Publications
2022
Speculating on Land, Property and Peri/urban Futures: A conjunctural approach to intra-metropolitan comparison
By Helga Leitner and Eric Sheppard
Urban Studies: Special Issue on Comparative Methods for Global Urban Studies https://journals.sagepub.com/
Abstract: This article explores a conjunctural approach to comparison as a means to capture the complexity of the processes shaping metropolitan land transformations in a city of the global South, comparing the co-implicated actions of developers and local residents across central and peri-urban Jabodetabek. A conjunctural approach shares with some other forms of comparison the ambition to build new theories and challenge existing knowledge. Rather than controlling for the characteristics of units of analysis as in conventional comparison, a conjunctural approach attends to the broader spatio-temporal conjuncture. It involves highlighting unexpected or overlooked starting points for comparison, attending to inter-place, inter-scalar and inter-temporal relationalities in order to identify shared general tendencies as well as particularities and to chart their mutual constitution. Grounding this comparison iteratively puts local knowledge and observations in conversation with already existing theories. Deploying these principles in a socio-spatial intra-metropolitan comparison, we show that economic speculation on land and property is complexly entangled with actors’ socio-cultural speculations, as they seek also to realise aspirations for distinct peri/urban futures. Economic speculation deepens already existing inequalities in wealth and power differentials between and among developers and kampung residents. The erasure of informal settlements and displacement of their residents is supplemented by the ability of other kampungs and select residents to take advantage of spillover opportunities from the formal developments built on former kampung land. Distinct central city and peri-urban landscapes are emerging, shaped by differences in the social ecology of land and local governance and planning regimes.
Market-Induced Displacement and Its Afterlives: Lived Experiences of Loss and Resilience
Helga Leitner, Eric Sheppard and Emma Colven
Annals of the American Association of Geographers: Special issue on Displacement https://www.tandfonline.com/
Abstract: We examine residents’ lived experiences of market-induced displacement from informal settlements and of their afterlives in greater Jakarta—the creeping displacement of residents under pressure to sell their land rights to developers and land brokers. We interrogate four aspects of these displacees’ afterlives: housing, livelihoods, rentiership, and commoning. Displacees relocate to cheaper kampungs where they can improve their housing quality. Such individualized gains are counterbalanced by social dispossession: a collective loss of the sociality and mutual aid of kampung living. These experiences are unequal, shaped by households’ differentiated sociospatial positionalities, their agency and resilience, and the larger political economic context. These differentiated experiences are marked by loss, mourning, and hardship but also by the possibilities that displacees create in resettlement: efforts to maintain and re-create kampung ways of life that contest neoliberal world-class urbanism’s emphasis on individualism. Conceptually, our findings question the common partitioning of displacement into voluntary and involuntary; highlight displacees’ conflicting experiences and practices, taking advantage of the exchange value of land while carving out spaces of mutual aid and care; identify the importance of expanding conceptions of dispossession to encompass social and affective registers; and challenge representations of displacees as passive victims of accumulation by dispossession.
SPECIAL ISSUE of Environment and Planning: Speculative Urbanism and the Everyday in Asian Cities
Speculative urbanism and the urban-financial conjuncture: Interrogating the afterlives of the financial crisis
By Michael Goldman
Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space https://journals.sagepub.com
Abstract: This article proposes an analytical–methodological approach to understand this historical conjuncture of speculative urbanism in which global finance capital plays an increasingly important role in urban transformation. Whereas the scholarship on urban financialization makes sharp distinctions between what occurs in the global North and the South, portraying the process in the South as one of subordination or peripheralization and in the North as mature and stable (although volatile), this article seeks to demonstrate that the North–South divide is less effective as an explanatory power. Instead, it presents an analytical approach that is attuned to the relentless dynamism and inter-scalar hyper-mobility of finance capital working across the postcolonial map—in other words, a relational–conjunctural approach. The article suggests the method of “following the financial strategy” by analyzing urban forms and projects as processes constituted by the nexus of practices in finance and city planning. It looks closely at finance’s use of inter-scalar financial tools (such as arbitrage, interest rate swaps, collateralized debt obligations, and currency hedges) across borders, sectors, infrastructures, and conditions, as mediated by national and international state actors. The value of this analytical–methodological approach will be illustrated through notable financial transactions occurring in and across cities to emphasize their speculative and financial characteristics—specifically highlighting investments traversing cities of Spain, the USA, and India. The focus here is on financial strategies emerging from the detritus of the 2008 global financial crisis and shaped by the expanding discursive-material formation of speculative urbanism.
