Session Name: Modes of Engagement in Urbanising India and Indonesia from the Vantage Point of Peripheral Settlements and Local Communities
3 - The Illusion of Autonomy: Urbanization in a Post-Authoritarian Indonesia
Thursday, August 1, 2024
09:00 – 10:45 (GMT+7)
Presentation Abstract The most drastic increase of urban population in the Global South is not happening in inner-city, but in the periphery and mega-urban areas. The paper is a critical assessment towards the autonomy of local actors in peripheral area to improve their neighborhood over time. Relying ethnographic and historical data of a tourism neighborhood in a newly formed city of Batu, Indonesia, I argue that spatial changes are never independent from the dominant regime of development. Living in the shadow of developmentalist-authoritarianism, local actors seize opportunities to develop their own economies and corresponding spaces, but are never free to choose nor influence the larger tourism-oriented development directions of the city. In fact, the era of local autonomy, ‘otonomi daerah’, allows more and more national and global political and economic structures to collide with local actors and to overpower them in producing and reproducing their neighborhood spaces by exploiting existing gaps within these structures. In turn, local actors also search for gaps to assert their opportunities for social and economic survival; yet, the range of choices to survive are ultimately very limited, as far as not going against market forces.
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