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doi: 10.1111/apv.12212
The foreword to the special issue of Asia Pacific Viewpoint considers the concept of exemplary centre as it was formulated by Clifford Geertz in light of its potential and limitation to address issues of power and politics in the study of contemporary urbanism. The articles in this issue deal with topics of urban culture and politics in Southeast Asia.
Tilley, Lisa; Elias, Juanita; Rethel, Lena
doi: 10.1111/apv.12218
The production and contestation of exemplary centres in Southeast Asia
doi: 10.1111/apv.12214
Immigration control constitutes a particular technique for regulating urban space and for controlling and disciplining migrant subjects within it. Unlike other manifestations of state power in exemplary urban settings, the architecture of urban immigration control is not recognisable through grand buildings or walls, but rather through its momentary presence and continuously shifting location: ad hoc identity controls in public spaces, roadblocks in neighbourhood streets or raids against workplaces. Building on fieldwork conducted in the Malaysian city of George Town, this article takes an interest in how migrants navigate this urban borderscape in order to avoid exploitation and encounters with the police. Read through Asef Bayat's notion of ‘street politics’, the article shows how migrants use the means (made) available to them in order to extend their room to manoeuvre. While such tactics are often driven by the force of necessity, they do nonetheless cumulatively encroach on the state's ability to produce migrants as (un)wanted or even (il)legal subjects in the city. Through this, migrants also challenge the very notion of what an exemplary urban space is as well as who is considered a legitimate part of it.
doi: 10.1111/apv.12208
In the Philippines, calls for creating ‘global’, ‘sustainable’ and ‘resilient’ cities are placing urban poor communities in increasingly precarious positions. These communities have long been the targets of urban development and ‘modernisation’ efforts; more recently the erasure of informal settlements from Philippine cities is being bolstered at the behest of climate change adaptation and disaster risk management (DRM) agendas. In Metro Cebu, flood management has been at the heart of DRM and broader urban development discussions, and is serving as justification for the demolition and displacement of informal settler communities in areas classed as ‘danger zones’. Using Kusno's (2010) interpretation of the ‘exemplary centre’ as a point of departure, this paper interrogates the relationship between DRM, worlding aspirations (Roy and Ong, 2011) and market‐oriented urbanisation in Cebu, and considers the socio‐spatial implications of these intersecting processes for urban poor communities. Through analysing the contradictions inherent in framings of certain bodies and spaces as being ‘of risk’ or ‘at risk’ over others, I argue that the epistemologies of modernity, disaster risk and resilience endorsed and propagated by the state are facilitating processes of displacement and dispossession that serve elite commercial interests under the auspices of disaster resilience and pro‐poor development.
doi: 10.1111/apv.12216
Vietnam has a long tradition of social engineering through which the ordering of urban space has effectively been used to enforce the state's vision of political and social order. With the country currently in transition from a centrally planned to a market‐oriented economy, the ordering of urban spaces is currently all the more important. This is prominently manifested in the numerous beautification projects that are being implemented in Vietnamese cities. This article explores recent ordering endeavours and considers the way they are legitimated and contested in Vietnam's new socio‐political context. Three beautification projects in Hanoi are examined using materials from policy documents, professional journals and media coverage. The article argues that state ordering actions and the ‘exemplary’ urban spaces they seek to create are embodiments of a complex system of orders of powers in transitional Vietnam, in which political visions of modernist socialism and the new market‐oriented agenda are sometimes in alignment and sometimes clash. Overall, the state's failure in sustaining these ‘exemplary’ urban spaces is emblematic of this hybrid system.