Everyday speculation in the remaking of peri-urban livelihoods and landscapes
By Helga Leitner, Samuel Nowak and Eric Sheppard
Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space https://journals.sagepub.com
Abstract: Peri-urbanization is transforming the urban-rural interface of metropolitan areas across the global south. Large-scale planned developments and infrastructure projects result in the widespread displacement of residents and the disappearance of agricultural fields, vegetable plots, and small enterprises. Through multi-year fieldwork in eastern peri-urban Jakarta, we shift the optic from the large players driving these transformations—developers, land brokers, and investors—to examine how residents of peri-urban settlements (kampungs) respond to unexpected developments and manage the uncertainties associated with market-induced displacement. We conceptualize their practices as everyday speculation, extending speculation beyond its financial meaning to include social and cultural aspects. Both displacees in relocation kampungs and holdouts in kampungs subject to displacement make the most of emergent spatiotemporal rent gaps to devise ways to improve their livelihoods and accumulate wealth, but they also attempt to realize their social and cultural aspirations of reproducing kampung ways of life characterized by dense social networks and commoning practices such as mutual aid. Speculation reinforces pre-existing economic inequalities among kampung residents but is not obliterating social and cultural values that contest the norms of neoliberal global urbanism. Scaling up from everyday speculation by individual households, we identify three paths of kampung transformation that are concatenating across a shape-shifting speculative kampung landscape that coexists in a complex and synergistic relationship with the planned developments. Understanding residents’ everyday actions is thus important to grasping the full scope of peri-urbanization.
Dispossession without displacement: Producing property through slum redevelopment in Bengaluru, India
By Carol Upadhya and Deeksha M Rao
Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space https://journals.sagepub.com
Abstract: The paper examines the role of slum redevelopment in the production of private property in land in a fast-growing city of southern India. Drawing on an in-depth case study in Bengaluru, we show that the tenurial rights of slum residents were eroded when the contested land on which they lived – which was layered with multiple rights and claims of various actors – was confirmed by the court as the sole property of an individual who claimed to be its owner. The transformation of the plot into private property and therefore into a fungible asset, free of encumbrances, allowed the landowner, the political entrepreneurs who spearheaded the redevelopment project, and various intermediaries to capture most of the rapidly escalating value of the land. The exchange of recognized land tenure rights for small flats carrying conditional titles further excluded slum residents from ‘proper’ urban citizenship based on property ownership and exacerbated the precarity of their lives in the city. In this case, in-situ (on the same site) slum redevelopment is shown to operate as a modality of enclosure in which the urban poor are displaced even while remaining in place – or a process of dispossession without displacement.
The social lives of network effects: Speculation and risk in Jakarta’s platform economy
By Samuel Nowak
Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space https://journals.sagepub.com
Abstract: Under the designation “platform urbanism,” there is growing scholarly recognition that platform intermediaries are reconfiguring urban industries, processes, and relationships through the collection and manipulation of big data. Central to realizing this economic project is financial speculation on platforms’ ability to coordinate network effects—a phenomenon in which the more users there are in a networked system, the more valuable and useful it becomes. In this paper, I argue that while the existing literature recognizes the importance of network effects, it has also adopted a limited conceptualization that understands platform firms as the primary agents generating and capturing the economic benefits of network effects. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Greater Jakarta, Indonesia, I work to expand this understanding through attention to the social lives of network effects—the ways in which platform architectures are always embedded in social relations created and sustained in everyday urban life. I show how ride-hailing drivers have attempted to mitigate the risks of their work through building socio-technical networks of their own, for their own purposes. Doing so reveals that it is not only platform firms and venture capital that speculate on network effects; rather, a range of actors in the city-region seek to tap into driver networks to advance their own social, political, and economic ends. In conclusion, I suggest that attending to these practices opens up space to reframe platform urbanism beyond its current preoccupation with macro political economic analyses, while also establishing new lines of inquiry for “speculative urbanism.”
