Making do and staying poor: The poverty context of Urban Brunei

Abstract

Drawing on interviews with households in Brunei’s Kampong Ayer, this paper explores the geography of poverty in an urban, high-income country context. Under the forces of modernisation and broader conditions of prosperity, the residents of Kampong Ayer can survive with dignity, but cannot prosper and are constrained in their upward mobility. State agencies’ approaches to poverty normalise a terrestrial mode of living, implicitly problematising the lives of those who choose to remain in Kampong Ayer, thus overlooking the important role such a space provides for the less privileged in Bruneian society. The paper develops the notion of ‘geographical context’ as a means to elucidate the co-production of produced marginality and enduring survival in a national context of thoroughgoing transformation.