What You See is Not Always What You Know

Abstract

Although Jakarta seems to follow in the footsteps of other major Asian cities in its determination to flood the city with mega-developments, there are hesitations and interruptions along this seemingly smooth path. In the majority world, the onus of developing a viable place in the city largely fell to residents themselves, who then proceeded to elaborate intricate social and economic architectures of collaboration whose logics and operations were not easily translatable into the predominant categorizations employed by urban elites and authorities. These elites then attempted to disentangle these relationships, prioritizing the need for visibility, even as their own methods for retaining control were, themselves, usually opaque. This article explores how these ambiguous modalities of visibility are being reworked in contemporary Jakarta.