Padawangi

Urbanization as a process is rife with inequality, in Southeast

Asia as anywhere else, but resistance and contestation persist
on the ground. This Element sets out to achieve three goals:
1) to examine the political nature of urban development; 2)
to scrutinize the implications of power inequality in urban
development discussions; and 3) to highlight topical and Politics and Society
methodological contributions to urban studies from Southeast
Asia. The key to a robust understanding is groundedness: in Southeast Asia
knowledge about the everyday realities of urban life that
are hard to see on the surface but dominate how the city
functions, with particular attention to human agency and
the political life of marginalized groups. Ignoring politics in
Urban Development

Urban Development in Southeast Asia

research on urbanization essentially perpetuates the power
inequities in urban development; this Element thus focuses
not just on Southeast Asian cities and urbanization per se but
also on critical perspectives on patterns and processes in their
development.
in Southeast Asia

About the Series Series Editors

The Elements series Politics and Society Edward Aspinall
in Southeast Asia includes both country- Australian National

Rita Padawangi
specific and thematic studies on one of University
the world’s most dynamic regions. Each Meredith L. Weiss
title, written by a leading scholar of that University at
country or theme, combines a succinct, Albany, SUNY
comprehensive, up-to-date overview of
debates in the scholarly literature with
original analysis and a clear argument.

Cover image: tashechka/Shutterstock ISSN 2515-2998 (online)

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https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108669108 Published online by Cambridge University Press
 Elements in Politics and Society in Southeast Asia
edited by
Edward Aspinall
Australian National University
Meredith L. Weiss
University at Albany, SUNY

URBAN DEVELOPMENT IN
SOUTHEAST ASIA

Rita Padawangi
Singapore University of Social Sciences

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DOI: 10.1017/9781108669108
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 Urban Development in Southeast Asia

Elements in Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

DOI: 10.1017/9781108669108
First published online: June 2022

Rita Padawangi
Singapore University of Social Sciences
Author for correspondence: Rita Padawangi, [email protected]

Abstract: Urbanization as a process is rife with inequality, in Southeast

Asia as anywhere else, but resistance and contestation persist on the
ground. This Element sets out to achieve three goals: 1) to examine the
political nature of urban development; 2) to scrutinize the implications
of power inequality in urban development discussions; and 3) to
highlight topical and methodological contributions to urban studies
from Southeast Asia. The key to a robust understanding is
groundedness: knowledge about the everyday realities of urban life
that are hard to see on the surface but dominate how the city functions,
with particular attention to human agency and the political life of
marginalized groups. Ignoring politics in research on urbanization
essentially perpetuates the power inequities in urban development; this
Element thus focuses not just on Southeast Asian cities and
urbanization per se but also on critical perspectives on patterns and
processes in their development.

Keywords: urban development, cities, urban planning, urban politics,

urbanization
This Element also has a video abstract: www.cambridge.org/padawangi
© Rita Padawangi 2022
ISBNs: 9781108705608 (PB), 9781108669108 (OC)
ISSNs: 2515-2998 (online), 2515-298X (print)

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108669108 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Contents

1 The Politics of Urban Development in Southeast Asia 1

2 Historical “Debris” in Southeast Asia’s Urban Development 6

3 Planning for Urban Development 18

4 Studying Urban Development in Southeast Asia 27

5 Political Ecology and Environmental Justice 46

6 Southeast Asia’s Urban Futures 57

7 Epilogue 70

References 73

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 Urban Development in Southeast Asia 1

