Contemporary urban environment development: The existence of bird markets as rural cultural migration

Bird markets remain part of Jakarta’s cultural interests in the midst of Jakarta’s development path to modernization. It brings us to a time-space imagination where birds were owned and traded to resemble the social status of a person, especially in Javanese traditions. It also, therefore, marks the migration period of Javanese to Jakarta who still retains their tradition and culture in the capital city. Today, several markets even persist in the contestation between the process of space acquisition for bird enthusiasts, the formal grids and regulation of urban development, also endemic animals, and environmental conservation. Although contested, it is suggested that the bird market reflects what Foucault implied about heterotopia. The bird market represents a liminal space of the ideal romantic-traditional society which in reality does not ‘fit’ under the hegemonic urban construct - yet it constructs the way we relate to urban life today. This article seeks through the possibility of exploring ‘this otherness’ the re-positioning of the traditional market in Jakarta today and how it constructs and is re-constructed by the dominant discourse of the city. It is also argued that this memory of a time that the bird market retains cannot be detached from the social networks of bird enthusiasts who are engaged not only in economic activities of selling, buying, or biding but also in chirping contests. Not only the social value, but the bird market also depicts a political-economic logic between traders, contests organizer, competition jury, and the market as to control - boost or suppress the price of birds and promote particular kinds of birds to be included in the competition which often leads to further exploitation of bird in the natural reserve. This paper concludes on how this nexus of the social, political, cultural, and environmental context of the existence of the bird market shapes and re-shapes the city today and how each actor related to it reflects on the transformation and potential of the bird market in the future.