This seminar will be in person at Niagara C0826 and hybrid on Zoom (link here).
Speaker: Rafael Martínez (Research Fellow, Asian Vision Institute)
Title: Living in Motion: Urban Transience and the Provisional City in Jakarta
Abstract: The Provisional City starts from an everyday feature of Jakarta that is easy to see but harder to explain: urban arrangements that appear temporary can remain in place, in one form or another, for many years. Roadside stalls emerge and disappear over the course of a day. Mobile vendors adjust their routes in response to traffic, demand, and police presence. Informal transport nodes form around congestion and pedestrian movement, while residual spaces are occupied, vacated, and occupied again. The people and materials involved may change, but the broader arrangements often remain recognisable.
Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in 2015–2016 and revisited repeatedly in 2024–2025, the study asks how such arrangements endure without becoming fixed or formally institutionalised. Provisionality offers a way of understanding urban continuity based on adaptation, reversibility, negotiation, and recurrent reassembly. Durability does not always require permanence; some urban formations continue precisely because they can be moved, altered, withdrawn, and reconstructed as circumstances change.
This perspective challenges two familiar readings of informally produced space. The first sees it mainly as a planning failure or an incomplete condition expected eventually to disappear through formalisation. The second relies on ideas of temporary urbanism developed largely from European and North American experience, where temporary uses are commonly associated with tactical interventions or “pop-up” projects. Neither fully accounts for provisionality as an ordinary and deeply embedded part of urban organisation in Jakarta.
The settings at the heart of the study are more than physical locations. They form through changing combinations of bodies, objects, infrastructures, routines, permissions, memories, and practical knowledge. A stall may be dismantled at the end of the day, but the relationships and spatial understandings that sustain it remain. People know when to return, where to position themselves, what materials they need, and how their presence will be understood by others. Provisional space lies, in this sense, between the tangible and the intangible, depending heavily on recognition, repetition, and tacit coordination.
Mobility is central to their persistence. It is not simply movement between locations, but a way of maintaining livelihoods, negotiating access, and coordinating activity across an unevenly serviced and continually changing city. Knowledge of circulation, timing, enforcement, and local conditions becomes a practical form of infrastructure, allowing materially unstable arrangements to remain operational. At the same time, this adaptability should not be romanticised: it sustains everyday urban life, but it develops amid insecurity, unequal access, and limited protection.
To address this, the presentation proposes a “proxy conversation” between Southeast Asia and Latin America—an indirect comparative dialogue grounded in sustained engagement with both regions. Rather than presuming that Southern cities are equivalent, this lateral exchange allows ideas to move across geographically dispersed urban experiences, approaching Jakarta not simply as a case study to be explained, but as a site from which broader urban theory can emerge.
This seminar is part of the IUR Brown Bag Seminar Series. Bring your lunch! If you have any questions, please contact Defne Kadioglu and Julie Goodrich.