Mind-walking through Instagram: extracting the essences of Jakarta’s street vending

Abstract

Despite its economic and social significance, street vending is still seen as a culturally backwards and faulty development unbecoming for Jakarta. This has led to the development of urban strategies that attempt to eliminate its presence from the city’s streets. In response to the issue, through this paper, I posit street vending as a form of interior urbanism; a creative micro-scale intervention born from precarious situations that temporarily transform the street into a habitable space. And thus, its assimilation into the city’s formal urban framework is integral in creating a more liveable and socially equitable urban environment. Hence, a thorough understanding of street vending spatial practices is needed. To compensate for a severe lack of official data and direct access to the field, this paper proposed using mind-walking to reveal the ingredients of Jakarta’s street vending interior urbanism through Instagram. Inductive coding and drawing, interpretative tools that are less intrusive, are utilised within the analytical process to provide a comprehensive reading and extract the necessary components from the Instagram datasets of three different areas in Jakarta. This experiment successfully recognises crucial ingredients that characterise Jakarta’s street vending activities, including six types of street vending practice; the typology of interior urbanism. Despite its inherent downside of only covering the spatial features and yet touching on the socio-political aspects, mind-walking can establish and set out the ingredients that make up the social phenomenon, bringing the research a step forward to formulating a comprehensive and Jakarta-centric urban street framework.