Introduction; On the road

Abstract

This special issue's set of articles is opened by Jonathan Rigg. Rigg poses the basic question of why Southeast Asian governments build roads to connect outlying areas to the centre of the state. A political motive, which he men tions without further analysis, is to integrate marginal people into the politi cal mainstream and to enhance the mobility of security forces. An economic motive is market integration, aimed at bringing development to people living at the state's fringes. This economic motive is criticized radically by the claim that roads do not develop marginal people, but, conversely, place previously self-reliant people in a marginal position in mainstream society. Thus, roads, imposed on people from the outside, are seen as creating poverty. However, using material from the Lao People's Democratic Republic and Thailand, Rigg reaches the conclusion that nowadays, for marginal people, problems no longer come from the outside. Problems such as population pressure on scarce local resources emerge from within their isolated society. Under these difficult local conditions, the road literally becomes an escape route from a non-viable subsistence economy to the market. More than anyone else, Rigg tries to give a balanced answer to the core question: Are roads good or bad for people? After Rigg's contribution the order of the articles roughly follows the route most travellers take: from the mega-city to the frontier of the expan sionist economy in the forest. This order is also similar to the general direc tion in which road networks are extended, but is a reversal of the stages an individual road goes through: from a multilane asphalt road back to a nar row dirt road. Presenting the whole range of roads in one volume, from an elevated mega-city motorway to the dust road in a forest, is, I believe, unique in road studies. Terry Mc Gee is the first of three authors writing about the impact of roads on urban morphology. He gives a general sketch of the development of mega-urban regions, and then focuses on the extended metropolitan regions of Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, and Jakarta. Urban space is shaped by a restructuring of the economy and the replacement of one existing land use by another, as well as by transportation and popular resistance. He concludes by stating that a research agenda for roads has yet to be worked out. Haryo Winarso shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the loca tion of new towns built in the Extended Metropolitan Region of Jakarta is not determined by access to main roads. Real estate developers prefer land This content downloaded from 207.46.13.169 on Mon, 15 May 2017 17:54:46 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms