Everyday resilience, reworking, and resistance in North Jakarta’s kampungs

Abstract

In the kampungs of North Jakarta, people make their lives in the face of a variety of transformations. While Jakarta has always experienced flooding from the coast and from its rivers, flooding is getting worse, and has dramatic effects on kampungs and their residents. At the same time, flood mitigation efforts by the government of Jakarta involve new infrastructures, such as sea walls and land reclamation, which interrupt livelihood practices in the kampungs and have led to violent evictions. Residents of North Jakarta’s kampungs must negotiate the surprise impacts of both flooding and the government’s attempts to manage flooding. In this article, we catalogue the social and material practices that support life and livelihoods in the contexts of these urban environmental transformations, drawing from fieldwork conducted in three North Jakarta kampungs and from recent critical geographical research about urban resilience and urban political ecologies. We describe these practices as everyday acts of resilience, reworking, and resistance. These everyday practices are social and material, drawing from and remaking social and material relations. Although everyday practices of resilience, reworking, and resistance require investments in social relations, we also demonstrate that the dividends filter through existing power structures in the kampungs.