1 The Politics of Urban Development in Southeast Asia

Why do we need to study urban development in Southeast Asia? Most of the
world’s population is now urban (UN-Habitat, 2017); rapid, widespread urban-
ization is not unique to Southeast Asia. Moreover, there has been plenty of
research on various cities in this region, so why should we need more of it?
I argue that studying urban development in Southeast Asia is important for at
least two reasons: first, to contribute to larger conceptual understandings of
urban development; and second, to shape a new vantage point that reconfigures
the relationship between academia and planning practice in contested urban
landscapes. In other words, we need to critically revisit the “what” and the
“how” of studying cities, as well as the extent to which the “what” and “how”
are connected, and Southeast Asia provides valuable examples with which to do
so. Many cities in Southeast Asia remain subjected to prescribed best practices
from elsewhere, a symptom of insufficient conceptual development from
studies in and of this region to build a comprehensive and robust under-
standing of urbanization. We face an urgent need to reshape studies of urban
development in Southeast Asia in light of the consequences of urbanization
for everyday lived experiences.
What is it about Southeast Asia that has most influenced the shape of cities,
urban life, and urbanization? Is there anything distinctive about urban develop-
ment in Southeast Asia? Much of what we find in Southeast Asia is not distinct
to this region. More than two decades ago, Howard Dick and Peter Rimmer
warned that “any attempt to explain either the historical or contemporary
urbanization of south-east Asia as a unique phenomenon is . . . doomed to
absurdity” (1998: 2319). It was Terry McGee’s concept of desakota (1991) –
a mixed village-city, agricultural-urban landscape – as a distinctive urbanization
pattern in the region that Dick and Rimmer (1998) viewed as a variation of
urban sprawl that can be found elsewhere. To this day, desakota continues to be
influential in studies of urbanization in developing countries, including in China
and India. The expansion of the application of the concept beyond the region in
which it emerged indicates that the phenomenon may not be distinctively
Southeast Asian. Therefore, the key reason to study urban development in
Southeast Asia is not to look for its distinctiveness. Rather, studying urban
development in Southeast Asia is important for identifying patterns and pro-
cesses of city life that are not sufficiently explained by existing theories and
concepts.
Understanding the patterns and processes of Southeast Asia’s urban develop-
ment is part of a larger effort to build knowledge about cities, urban life, and
urbanization. The range of studies of urban development in Southeast Asia

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 2 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

today reflects Margit Mayer’s concerns in her observation of urban studies in

developing regions of the world: There are many case studies of local efforts
and comparative analyses of various issues – such as poverty, social housing,
evictions, and resistance movements – but there is not yet a comprehensive
picture out of such a “fragmented map of . . . hard-fought contestations” (2020:
45). However rich the literature on Southeast Asia, like studies of urbanization
elsewhere it warrants a refocus, given rapidly changing realities on the ground
and the need to better align academic perspectives, planners’ assumptions, and
lived experiences.
A major challenge in refocusing studies of urban development is the emphasis
on pragmatism in research, as urbanization has become the world’s recipe for
economic growth. Such a pragmatic focus on delivering bread-and-butter issues
obscures the need for critical analysis of political power inequalities inherent in
development strategies. In other words, the ends of developments justify the
means, and scholars are caught in this process. These urbanizations assume
certain images of a desirable future, to be achieved through prescribed strategies
for development. The problem with these future images is that, while they are
normative in terms of to where and how to progress, they come with technocratic
and investment-driven narratives that exacerbate power inequalities in urban
development (Ghertner, 2010; Harms, 2012; Padawangi, 2018c). In a socially
fragmented landscape with increasing complexities cultivated over several
decades of rapid urbanization, urban development becomes an arena in which
“progress” for some comes at a cost of displacement of others, often the
socially and economically marginal.
Yet not only are urbanizing landscapes of Southeast Asia places of social
marginalization and environmental destruction in the name of development, but
they also present alternatives to the state’s official narratives. These alternatives
are indicative of actions on the ground that reflect communities’ human agency
and political life. Active participation of disenfranchised communities in urban
development opens avenues to understanding cities, urban life, and urbaniza-
tion as political terrain on which socially and politically active communal
enclaves coexist with top-down planners.
By proposing a new vantage point that critically examines urban develop-
ment, this Element helps to meet this important need for a deeper understanding
of urbanization, one that captures how power inequalities manifest materially in
urban spaces. First and foremost, this Element fully recognizes that urban
development is political, and therefore studying urban development must be
critical. This recognition is key to shaping one’s perspective on urban develop-
ment and consequently influences the methods one selects. The methods that
scholars and practitioners adopt – whether ground-up or top-down – ultimately

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 Urban Development in Southeast Asia 3

structure the ability of urban development to address core challenges of social

justice and environmental justice in real-life settings. Therefore, the choice of
perspective is not just “academic” but has real implications for the future of
cities in Southeast Asia.

