The Urban Poor and Their Ambivalent Exceptionalities: Some Notes from Jakarta

Rather than being sedentary strata of urban existence, the urban poor move in and out of heterogeneous transformations, becoming a body of critical experimentation in ongoing calibrations of circulation and emplacement. They are sometimes the “wild cards” of urbanization itself, less excluded from rights and livelihood or a reserve surplus of wasted lives than vehicles for both conjoining and disrupting clearly delineated sectors, territories, and policies. Reviewing various dynamics of local economic practice, provisioning systems, and the built environment in Jakarta, in this article I explore the ambiguous presence of the poor in contemporary urban systems of the so-called global south.