“Worlding Sites”: Globalized Visions and Material Constructions of Future Southeast Asia
Type
Double PanelPart 1
Session 5Thu 09:00–10:30 Room 1.401
Part 2
Session 6Thu 11:00–12:30 Room 1.401
Conveners
- Monika Arnez University of Hamburg
- Silvia Vignato Università di Milano-Bicocca
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Add to CalendarPapers (Part 1)
- Moulding Singapore: Crafting Places and Engineering Conviviality Barbara Götsch Austrian Academy of Sciences
Singapore is a prime site of worlding, as laid out by Roy and Ong (2011). With its ambitious visions and effective transformations, ranging from land reclamation and urban restructuring to educational and business policies, Singapore has become a model for many other states to emulate. Moreover, the state introduced an industrious regime of controlling the smallest aspects of life in the city-state, all in the name of boosting the economy and improving services to the public. For this reason, Singapore has been titled a “nanny state” that not only plans well but also cares for and disciplines its citizens to behave in specific ways. It is no coincidence that the Ministry of Education’s claim runs “moulding the future of our nation”.
In recent years, there has been a growing awareness – corresponding to international trends and competitions between cities – that for Singapore to remain successful, it needs to be perceived as a liveable, vibrant and convivial place, for the population to enjoy and for ideas to flourish. As a consequence, the Singapore government invested in the preservation of its multicultural heritage, in fostering the arts and sparking creativity, and it proclaimed the aim of becoming a “city in a garden”. In this paper, I will be concerned with the way authorities aim to create spaces – and “make places” – that enable this vibrancy and conviviality and in the subtle ways in which they encourage, stimulate or “nudge”, the desired behaviour in the population.
- The Conflicted City: NGOs vs. Globalised Urban Development Visions of Jakarta Jerome Tadie French Research Institute for Development
As a megacity of more than 25 million inhabitants (almost 10 in the limits of the capital city province, the DKI), Jakarta until recently enjoyed mixed forms of residential neighbourhoods, in which the kampongs used to prevail. After a period of kampong rehabilitation programs, relocation programs began in Jakarta in the 1980s, under the influence of the Singaporean model and of paradigmatic shifts in international policies for housing for the poor (as designed by the World Bank in particular). As a reaction, various local NGOs have tried to adapt to such a context and to propose alternative solutions to what can seem a hegemonic international trend.
Starting from the imposition of international models for housing for the poor, where social housing in towers prevail, this paper studies how local NGOs in Jakarta have tried to negotiate these hegemonic global shifts and to propose other types of solutions. It first analyses the context of urban transformation in the central zones and the eradication of several kampongs. It then addresses the NGOs’ alternative visions of the city and its future, before showing, in a third part, how these visions are deeply rooted in formal and informal networks that are proper to the Indonesian context.
- The Jakabaring Sport City in Palembang, Indonesia: A Worlding Site of Modernity, City Development and Islam Friederike Trotier University of Passau
The capital of the Indonesian province South Sumatra has long been an industrial centre with a negative reputation of being ugly and backward. Major transformations, however, occurred after Indonesia’s decentralization process in the early 2000s which have been connected to Palembang’s regular hosting of national and international sports events between 2004 and 2018 leading to the city’s new status as Indonesia’s sports city. This paper investigates the role of the sports-themed zone Jakabaring Sport City as Palembang’s worlding site of modernity, city development and Islam and the political aspirations related to this sports complex. By detailing the transformation process of the Jakabaring area, the governmental targets of displaying modernity and progress come to light. This does not only include the association of sports with modernity but also the purpose of ending rumours about mysterious incidents in the area and thus eliminating backwardness and haunted places. As a worlding site with international attention, the Jakabaring Sport City is further supposed to symbolize green and smart city development and to display Muslim identity. This paper analyses in how far this overload of meaning and the different ambitious visions have led to contradictions and failures. It further scrutinises the different responses of Palembang’s citizens and compares the Jakabaring Sport City to other sports sites and complexes in Southeast Asia and beyond.