1.1 Southeast Asia as a Postcolonial Region

To study Southeast Asia’s urban development, the extent of its complexities,
and its contradictions, one must understand the scope of the region itself. Mostly
emerging in its current geopolitical form after World War II and decolonization,
Southeast Asia is a relatively “new” region in the field of urban studies, and
studies on urban development here grew along with the increasing role of the
region in the world economy (Rimmer & Dick, 2019). Reflecting the fact that
Southeast Asia is a postcolonial region, thus far its urban development has two
contradictory realities: first, in extending colonial systems; and second, as
stages for nationalist projects.
Urban development as an extension of colonial systems comes from the
formation of Southeast Asia’s nation-states as “by-products” of colonial states
(Anderson, 1983) in terms of their categories and territories, as well as the
“cultural” positions of the residents as postcolonial subjects. Colonial urban
planning was a tool to sustain order, contain disorder, and modernize as the
“rational choice” to achieve the public good, but it did so to “incorporate
colonies into the capitalist world economy” (Kusno, 2017a: 219; Yeoh, 1996).
Such objectives continue in the postcolonial era, as urban planning applies
technocratic approaches to gear cities to become gateways for global capitalism.
Postcolonial urban planning extends to more all-encompassing scales, however,
as contemporary capitalism requires participation of the whole landscape in the
market economy (Yeoh, 1996).
We see the second frame, of urban development to showcase nationalism, in
modern buildings and monumental projects in postcolonial times. Newly inde-
pendent countries often rely on these buildings and projects to paint an image of
a nation free of colonial subordination, but their now-sovereign leaders continue
to preserve some legacies of the colonial era (Kusno, 2017b: 231). These
monumental projects appear in official maps, but self-built, semi-autonomous
enclaves do not appear in detail. In the colonial era, such semi-autonomous
enclaves functioned as spaces for the Indigenous population but also contained
those populations, albeit allowing a degree of self-governance. In the postcolo-
nial era, these enclaves continue to absorb populations and buffer the govern-
ment’s incapacity to provide affordable housing, but they continue to be
underrepresented in cities’ official maps, which instead highlight flagship

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 4 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

projects and larger buildings. Moreover, their capacity for autonomy has
declined as subsequent regulations and structural transformations have brought
more spaces into the capitalist economy. Over time, urban development plan-
ning has tended increasingly in favor of technocratic planning, which provides
spatial engineering tools for societal control and discipline to support economic
growth, in the name of national progress.
These two contradictory realities share a core attribute: both are top-down.
Nonetheless, contestation and negotiation also shape the city and urbanization
processes in Southeast Asia, not just overarching control of the state. In her
seminal work Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore, Brenda Yeoh (1996)
points to the importance of examining the role of urban actors in these chal-
lenges. In other words, although urban development seems to be a rational-
technocratic vehicle to achieve public good, what gets built is a result of
political processes, and it is important to understand these political processes
to be able to obtain a comprehensive view of the seemingly fragmented city.
This is a difficult terrain to navigate because it requires mapping political actors
and linkages onto the built environment. Yet this navigation is necessary to
allow in-depth understanding of urban development dynamics in Southeast
Asia. An assumption of a linear progression of development is problematic,
as the evolution of cities through various historical eras reflects a mix of
continuity and discontinuity in urban systems. Such a situation requires scholars
to focus on “distinctions between what is residual and tenacious, what is
dominant but hard to see, and . . . what is emergent in today’s imperial forma-
tions – and critically resurgent in responses to them” (Stoler, 2008: 211).

1.2 Urban Development as Power Contestations

Urban development in Southeast Asia is a manifestation of power contestations.
Property developers have emerged as dominant actors in the making of urban
spaces in Southeast Asia, following the ascendancy of technocratic approaches
and investment-driven planning in decades of postcolonial industrialization.
Although several countries – namely Indonesia, the Philippines, and, to
a certain extent, Thailand and Myanmar (before the latter’s military coup in
2021) – have undergone waves of democratization in the late twentieth and
early twenty-first centuries, even the democratization process “did not suffi-
ciently address the urban development course that allowed over-corporatization
of urban spaces” (Padawangi, 2014: 47).
The continued hegemony of technocratic planning in global-capitalism-
plugged economies has converted built environments into spaces that celebrate
consensus while stigmatizing dissent. Beautiful, tidy landscapes embody

