken, divided into fractions, reorganized as rhythms, appropriated, revalourized and invoked strategically.…”

Hydraulic City

“…The arrival of water on a daily schedule does make it easier for settlers to plan and allocate time for water supply in accordance with the other things they need to do to reproduce their lives. Yet the right time for some might be the wrong time for others (see Simone and Fauzan 2013). For Anku mausi, it was all right when the schedule allowed her to come home and collect water after her work.…”

“…For settlers then, the viability and possibility of their urban lives is contingent on the manner in which they temporarily anticipate and negotiate the diverse times, tempos, and demands of urban life (Simone and Fauzan 2013). As settlers are not permitted ( either by law or by the state of their water connections) access to machines (sumps, tanks, and pumps) that apartment residents use to collect water for themselves at any time of the day, they work to amalgamate diff er ent times and tempos of water time into their daily life (De Boeck 2015).…”