2021
Caste at the City’s Edge: Land Struggles in Peri-urban Bengaluru
By Carol Upadhya and Sachinkumar Rathod
South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal [Online], 26 2021 http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/7134
Abstract: Building on recent literature that explores how the social logics of older agrarian formations are refracted in processes of urbanization, the paper foregrounds the significance of caste in rapidly changing peri-urban spaces. Drawing on extended fieldwork in several villages on the outskirts of Bengaluru, it shows how the twin scaffoldings of agrarian society—caste and land—are reconfigured as the values of land change in this zone of transition. Caste identity not only structures who can participate in, or prosper from, the transformation of agrarian land into urban real estate—it is also refashioned and deployed in new ways, especially through the politics of land. This study demonstrates why caste should be understood as a social structure of accumulation, whose specific modes of operation are defined by regionally rooted histories of development and memories of oppression and struggle.
Through the Optics of Finance: Speculative Urbanism and the Transformation of Markets
By Michael Goldman and Devika Narayan
The International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, March 5, 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.13012
Abstract: This article contributes to debates on the financialization of global South economies by looking closely at how India's real estate markets became entwined with global financial networks. We offer an analytical frame that centers on the strategies of global finance and its ability to transform its form and mode of operation when faced with a supposed ‘limit’, both spatially and temporally. Finance capital, we argue, derives its power from working with state actors and ambitious borrowers—across borders, sectors and conditions—to spawn new investment opportunities and, over time, a financialized type of urban transformation. In 2005, India deregulated foreign investment into land and real estate, a watershed moment that radically altered the financial and urban speculative logics of the sector. Private equity firms made vast investments into urban projects, anticipating massive returns, and even though the bubble quickly burst, India continues to attract finance capital. We explain this conundrum by tracking the new techniques and investment tools of private equity (‘following the financial strategy’), arguing for an analytical approach attuned to the relentless dynamism and hyper‐mobility of finance capital (an ‘inter‐scalar and conjunctural dynamics approach’).
2020
Dispossession by financialization: The end(s) of rurality in the making of a speculative land market
By Michael Goldman
The Journal of Peasant Studies, September 29, 2020 https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2020.1802720
Abstract: This article elaborates upon the concept of speculative urbanism and the theory of accumulation by dispossession by delving into the recent history of the transformation of Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore) India into a global city. It explains how the conversion of rural land into urban real estate for ‘global-city’ projects triggered distinct forms of dispossession and financialization. The shifting practices of global finance capital along with its national and local partners have created the conditions for widespread dispossession of rural producers and the financialization of the regional economy, a phenomenon identified here as ‘dispossession by financialization’.
Nostalgia as affective landscape: Negotiating displacement in the “world city”
By Hemangini Gupta and Kaveri Medappa
Antipode, October 16, 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12674
Abstract: Bangalore, an aspiring “world city”, is rapidly transforming as factories and mills are sold to private developers. As their neighbourhoods now accommodate multi‐million‐dollar gated communities and post‐industrial labour markets, residents experience an in situ displacement, staying in place while landscapes around them dramatically reconfigure. This paper makes sense of how old‐time residents locate themselves within such urban growth through nostalgic invocations of the past. Emplaced within histories and geographies of neighbourhood change, nostalgia creates “affective landscapes” through which residents invoke their closeness to past landscapes of abundance and involvement in community‐making. Such affective landscapes bring together embodied, sensorial, and more‐than‐human fields of action to shape an everyday politics in which residents narrate their marginalization within the world city and articulate their own value here.
