Majority Time: Operations in the Midst of Jakarta

Abstract

Across many cities of the so-called Global South, the primary responsibility for constructing spaces of inhabitation has fallen largely to residents themselves. Although these cities have been largely remade through the intensive segregations precipitated by property markets, many substantial traces of the continuous incremental renovations and readjustment of everyday life remain vital. It was not just a matter of households building their own homes. Affordability meant density. Densification was not just of bodies of techniques necessary to provide an array of affordances. This meant the intermixing of measures, angles, calculations, impulses, screens, surfaces, soundscapes, exposures, folds, circuitries, and layers, as instruments for associating things, bringing things into association, where things get their ‘bearings’ by having a ‘bearing’ on each other. But these associations required their own rhythm and time. Focusing on different heterogeneous districts in inner city Jakarta, the paper explores these mixtures of temporality and how they are materialized in local built and economic environments.