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 Urban Development in Southeast Asia 5

aspirations for a “good city.” For instance, Erik Harms (2012) observes in Ho
Chi Minh City the extent to which those who were displaced by city beautifica-
tion projects had internalized aspirations for neatly manicured spaces and
therefore resigned themselves to the fate of being evicted. Beautification is
part of many cities’ urban development practices, intended to project their
competitiveness in the globalizing economy. Those projects pursue conveni-
ence and beautiful landscapes at all cost, as prescriptive strategies to facilitate
economic growth. When urban spaces become economic assets, the concept of
public space fades, as political discussions in such spaces are seen as obstacles
to safe orderliness (Bayat, 2012). Forced displacements for these projects
become pragmatic decisions, taken to implement projects framed as necessary
interventions to modernize the city.
The increasing implementation of these neoliberal practices as “the new
orthodoxy within urban governance” (Paddison, 2009: 8) raises questions
regarding the maintenance of political spaces within rapidly urbanizing
Southeast Asia. When contemporary urban development and governance
regimes constrain the political spaces that societies have relied upon thus far
to participate in the making of cities and urban life in Southeast Asia, what are
the consequences for urban development trajectories in the region? The ques-
tion also applies the other way around: What are the consequences of these
urban development trajectories for politics in the region? And to what extent do
scholars take those consequences into account in assessing urban spaces,
projects, and governance?

1.3 Structure of the Element

This Element dissects patterns and processes of urbanization in Southeast Asia
to demonstrate that these have always been political and to chart an agenda for
future studies of urban development. Section 2 follows historical trails to
analyze aspects of urban planning in the past that still characterize Southeast
Asia’s urban development in the present. The discussion continues in Section 3
by dispelling the “lack of planning” myth as a stereotype of urbanization in
Southeast Asia. The section’s emphasis on the mismatch between urban plans,
implementation, and everyday life on the ground, which bears the consequences
of injustices that urban development exacerbates, leads to Section 4, on the
“how” of studying urban development. Since top-down perspectives in practice
are limited in their ability to address injustices, studies of urban development
require groundedness for a more complete picture of power inequalities and
their impacts on urban life. This section examines innovative research methods
and approaches to connect scales from the micro to the macro and to critically

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 6 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

question the limits of administrative boundaries. It should no longer be accept-

able to rely only on official data and formal channels, as such an approach
obscures reality on the ground. Section 5 continues with the consequences of
these approaches for understanding social and environmental justice in urban
development. The discussion connects social and environmental issues with
urban politics, in which stakeholders and the power inequalities among them
have real impacts on lives and livelihoods and make the city a political stage in
pursuit of (and against) justice.
Section 6, on the region’s urban futures, discusses potentials and possibilities
for Southeast Asia’s cities and the study of them. This section covers aspirations
for and imaginations of the future of the urban, from multiple perspectives.
Given the misalignment of interests that the preceding section identifies, these
perspectives from various urban development actors diverge, yielding frag-
mented visions of the city, notwithstanding points of convergence. As neo-
liberal government regimes constrain political spaces and present urban
development as a series of pragmatic fixes for the built environment, aspirations
for the future city take the shape of assemblages of imagined interventions that
appear technical and still reflect the hegemony of technocratic planning in the
city. Paying closer attention to the role of activism in directing urban futures,
though, highlights the importance of observing alternative urban development
programs and projects as counter-, yet inseparable, narratives to technocratic
and investment-driven official ones. Such an emphasis recognizes the human
agency that continues to shape cities and urban developments in Southeast Asia.
Studies of urban development in Southeast Asia require clear awareness of
power inequalities to avoid aggravating them. One challenge that lies immedi-
ately ahead is the availability of data to study and to conceptualize alternative
development projects, and therefore the Element concludes with a call for
engaged scholarship on urban development in Southeast Asia.

2 Historical “Debris” in Southeast Asia’s Urban Development

Southeast Asia took shape as a geographical region in urban studies mostly after
World War II as the countries involved underwent rapid industrialization. Yet
urban development in Southeast Asia has a significantly longer history. This
section presents urban development as an ongoing process that both dismantles
and repurposes “debris” of the past (Stoler, 2008), not exactly in a linear
progression but more through continuous power struggles among actors ranging
from those who hold high political power to ordinary citizens. The built
environment, as a result of (and as a record of) these processes, becomes a set
of physical manifestations of the political nature of urban development.