Geo/Eco/Nomy: A tribute to Fernando Coronil
By Vinay Gidwani
Platform: A digital forum for conversations about buildings, spaces, and landscapes (March 5 2020)
Overview: This work of realist fiction, on Bangalore’s urban transformation, is inspired by the late Fernando Coronil’s inventive and utterly original approach to geopolitical economy as anthrohistory.
Toward an epistemology for conjunctural inter-urban comparison
by Helga Leitner and Eric Sheppard
Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society (forthcoming) https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsaa025
Abstract: We propose an epistemology for conjunctural inter-urban comparison, stressing the dialectical relationship between the general and the particular. We spatialize conjunctural analysis; avoiding methodological territorialism by extending the explanatory framework outwards in space to incorporate inter-territorial connections and supra-territorial scalar relations. We then provide three guiding principles for conjunctural comparison: an open starting point, a three-dimensional socio-spatial ontology, and the general/particular dialectic. Illustrating this with comparative fieldwork on urban land transformations in Jakarta and Bangalore, we stress-test received theories and develop Inter-scalar Chains of Rentiership: this mid-range concept clarifies shared tendencies across the cities, particularities differentiating them, and their inter-relations.
Keywords: Conjunctural analysis, relational comparison, comparative urbanism, rentiership, southern urban theory, neoliberal global urbanism
Wheeling out urban resilience: Philanthtrocapitalism, marketization, and local practice
by Sophie Webber, Helga Leitner and Eric Sheppard
Annals of the American Association of Geographers (forthcoming)
Abstract: In this article, we examine how urban resilience has emerged as a global urban policy project, offering solutions for cities about how they can adapt to and recover from shocks and stresses, particularly those associated with climate change. We conceptualize this as a multicentric global urban resilience complex, catalyzed until recently by the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities initiative in concert with the World Bank. The complex is comprised of three components: (1) a global network of foundations, multilateral agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and private-sector goods and services providers, wielding differential power and influence; (2) measurement and assessment devices that both mobilize and define resilience; and (3) initiatives to marketize urban resilience as producing a dividend also for private sector firms and investors. Northern institutions define what should be done, downscaling this as a sequence of practices, participatory agenda setting, strategizing, and implementation, to be followed by cities. Examining how the complex has come to ground in Semarang and Jakarta, Indonesia, we identify ways in which it is reproduced, but also criticized and contested. If the complex in many ways is driven by philanthrocapitalist and neoliberal norms and aspirations, its programs also are subject to critique and contestations at the local scale.
Keywords: complex, Indonesia, neoliberalism, philanthrocapitalism, policy mobility, urban resilience.
Urban space grabs: Colonizing the vertical city
by Liong Ju Tjung, Helga Leitner, Eric Sheppard, Herlambang Suryono and Wahyu Astuti
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (forthcoming)
Abstract: Much attention has been paid recently to land grabs in rural and urban areas of the global South, but relatively little attention to such activities in the third dimension – vertical space. Yet vertical space also has been increasingly colonized, as manifest in the transformation of mega-city skylines through the proliferating number and height of high-rises in both central cities and peri-urban developments. We investigate how floor area ratio policies, originally designed to control densification, have been re-worked to facilitate densification through floor area uplift. Thus a tool originally developed to advance public welfare has come to be utilized to facilitate the profitability of real estate projects for developers as well as benefiting local governments. Taking DKI Jakarta as our case study, we sketch out the co-evolution of this policy with urban regimes, focusing on the mid 2010s when compensation measures were formalized and made transparent. Using a particular project in Jakarta’s CBD we show how the benefits of floor area uplift favor private sector developers over the local government. In a context of rapidly increasing land values, increasing demand for housing from an emergent middle class, and particularly the privatization of planning, this unevenness systematically favors the private sector.
Keywords: Vertical urbanism, Jakarta, Floor Area Uplift, Skyscrapers, Real estate development, urban transformation.
