3 - Shock City: Everyday transience in an East Indonesian Nickel Town

Anthropologist Anna Tsing broadened the concept of ‘frontiers’ in her work on the logging industry of West Kalimantan, stating ‘frontiers always came as a shock and a disruption.’ Undoubtedly, the nickel boom in East Indonesia has greatly disrupted previous livelihoods and human and non-human interactions, resulting in extensive intraisland migration and land use change. How can this 'disruption and shock' be understood with regards to urban studies and space production? This paper focuses ethnographically on Bahodopi, a remote town situated at the heart of the nickel belt. The transnational extractive industry catalysed the transformation of Bahodopi from a quiet village into a booming town within 15 years. Hundreds of thousands of workers flocked to Bahodopi, making it arguably the second largest town in Central Sulawesi Province. As a site of danger and lawlessness, Bahodopi came unplanned, unregulated and unruly, thus, a shock. Dependant on a single commodity following large-scale primitive accumulation, the daily routine in the thriving Bahodopi is solely structured around the temporal and spatial arrangements of the factories, and it can be excessively boring and repetitive. This article investigates how Bahodopi was assembled to cater to the production and reproduction necessities of factories and workers. It will examine the lived experience in this ‘shock city’ from the perspectives of resource, space, and temporality.