Desakota 2.0: worlding hybrid spaces in the global urban

Abstract

ABSTRACT In a world where rapid urban expansion is occurring in peri-urban fringes of the Global South, this paper advocates for a foregrounding of urban-rural fringes as sites of urban theorization. Heeding to postcolonial urbanism's call for creative experimentation on building wider and inclusive theoretical terrains of urban scholarship, I proffer desakota 2.0 as a worlding conceptual vector. Drawn from the contextual realities of Java, Indonesia, desakota denotes a spatiality characterized by an interplay of urban and rural ways of living. Reloading and re-deploying the term as desakota 2.0 disrupts the city-centric tendency that treats urban-rural spaces as residual sites of theroization and analysis. Worlding desakota 2.0 becomes a provincialized practice engaging with places through a deeper accounting of contextual histories and socio-spatial dynamics, engendering new conceptual formulations and comparisons across contexts. Using the case of Manila's fringe, I discuss desakota 2.0's deployment and two emergent conceptual formulations.