World class aspirations, urban informality and poverty politics: A north-south comparison
by Eric Sheppard, Tony Sparks and Helga Leitner
Antipode 52 (2): 393-407, 2020
Under the influence of the discourses and practices of global neoliberal urbanism, municipal administrations worldwide aspire to make their cities world class spaces, where informality is an anachronism and poverty can be made history. In this essay, drawing on fieldwork conducted in Jakarta, Indonesia, San Francisco (California), and Seattle (Washington), we address the question of how a geographic relational poverty approach can help us understand, or at least expand ways of thinking about these processes by attending to urban informality and the politics of poverty. Informality, a pervasive feature of the global South and North, functions as a survival strategy whereby the monetarily poor can compensate for their lack of income through commoning. Market‐driven, state underwritten urban development initiatives for housing those with wealth is limiting the conditions of possibility for the monetarily poor, and informality. This is compounded by emergent political discourses rendering informality as inappropriate, and the monetarily poor as undeserving of a right to the city. Yet long‐standing more‐than‐capitalist and communal informal practices pursued by the urban poor remain effective and necessary survival strategies, supporting residents whose presence is necessary to the city and whose practices challenge capitalist norms.
Abstract: informality, housing, relational poverty, urban development, housing crisis.
Global urbanism inside/out: Thinking through Jakarta
By Helga Leitner and Eric Sheppard
In C. McFarlane and M. Lancione (eds) Global Urbanism. London: Routledge (forthcoming)
2019
Critical spatial practice and urban poor politics: (Re)imagining housing in a flood-prone Jakarta
by Emma Colven and Dian Irawaty
Society and Space online Critical Spatial Practice forum
Jakarta’s great land transformation: Hybrid neoliberalisation and informality
by Suryono Herlambang, Helga Leitner, Liong Ju Tjung, Eric Sheppard, Dimitar Anguelov
Urban Studies (2019) 56(4): 627–648.
Abstract: We analyse dramatic land transformations in the greater Jakarta metropolitan area since 1988: large-scale private-sector development projects in central city and peri-urban locations. These transformations are shaped both by Jakarta’s shifting conjunctural positionality within global political economic processes and by Indonesia’s hybrid political economy. While influenced by neoliberalisation, Indonesia’s political economy is a hybrid formation, in which neoliberalisation coevolves with long-standing, resilient oligarchic power structures and contestations by the urban majority. Three persistent features shape these transformations: the predominance of large Indonesian conglomerates’ development arms and stand-alone developers; the shaping role of elite informal networks connecting the development industry with state actors; and steadily increasing foreign involvement and investment in the development industry, accelerating recently. We identify three eras characterised by distinct types of urban transformation. Under autocratic neoliberalising urbanism (1988–1997) peri-urban shopping centre development predominated, with large Indonesian developers taking advantage of close links with the Suharto family. The increased indebtedness of these firms became debilitating after the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. Thus post- Suharto democratic neoliberalising urbanism (1998–2005) was a period of minimal investment, except for shopping centres in DKI Jakarta facilitating a consumption-led strategy of recovery from 1997, and the active restructuring of elite informality. Rescaled neoliberalising urbanism (2006–present) saw the recovery of major developers, renewed access to finance, including foreign capital, and the construction of ever-more spectacular integrated superblock developments in DKI Jakarta and peri-urban new towns.
Keywords: elite informality, hybrid political economies, neoliberalising urbanism, real estate mega-projects, urban transformation
Water crisis through the analytic of urban transformation: An analysis of Bangalore’s hydrosocial regimes
By Michael Goldman and Devika Narayan
Water International (2019). 44 (2): 95–114.
Reprinted as a book chapter in Rural–Urban Water Struggles: Urbanizing Hydrosocial Territories and Evolving Connections, Discourses and Identities, Eds. Hommes, Lenna., Boelens, Rutgerd., Harris, Leila, M., & Veldwisch, Gert, V. New York: Routledge. 2020, pp. 15-35. [Lead Chapter]
Abstract: This paper explores intensified water crisis in Bangalore (or Bengaluru) in India by using the analytic of three hydrosocial regimes: the catchment-based regime, the hydraulic regime and the speculative urban regime. It uses a wide range of qualitative interviews, scientific reports and secondary sources to analyze shifting urban trajectories, agrarian relations and their interlinkages with water. Historical ruptures (in the realm of governance, urban growth and changing urban–rural dynamics) allow one to highlight the complex role of speculative logics that shape urban expansion and water scarcity.