Papers (Part 2)
- Building a Safe Future in Different Worlding Sites: From Batam, a Failed Industrial Project, to Malang, Where Returnees Farm Cash Crops and Work in Services Giacomo Tabacco University of Naples L’Orientale
In this paper, I will explore the aesthetic, moral and material constructions of the future in two Indonesian localities that are socio-economically adjacent; Batam (a failed industrial worlding project), and the region of Malang, home to many migrant factory workers and a major locality for dismissed returnees from Batam. With the relentless demise of technologically advanced and value-capturing industry, Batam transformed into a low-tech production center, where machines and infrastructures haven’t been upgraded since the 1990s, and the workforce and capital decrease little by little. Hit by global contingencies and market rivalries, Batam consists today of a transforming worlding site where what should remain unseen in a neo-liberal regime is often easily seen; abandoned plants and shipping yards, deserted dormitories, empty shopping malls, eroded coastlines, and unemployed wanderers all over. The region of Malang, for its part, became a vibrant worlding site of new speculative experiments in cash cropping and food processing by former factory workers (now in their 40s) and their offspring. Central to my analysis are the ideas of a good and safe future that people who were exposed to a worlding site par excellence as Batam elaborate when neoliberal urbanization and industrialization don’t deliver. From what I gathered during recent fieldwork, bureaucrats, migrant workers and new generations often embrace ideas that are intrinsically global: they call for State and large corporations’ intervention, embark upon very capitalistic and market oriented small-scale farming (in Malang), and aspire to infrastructural, political and existential modernity. At the same time, however, people also question these mainstream worlding repertoires; they acknowledge hopes are usually disconnected from reality, life trajectories are often marked by recurrent existential and economic failures, and the social capital they rely upon is ultimately fragile.
- Smallholders, Farmers and Environmentalists: Small Oil Palm Plantations as Meaningful Spaces Giulia Zaninelli Università di Milano-Bicocca
Based on my previous fieldwork for the master thesis in the province of Aceh and my current research Phd project in the province of Riau (Sumatra, Indonesia), I will show how environmental NGOs shape rural workspaces through public narratives.
The small oil palm plantation become a space where it is possible to identify a friction between global market dynamics and “glocal” environmental protection visions and where the personal and collective ambitions, hopes and dreams are shaped. On the one hand, the small oil palm plantation represents the target-space for green environmental projects conceived in a citizen elsewhere far from rural areas; on the other hand, it is possible from the small oil palm plantation to think of an upturn of the agricultural site as a space for designing a more measured, more "sustainable", more environmental-friendly agro-economic future. Using the data I will collect during fieldwork in Riau I will analyze how small oil palm plantation, a non-urban space, build the imaginary and the practices of the future through a continuous friction between the developing ideology that re-signify the agricultural spaces and the environmental protection vision.
- “Worlding School Gardens”: Contested Values of Education and Land Usage in Timor Leste Thomas Stodulka Freie Universität Berlin
Within a broader scope of anthropological research on transnational dimensions of education and learning, this paper focuses on the unique pathways of public education in Timor Leste. It focusses on the young nation’s unique primary school curriculum that is designed around the transnationally travelling concept of permaculture, which promotes children’s ecological, historical and cultural awareness and responsibility vis-à-vis postcolonial identity formation, citizenship and their usage of the land. I intend to discuss permaculture’s potentials to contribute to large-scale transformations within the realms of national and local economies, environmental and social justice, and the shaping of children’s bodies and minds to provide them with skills that oscillate between imagined both local and cosmopolitanized futures. This paper also attends to the question as to why the globally circulating ideas of permaculture, school gardening, sustainable learning principles and land usage fall on particular fertile grounds in Timor Leste as nationalized ‘worlding site’ subject to various kinds of economic, political and other heterotopias.
Show Paper Abstracts
Abstract
We see the worlding city as a milieu of intervention, a source of ambitious visions, and of speculative experiments that have different possibilities of success and failure [...] Such experiments cannot be conceptually reduced to instantiations of universal logics of capitalism or postcolonialism. They must be understood as worlding practices, those that pursue world recognition in the midst of inter-city rivalry and globalized contingency. (Roy, A., Ong, A., 2011: xv)
In this panel, we would like to extend Aihwa Ong’s idea of “worlding cities” to a larger acceptation of “worlding sites,” land- and seascapes modified in line with massive, modern transformation in Southeast Asia. Some of these sites are seminal projects representing best practice, not only in terms of commercial profit but also innovation. Such original, experimental, yet contested places are often engineered according to a specific vision that bespeaks aesthetic, economic, moral and political ideas of a good future. Land reclamation sites modifying the sea/land border, real estate mega projects and Special Economic Zones where global capital is emplaced and shown off are of particular interest here. We focus on the experience of transformation and the responses to such sites, the compliance, indifference and resistance to them. We also include visions, standpoints and the control of them. Another interesting field is the dichotomy between the seen and the unseen. What is made to be seen and what needs to stay unseen when a wording site is planned and constructed?