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 Urban Development in Southeast Asia 7

2.1 From “Cosmic Centers” to “Nationalist Centers”

Historians and archaeologists have noted the existence of societies in the region
with relatively diverse social and economic activities since the first millennium.
Adding to this variation was trade, including within and among Southeast Asia,
China, India, and Europe between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries (Reid,
1993). Trade in commodities such as spices and wood spurred the growth of
port cities and, consequently, urban centers in relation to these port economies.
Islam and Christianity also grew in Southeast Asia during this period, which
transformed the cities’ religious, social, political, and cultural landscapes (Reid,
1993). Even prior to the fifteenth century, trade and cultural exchanges with
China and India had played a role in Southeast Asia’s commerce. Denys
Lombard (1995) argues that Southeast Asia was not just a “crossroad” of two
oceans and two continents but a lively region of trade with established Chinese
networks, Muslim networks, and Christian networks within the region. Records
of maritime trade missions to China’s Song Dynasty show voyages as early as
947 AD, noting official trade missions from Srivijaya, Champa, Java, Brunei,
and Cambodia, among others (Wade, 2012). Traces of urbanization and trade in
the first millennium showed cultural influences from India; the existence of pre-
Indianization towns, although possible, is still a subject of debate among
archaeologists (Savage, 2019).
Although trade was important to the sustainability of Southeast Asia’s king-
doms, cities in the region at the time connected functions of inter-kingdom trade
with a “cosmic city” concept, in which the city became the ceremonial center,
surrounded by the kingdom’s agricultural lands (Savage, 2019). These cosmic
cities collected agricultural surpluses and functioned as the political and cultural
core of the kingdom, as the king was both the political and the spiritual leader.
Urban plans revolved around this leadership, with the ceremonial ground,
palace, and temple located at the center. This urban plan and societal structure
were among the legacies of Indian religious influence in the region, dating back
to the first millennium.
Parallels of the “cosmic city” concept can still be found in today’s cities in
Southeast Asia. They are not exactly similar, but the social, cultural, political,
and physical constructions of cities and urban life in the region have not fully
shed the “debris” of that history (Stoler, 2008). These expressions of political
culture appear in the built environment, and assertions of power are apparent in
cultural beliefs and practices (Anderson, 1983). National monuments and
symbolic projects, such as the National Monument and the Miniature Park in
Indonesia, are examples of how politicians ensure cities physically embody
tropes of national symbols. The story of nation-building in Southeast Asia is

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 8 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

often a story of urban development that is infused with the notion of an

imagined community of the nation, oriented symbolically around the capital
city.
But what about the technocratic side of cities that seems to disenchant
societies from such cultural symbolism? In spite of its technicalities, postcolo-
nial industrialization does not reduce symbolic orientation toward and around
the capital city; rather, industrial development gradually infuses infrastructural
projects as national symbols. Instead of making symbolism obsolete, the con-
centration of buildings, industries, and their related infrastructures have evolved
to be the new face of nationalism. An observable practice of urban development
as nation-building appears in the case of Singapore, where infrastructural
projects for urban living have been integral parts of national pride. High-rise
buildings and advanced transportation infrastructures as symbols of progress
stand as orientations of aspired progress as national identity.
Singapore is currently the city with the highest per capita income in the
region, and it is also a country that is officially “100 percent urbanized” (UN
Population Division, 2018). Provision of basic infrastructure services such as
water and public housing has illustrated the city-state’s development as
a sovereign nation with a government that is capable of providing services to
the people. Yet Singapore’s development is also one of urban expansion, as the
“city” area used to be only the downtown area nearer to the port, governed by
the municipal authority, while most of the main island and the smaller islands
that surrounded it was rural, composed of various village settlements.
Eventually most of these areas became residential neighborhoods to house the
urbanized labor force, as the economy industrialized after its national independ-
ence. The city also annexed surrounding islands, reorienting the nation as a city-
state rather than the sprawling archipelago of seventy small islands that it was
prior to land reclamation. The story of Singapore’s progress is a story of urban
development, with expanding transportation services, housing provision, indus-
trial parks, and a financial center. Capacity to deliver pragmatic results in
Singapore’s urban development is still an important source of political capital
until today. Members of parliament campaign for elections based on their
perceived ability to maintain cleanliness, build neighborhood centers, and
administer other development projects.
Recent evolution of political life echoes the “cosmic city” concept as cities
continue to function as political, economic, and cultural centers of power. In the
case of Thailand as a constitutional monarchy, Bangkok as the capital city is
also where the king is seated, and it continues to be the orientation of cultural,
political, and religious symbolism. Nevertheless, Chiang Mai as an old cosmic
center of Lanna Kingdom has now also become a center for the red shirt