2018
Grassroots struggles of the city of the many : From the politics of spatiality to the spatialities of politics
by Helga Leitner and Eric Sheppard
In J. Peck, M. Werner, B. Christophers and R. Lave (eds), Doreen Massey—critical dialogues. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Agenda Publishing, pp. 313-324, 2018.
Abstract: Doreen Massey concerned herself with the politics and ethics in and of cities. Yet she paid relatively little attention to its raggedy edges of urban activism and social movements, such as more-than-capitalist urban commoning. In this brief essay, we critically interrogate the implications of her relational conceptualization of place and spatiotemporality, and of the politics of spatiality, for urban activism. Endorsing her argument that “you can’t [just] take a theory off the shelf and use it” (Hoyler 1999, 73), we write back to her theoretical reflections from our own studies of urban commoning in Los Angeles and Jakarta. We argue that spatialities and politics are dialectically interrelated, implying that her politics of spatiality should be extended to embrace the spatialities of real world politics (realpolitik).
From kampungs to condos? Contested accumulations through displacement in Jakarta
by Helga Leitner and Eric Sheppard
Environment and Planning A 50(2): 437–456, 2018.
Abstract: Across cities of the global South, major initiatives are underway to assemble land from informal settlements in order to make it available for large-scale infrastructure and commercial real estate projects. Driven by global city aspirations, profit-seeking developers, demands from emergent middle classes for modern residential, consumption and recreational spaces, and, last but not least, the availability of finance, these land transformations seek to commodify and enclose residential urban commons and involve the displacement of thousands of urban residents. Through an examination of two field sites, a ‘legal’ kampung where land is being acquired through negotiations between kampung residents with land rights and developers’ land brokers, and two ‘illegal’ kampungs whose residents were evicted in the name of flood mitigation, we conclude that the default theory for explaining these processes—accumulation by dispossession—is inadequate for capturing the variegated and complex nature of such processes. By thinking through Jakarta, we seek to provincialize the dominant concept of accumulation by dispossession, proposing an extension that we suggest is better attuned to capture the distinct features of Southern cities: Contested accumulations through displacement.
Keywords: Accumulation by dispossession, commoning, contestation, displacement, land transformation
Globalizing Urban Resilience
by Helga Leitner, Eric Sheppard, Sophie Webber & Emma Colven
Urban Geography 39(8): 1276-1284, 2018.
Abstract: Urban resilience, a new urban development and governance agenda, is being rolled out from the top down by a network of public, private, non-profit sector actors forming a global urban resilience complex: producing norms that circulate globally, creating assessment tools rendering urban resilience technical and managerial, and commodifying urban resilience such that private sector involvement becomes integral to urban development planning and governance. The Rockefeller Foundation's 100 Resilience Cities Program is at the center of this complex, working with the World Bank, global consultants, NGOs, and private sector service providers to enroll cities, develop and circulate urban resilience assessment tools, and create a market catalyzed by the notion of a resilience dividend. Notwithstanding the claim of this program being open and inclusive, aspects of its initial operationalization in Jakarta suggest that urban resilience assessment tools preempt alternative understandings of urban resilience and marginalizing voices of the city's most vulnerable populations.Keywords
Keywords: Urban resilience; urban governance; global resilience complex; Rockefeller 100 Resilient Cities Program
In Bengaluru’s gated communities, new forms of civil engagement are emerging
by Hemangini Gupta
Economic & Political Weekly 53(39) (29 September 2018)
Summary: By foregrounding the flows of water and waste through the analytics of seepage, smell, and sightings (of flies and buzzards), an ethnography of the gated community suggests an entangled and evolving relationship with its poorer neighbours.
Ecological security for whom? The politics of flood alleviation and urban environmental justice in Jakarta, Indonesia
By Helga Leitner, Emma Colven and Eric Sheppard, in The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities edited by Jon Christensen, Ursula Heise and Michelle Niemann. London: Routledge, 2018, pp 194-205.