From the fortified and securitised environments of early Dutch colonialism to the construction of privatised gated-estates in the city’s urban fringe in the 1980s and 1990s, walling and the enclosure of people and wealth are recurring features of Jakarta’s built form. However, unlike the mercantilist storehousing, colonial military infrastructure or residential estates of the previous three hundred years, since 2006 a very new form of urban separation has emerged in the city: the integrated-superblock.
Enormous and exclusive, the superblock sits at the intersection of the office, the shopping mall and the home. They tower over the largely single or double-storey neighbourhoods around them and are stark and imposing expressions of the city’s significant, and still growing, inequalities. But superblocks did not appear from thin air. They are a product of a series of late-20th and early-21st century changes in Indonesia’s political economy. [...]
Crucially however, the property market in the immediate aftermath of the democratic transition was heavily liberalised, subject to extreme property speculation and ensnared by the continuation of New Order-connected oligarchic control. Appropriation and rent-seeking was aided by the creation of a state managed, but IMF directed, financial crisis response organisation: the Indonesian Bank Restructuring Agency (IBRA). IBRA was a significant financial vehicle in Indonesia through the early-2000s and existed with the sole mandate of stabilising the business environment and returning money to government coffers as quickly as possible. To do so, the bank bailed out over 70% of underperforming loans given to property developers by the New Order, offered debt restructuring packages to well-connected developers and auctioned off state-held property in the inner city for next to nothing. This amounted to a recapitalisation of privileged developer groups and a government-sanctioned transfer of land from collective to private ownership for effectively no public gain. [...]
The logic of the superblock recalls both the old form of enclosing social relations found in the moneyed separations of the new towns of the 1980s, but it is also the construction of something entirely new. The nation, for those that can afford it, is increasingly entangled with the recessed conditions of the gated-estate gone global – privatised and keenly aware of its surroundings, but dislodged from the specifics of its geography and blurred into a worldwide network of prestige, inter-reference and money.
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