doi: 10.1111/apv.12217
The existing literature on street vendors has largely examined processes of marginalisation of informal enterprises amid rapid urban development. At the same time, the resistance methods of street vendors against the constraints of urban development have been extensively explored. However, these studies tend to focus on the binary position between informal and formal, as well as on the overt confrontation and conflicts between vendors and the state, which risks simplifying the heterogeneity of interests in the everyday practice of street vending. Delving into the daily work of street vendors in Bandung city, this article explores the everyday practice of traders in order to identify their subtle forms of resistance to removal and to the negative perceptions attached to them. By adopting the analytics of ‘people as infrastructure’ (Simone, 2004) and the idea of ‘building blocks of success’ for small enterprises (Turner, 2003), this article argues that social infrastructure is constituted and practiced through the construction of personal relationships and varied forms of informal economic exchange between vendors and their customers, informal organisers and neighbours, as well as through the adoption of new technology. Social infrastructures have become a means of building everyday politics for street vendors and a vital way of challenging the negative perception attached to street vending activities.
doi: 10.1111/apv.12213
This article considers the relationship between forced evictions and the ‘exemplary centre’ through an examination of three urban waterfront sites in Indonesia in comparative perspective. How is the notion of the ‘exemplary centre’ related to forced evictions and the aspirations of marginalised populations in contemporary cities of Indonesia? What are the chances of asserting alternative ideologies when a capital‐centric and modernist vision of the city as ‘exemplary centre’ dominates official planning paradigms? Competing visions of the ‘exemplary centre’ arise from distinct centres of power, from the state level to the grassroots community level; however, the dominant state vision of urban space is often internalised by those most at risk of displacement by modernist projects. Strategies to thwart forced evictions in riverbank settlements in Jakarta, Solo, and Surabaya offer alternative imaginings of the ‘exemplary centre’ – imaginings that enable the urban poor to visualise their hopes and to overcome the spatial uncertainties that characterise their everyday lives. While these efforts indicate resistance to marginalisation, they also provide a distinct kind of ‘exemplary’ vision based on residents’ own understanding of ideal city living. Concurrently, some alignment to existing ‘exemplary centre’ narratives is traceable in the effort to assert these alternatives.
Tilley, Lisa; Elias, Juanita; Rethel, Lena
doi: 10.1111/apv.12209
The dispossession of urban communities across class and racial lines is a global phenomenon linked to the expansion of international investment in the development of ‘exemplary’ city space. However, city evictions are also historically informed and gendered processes which are continuous with past colonial and postcolonial urban rationalisation projects. Drawing on testimonies of women evictees in Jakarta, as well as interviews with public housing managers, this article details the gendered nature of the rationalisation of urban life in the context of a contemporary evictions regime. We argue that the rationalisation of urban space serves to sharpen the gender order by placing material constraints on women's roles, limiting their economic activities and defining them as hygiene‐responsible housewives. Further, and in turn, the limited provision of ‘rusunawa’ public housing, which we show to be a gendered spatial and social transition informed by state doctrine on the family, provides the state with justification for dispossession itself. Finally, women's everyday acts of refusal and resistance show not only that kampung forms of social life continue to be preserved in Jakarta, but also that rationalisation itself is a negotiated and contingent process.
doi: 10.1111/apv.12215
After Typhoon Yolanda devastated the Philippines, ‘resilient’ was a term frequently used by the media, survivors, government officials and various other stakeholders in the city of Tacloban to describe those affected by the disaster. The focus of this article is therefore on how this term was articulated and experienced during this period. The analysis covers how resilience was discursively deployed to describe the condition of residents who were, in fact, often suffering from a double process of dispossession: once by the typhoon and once more by government policy and the inequitable distribution of relief goods and services due to the inadequacies of the disaster response. Despite these inadequacies, Tacloban was presented as ‘an exemplary centre’ of the post‐Typhoon Yolanda relief effort. I argue that the overarching rhetoric and strategies of resilience became rituals aimed at normalising modes of profit‐seeking and recreating the unequal socio‐economic status quo. These rituals occurred at multiple levels; however, the fortunes of Tacloban were indelibly intertwined with the political credibility and status pride of the Marcos/Romualdez family. I argue that ‘resilience’ is a complex, overused, manipulated and contested term and that a more transparent understanding of resilience for disaster relief and rehabilitation is needed.
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