Jakarta, Indonesia and beyond: (Post-)Colonial Legacies and Contesting Modernities
Robert Ezra Park, one of the first modern urbanists, commented in 1916 “the city is man’s most consistent and (…) successful attempts to remake the world (…) after his heart’s desire. But, if the city is the world man created, it is the world he is henceforth condemned to live (Park quoted in Harvey, 2012).
More than a hundred years later, the majority of the world’s population, Indonesians in particular, live in urban settings. Park was right, it is the world where we are condemned to live! This fact had and has massive consequences for human livelihoods, cultural, social and economic institutions, structures and systems as “without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city, man has remade himself” (ibid).
In this seminar we are looking at these dynamics of the making and remaking of cities and in extension of society and the human condition. Our focus region will be (Southeast) Asia in general and Indonesia i.e. Jakarta, the nation’s capital, in particular, without excluding cities in other regions. Our guiding questions are:
Tuesdays we will focus particularly on Jakarta and Indonesia, we will learn concepts and debates of urban studies and how they manifest themselves in urban life in the local grounded context.
The Thursday’s Begleitkurs focuses on the anthropological approach and the genre of ethnography – how do urban anthropologists deal with the vast density of actors, issues, the building environment, the complex urban phenomena and what did they contribute to understand city-making in the 21st century.
The content is structured in three interconnected thematic blocks:
1. Theories and concepts of space and urbanization
2. Understanding “The City” in Southeast Asia/Indonesia
3. Urban Anthropology: Understanding urban society form below – Conflicts, interactions and change