We suggest a few hints: pollution (sea pollution, for example), impacts on the ecosystem (decrease in fish population, seabed destruction, erosion), hazards (climate change and natural hazards), work (workers’ lodging in urban peripheries, in building sites, on the sea itself), cross-border mobility, signs of poverty or backwardness (dormitories, slums, food stalls, wanderers, beggars), immorality (prostitution, drinking, drugs), and wild exploitation (massive sand displacement, gas exhaustion...).
We invite contributors to explore the powerful visions which are brought into play and emplaced in worlding sites, addressing modern industrialization, development and progress, nation, citizenship, emplacement of global capital and entitlement and rights. Beyond visions, we are also interested in soundscapes. How do they shape sites and vice versa? In order to explore these visions in their concrete and embodied forms, we invite contributors to ask questions such as:
- Are all the sites of transformation in SEA inspired by similar models? Are all the land reclamations alike, the SEZ alike, the new cities alike?
- How are these sites produced and reconstructed in the face of the challenges of exploitation and political aspirations?
- To what extent are humans part of the visions? Who is supposed to work, live and stroll in the worlding sites, and who actually does? Who is not supposed to be there?
- What happens if large-scale projects are constructed but there are hardly any people inhabiting them?
- What is the interplay of governmental schemes, local interests and other, immaterial values when it comes to uprooting homes, modifying the coastline or filling “empty” spaces with buildings? How does this show in concrete objects and bodies?
- How is memory inserted into global visions (for example as “tradition”)? Who remembers? Is memory connected to sites or does memory ‘travel’?
- Is there a common temporality in similar sites?
- What is the gender bias in a worlding site?
This is an interdisciplinary subject but to keep the dialogue alive we invite contributors to privilege the human factor over the technical analysis.
Keywords
In this paper, I will explore the aesthetic, moral and material constructions of the future in two Indonesian localities that are socio-economically adjacent; Batam (a failed industrial worlding project), and the region of Malang, home to many migrant factory workers and a major locality for dismissed returnees from Batam. With the relentless demise of technologically advanced and value-capturing industry, Batam transformed into a low-tech production center, where machines and infrastructures haven’t been upgraded since the 1990s, and the workforce and capital decrease little by little. Hit by global contingencies and market rivalries, Batam consists today of a transforming worlding site where what should remain unseen in a neo-liberal regime is often easily seen; abandoned plants and shipping yards, deserted dormitories, empty shopping malls, eroded coastlines, and unemployed wanderers all over. The region of Malang, for its part, became a vibrant worlding site of new speculative experiments in cash cropping and food processing by former factory workers (now in their 40s) and their offspring. Central to my analysis are the ideas of a good and safe future that people who were exposed to a worlding site par excellence as Batam elaborate when neoliberal urbanization and industrialization don’t deliver. From what I gathered during recent fieldwork, bureaucrats, migrant workers and new generations often embrace ideas that are intrinsically global: they call for State and large corporations’ intervention, embark upon very capitalistic and market oriented small-scale farming (in Malang), and aspire to infrastructural, political and existential modernity. At the same time, however, people also question these mainstream worlding repertoires; they acknowledge hopes are usually disconnected from reality, life trajectories are often marked by recurrent existential and economic failures, and the social capital they rely upon is ultimately fragile.
Based on my previous fieldwork for the master thesis in the province of Aceh and my current research Phd project in the province of Riau (Sumatra, Indonesia), I will show how environmental NGOs shape rural workspaces through public narratives.
