Keeping track: Temporal Strategies of Governing in the Jakarta Smart City
Topics: Urban Geography
, Cultural and Political Ecology
, Economic Geography
Keywords: urban governance, delay, Jakarta, smart cities
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 60
Authors:
Sophie Webber, The University of Sydney
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Abstract
For global consultancies and technology giants, Jakarta is an increasingly important “smart” city. But, despite the popular and academic hyperbole, there has so far been little research examining what this means for the urban governance and the seemingly intractable issues of urban development, flooding, traffic, and waste which currently challenge the city. Here, I consider how urban governance is, and is not, achieved through new smart city policies, projects and devices. While much critical geographical and urban research has suggested that ‘smart’ is intensifying and extending the uneven outcomes of capitalist urbanisation, including inequality, extraction and dispossession, I find that the Jakarta Smart City is instead structured by ambivalence and ambiguity. I argue that, in Jakarta, smart city technologies are temporal strategies of governing that revolve around projecting, delaying and hypothesising into the future. This paper describes these temporal strategies of delay, and outlines three of its key forms: keeping track of objects and people, calculating and projecting state savings, and mundane watching. Through this ambiguity and ambivalence, however, existing urban governance strategies are protected, facilitating unfettered urban development despite the existential challenges this is producing in the city.
Keeping track: Temporal Strategies of Governing in the Jakarta Smart City
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Virtual Paper Abstract
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