The social lives of network effects: Speculation and risk in Jakarta's platform economy

This article proposes an analytical–methodological approach to understand this historical conjuncture of speculative urbanism in which global finance capital plays an increasingly important role in urban transformation. Whereas the scholarship on urban financialization makes sharp distinctions between what occurs in the global North and the South, portraying the process in the South as one of subordination or peripheralization and in the North as mature and stable (although volatile), this article seeks to demonstrate that the North–South divide is less effective as an explanatory power. Instead, it presents an analytical approach that is attuned to the relentless dynamism and inter-scalar hyper-mobility of finance capital working across the postcolonial map—in other words, a relational–conjunctural approach. The article suggests the method of “following the financial strategy” by analyzing urban forms and projects as processes constituted by the nexus of practices in finance and city planning. It looks closely at finance’s use of inter-scalar financial tools (such as arbitrage, interest rate swaps, collateralized debt obligations, and currency hedges) across borders, sectors, infrastructures, and conditions, as mediated by national and international state actors. The value of this analytical–methodological approach will be illustrated through notable financial transactions occurring in and across cities to emphasize their speculative and financial characteristics—specifically highlighting investments traversing cities of Spain, the USA, and India. The focus here is on financial strategies emerging from the detritus of the 2008 global financial crisis and shaped by the expanding discursive-material formation of speculative urbanism.

Section: It Is a Small (Financialized) World After Allmentioning

confidence: 93%

Speculative urbanism and the urban-financial conjuncture: Interrogating the afterlives of the financial crisis

Goldman

2021

“…Such analyses, in which Northern capital “subordinates and peripheralizes southern economies and populations, remaking cities in its own image,” adhere to linear trajectories of developmentalism in which the South lags and can only be understood as subservient to the North. As a result, they fail to account for the dynamism and mobility of global finance (which does not originate only in the north), and how elites and the urban majority in postcolonial settings interact with “speculative volatility” (Goldman, 2021: 2) and the resulting politics of futurity. Goldman attunes us to how global finance “sees the playing field as relational” (11) rather than as a fixed and predetermined landscape defined by the North-South divide.…”

Section: Methodologiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Turning to Nowak's (2021) work on Jakarta's platform economy, we see how the network effects central to the expansion and value of venture capital-funded digital platforms also operate as a site of networked speculation from below. Nowak's paper centers ride-hail drivers as a speculative community (Komporozos-Athanasiou, 2022), leveraging digital networks created by platforms to autoconstruct mutual aid networks rooted in space and affinities.…”

Section: Vocabulariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Nowak's paper centers ride-hail drivers as a speculative community (Komporozos-Athanasiou, 2022), leveraging digital networks created by platforms to autoconstruct mutual aid networks rooted in space and affinities. He documents how the speculative imagination operates to make the future actionable and livable in a present characterized by the cloudy legal status of motorbike taxis, the physical risks drivers face in their work, and the black-boxed nature of the platforms governing their livelihoods (Komporozos-Athanasiou, 2022, Nowak, 2021).…”

Section: Vocabulariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Speculative urbanism

Fields¹

2022

The way we tend to conceive of speculation, not surprisingly, is very much tied to the operations of finance: the futures it anticipates, and the chances taken on those futures for the sake of capital accumulation. When we bring these questions to the urban, our attention often turns first to how finance is mobilized to realize opportunities for accumulation in the real estate sector. Indeed, it seems that everywhere we look today, we find extended circuits of financial processes, instruments, and intermediaries pulsating through urban space as they seek out, act upon, and invent possible (ostensibly better) futures. Yet as this collection of papers demonstrates, all focused primarily either on Jakarta, Indonesia, or Bengaluru, India, reducing speculative urbanism to the nexus of finance and real estate would be a limited and limiting move. This is a conjuncture in which everyone is speculating, from local land aggregators to kampung residents to state-owned enterprises to ride-hail drivers. Such varied attempts to reconfigure urban futures sometimes align with the efforts of financial markets to extract value from the notyet-world-class postcolonial city, but they also enact what Aimee Bahng (2018: 8) describes as "speculation from below…releasing speculation from capitalism's instrumentalization of futurity".Thus, while finance and real estate are indeed central to the work in this special issue, the articles collectively demonstrate that capitalocentric accounts of speculative urbanism are incomplete. In this brief commentary, I focus on how the work in this special issue 1) provides new vocabularies for speculative urbanism in addition to the domain of finance; 2) engages the temporalities of speculative urbanism, and; 3) offers methodological provocations for critical urban research. VocabulariesSpeculation is commonly associated with high risk/high reward forms of financial investment, focused on asset price fluctuations. While its risky nature makes the outcome of speculation uncertain, in the contemporary era of financial capitalism this uncertainty has become profoundly socially and politically generative, raising speculation to a wider cultural imperative and orientation (Bear, 2020;Komporozos-Athanasiou, 2022). In short, financialization cultivates a "speculative imagination", or a "capacity to imagine under conditions of incalculable uncertainty; to bring forth new collective images of the future, which helps economies, societies, and polities navigate the present's volatile conditions" (Komporozos-Athanasiou, 2022: ix). The papers in this special issue document the constructive work of the speculative imagination in postcolonial cities, giving us new conceptual vocabularies to work with.

“…In his discussion of organizing efforts to manage speculative urbanism's risks, Nowak shows how speculation operates beyond the trifecta of physical infrastructure, real estate, and land – objects that, for good reason, have long held the attention of scholarship on financialized speculation. His focus, instead, is on how speculation operates in and through ‘digital sequences of 1 and 0s’ (Nowak, 2021, p. 3), where ‘venture capital speculation on platform firms and the data they collect has become increasingly influential for urban transformations across the globe’ (Nowak, 2021, p. 2). Not only does speculative activity occur through the digital, but so too do organizing other economic ventures, social reproduction, and care in the face of risk: Nowak documents how ride-hailing drivers use sociotechnical networks and apps, like WhatsApp, to organize insurance and emergency response.…”

Section: Speculative Urbanism Beyond Real Estate Infrastructure and Landmentioning

confidence: 99%

Living otherwise in uncertain and speculative times

Prouse

2022

Speculation has come to define the current conjuncture in myriad ways, from the structural hegemony of finance capital to the ways that people and communities are always thinking about and remaking their futures. In this brief commentary, I draw out five ways in which the articles in this special issue advance our understanding of speculation in the contemporary moment: speculative urbanism's temporalities, geographies, undersides, more-than-human materialities, and articulations. I also pose questions of where the concept of speculation might lead, hoping to further enflesh this analytic from the perspectives of different socio-spatial positionalities across the globe. I ultimately consider how storytelling and future envisionings are already leading people to live life otherwise in uncertain and speculative times.