The small oil palm plantation become a space where it is possible to identify a friction between global market dynamics and “glocal” environmental protection visions and where the personal and collective ambitions, hopes and dreams are shaped. On the one hand, the small oil palm plantation represents the target-space for green environmental projects conceived in a citizen elsewhere far from rural areas; on the other hand, it is possible from the small oil palm plantation to think of an upturn of the agricultural site as a space for designing a more measured, more "sustainable", more environmental-friendly agro-economic future. Using the data I will collect during fieldwork in Riau I will analyze how small oil palm plantation, a non-urban space, build the imaginary and the practices of the future through a continuous friction between the developing ideology that re-signify the agricultural spaces and the environmental protection vision.
Within a broader scope of anthropological research on transnational dimensions of education and learning, this paper focuses on the unique pathways of public education in Timor Leste. It focusses on the young nation’s unique primary school curriculum that is designed around the transnationally travelling concept of permaculture, which promotes children’s ecological, historical and cultural awareness and responsibility vis-à-vis postcolonial identity formation, citizenship and their usage of the land. I intend to discuss permaculture’s potentials to contribute to large-scale transformations within the realms of national and local economies, environmental and social justice, and the shaping of children’s bodies and minds to provide them with skills that oscillate between imagined both local and cosmopolitanized futures. This paper also attends to the question as to why the globally circulating ideas of permaculture, school gardening, sustainable learning principles and land usage fall on particular fertile grounds in Timor Leste as nationalized ‘worlding site’ subject to various kinds of economic, political and other heterotopias.
We see the worlding city as a milieu of intervention, a source of ambitious visions, and of speculative experiments that have different possibilities of success and failure [...] Such experiments cannot be conceptually reduced to instantiations of universal logics of capitalism or postcolonialism. They must be understood as worlding practices, those that pursue world recognition in the midst of inter-city rivalry and globalized contingency. (Roy, A., Ong, A., 2011: xv)
In this panel, we would like to extend Aihwa Ong’s idea of “worlding cities” to a larger acceptation of “worlding sites,” land- and seascapes modified in line with massive, modern transformation in Southeast Asia. Some of these sites are seminal projects representing best practice, not only in terms of commercial profit but also innovation. Such original, experimental, yet contested places are often engineered according to a specific vision that bespeaks aesthetic, economic, moral and political ideas of a good future. Land reclamation sites modifying the sea/land border, real estate mega projects and Special Economic Zones where global capital is emplaced and shown off are of particular interest here. We focus on the experience of transformation and the responses to such sites, the compliance, indifference and resistance to them. We also include visions, standpoints and the control of them. Another interesting field is the dichotomy between the seen and the unseen. What is made to be seen and what needs to stay unseen when a wording site is planned and constructed?
We suggest a few hints: pollution (sea pollution, for example), impacts on the ecosystem (decrease in fish population, seabed destruction, erosion), hazards (climate change and natural hazards), work (workers’ lodging in urban peripheries, in building sites, on the sea itself), cross-border mobility, signs of poverty or backwardness (dormitories, slums, food stalls, wanderers, beggars), immorality (prostitution, drinking, drugs), and wild exploitation (massive sand displacement, gas exhaustion...).
We invite contributors to explore the powerful visions which are brought into play and emplaced in worlding sites, addressing modern industrialization, development and progress, nation, citizenship, emplacement of global capital and entitlement and rights. Beyond visions, we are also interested in soundscapes. How do they shape sites and vice versa? In order to explore these visions in their concrete and embodied forms, we invite contributors to ask questions such as:
- Are all the sites of transformation in SEA inspired by similar models? Are all the land reclamations alike, the SEZ alike, the new cities alike?
- How are these sites produced and reconstructed in the face of the challenges of exploitation and political aspirations?
- To what extent are humans part of the visions? Who is supposed to work, live and stroll in the worlding sites, and who actually does? Who is not supposed to be there?
- What happens if large-scale projects are constructed but there are hardly any people inhabiting them?
- What is the interplay of governmental schemes, local interests and other, immaterial values when it comes to uprooting homes, modifying the coastline or filling “empty” spaces with buildings? How does this show in concrete objects and bodies?
- How is memory inserted into global visions (for example as “tradition”)? Who remembers? Is memory connected to sites or does memory ‘travel’?
- Is there a common temporality in similar sites?
- What is the gender bias in a worlding site?
This is an interdisciplinary subject but to keep the dialogue alive we invite contributors to privilege the human factor over the technical analysis.