Chapter 7 Urban Futures: Spectral Time in the Archipelago
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Abstract
Jakarta, a coastal city faced with increasingly disastrous flooding events and land subsidence, has been called one of the world’s fastest sinking cities. The government’s responses have deployed the nationalist spatial metaphor of the archipelago, repackaging an old political idea and projecting it into a distant future aspiration for the city and the nation. I argue that in contemporary Jakarta, the market-based mode of governance mitigates risk by projecting images of urban nationalist aspiration into the distant future, constructing a spatial and temporal packaging of the city that I call “spectral time”. Two major plans of the past decade were conjured in response to the ecological crisis, both of them invoking ruptures in the time and geography of the capital city. The first vision displaces “Old Jakarta” with a modern “New Jakarta”, to be constructed in the Bay along the northern coast of the city. This plan reimagined the nation as an archipelago in miniature, a massive string of islands in the shape of the mythical Garuda along the north coast of the city. When this dream languished, and as Jakarta continued to sink, the national government opted to abandon the renovation of Jakarta and to entirely relocate the capital, building a brand new city on another island. Both these futures would require massive influxes of foreign aid and investment as well as enormous quantities of sand. But planning in spectral time, the state defers these challenges to the indeterminate space between the present and the long-term future, banking instead on nationalist images of a modern and pristine capital city.