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 Urban Development in Southeast Asia 9

political camp vis-à-vis the yellow shirts in Bangkok. One might argue that
the second-order city just happens to be the hometown of the opposition
Shinawatra family, but Chiang Mai has a history of being the center of political
power in northern Thailand, felt across continental Southeast Asia. Meanwhile,
some nation-states in Southeast Asia have transitioned into democracies, but the
centralization of economic activities in cities has made them fertile grounds to
build political capital. Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines and Joko Widodo of
Indonesia are examples of contemporary politicians who capitalize on the
legacy of the city as accumulation of power. Both contested for the presidency
as local figures – problem-solving mayors of second-order cities – but have
since built populist followings by marshaling the power of the center: they
present themselves, like the capital cities from which they now govern, as the
center and embodiment of the nation. In the case of Widodo, he served as
governor of the capital city Jakarta for less than one term as a stepping stone
toward seizing the presidential seat, garnering popular support through widely
shared images of technocratic progress in the capital city. Duterte, on the other
hand, relied on the claims of progress in Davao for his presidential campaign.
Progress in second-order cities – ranging from basic needs fulfillment to ensur-
ing the convenience of city living, safety, and security – serve to augment the
political power of such national leaders to take over the center.

2.2 The “Debris” of the “Colonial City”

The historical political, social, and cultural debris that still shapes Southeast
Asia’s contemporary cities comes from various eras, but the one that has been
most studied in relation to urban development is the European colonial era.
Scholars have argued that the colonial era, in which trade intensified with
imperial Europe, was a precursor to the immersion of cities into global capital-
ism (Yeoh, 1996). Although intercontinental trade preceded colonial forces’
arrival in the region, what made this era distinct was the shift of power relations
in urban development decisions. Political negotiations, conflicts, and the accu-
mulation of wealth in the European colonies contributed to the shaping of
racially diverse, yet unequal, societies through the development of infrastruc-
ture and the urban fabric.
The earliest colonial trace in the urban fabric in Southeast Asia was from
the Portuguese in Melaka, starting with the arrival of their traders in 1511.
Later on, some European colonies in the region had fortified towns, with the
Europeans within the walls and others outside, reflecting segregation and fear
of the local population. These forts were usually in port cities that were
important for trade connections. Remains of these European forts still stand

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 10 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

in several cities, such as Jakarta’s Batavia and Manila’s Intramuros. In cities

without forts, the differentiation of European colonial sections from the rest
of the city was still apparent in aspects of European engineering, such as
infrastructure and building techniques. That spatial segregation reflected both
racial and class inequality in urban life, as the wealth from intercontinental
trade was unequally distributed.
However, it is too simplistic to assume that colonial-era urbanization only led
to segregation, as there is historical evidence of integration in practice. Official
planning documents might have designated specific ethnic quarters, but local
acts of desegregation were possible. For example, under the Dutch colonial rule
in Surabaya, Wijkenstelsel applied as an ethnicity-based zoning policy, coupled
with the Passenstelsel policy that required members of the Chinese ethnic and
other “foreign oriental” groups to obtain permits for travel outside their quar-
ters. As restrictive as these policies might seem, their implementation was not so
effective – as evidence of, for instance, intermarriage between prominent
Chinese officials and Javanese royalty suggests (Sutherland, 1974).
Furthermore, the designation of the kampung as the quarters for “other natives”
of the city at the time allowed kampung in Surabaya to welcome new migrants
without ethnic restrictions and to accommodate interethnic families (Perkasa,
Padawangi & Farida, 2021). Although this does not automatically indicate
seamless ethnic integration, the possibility of forming ethnically diverse neigh-
borhoods despite the implementation of ethnic segregation regulations sug-
gested common practices that might be hard to see if one only looked at
official policies.
The misalignment between official policies and everyday lived realities
indicated an assertion of human agency amidst bureaucratic control. There
were also more open displays of challenge to the ruling powers in the colonial
era, such as the resistance that led to the strike of Chinese businesses in
Singapore against new legislation on political representation and municipal
reform in the second half of the nineteenth century (Yeoh, 1996: 32–33).
Even though there was an impression of relatively strong bureaucratic control
of urban planning in Singapore in the hands of the municipal authority at the
time, the bureaucratic management reflected power negotiations “more com-
monly articulated through strategies of evasion, non-compliance, and adjust-
ment, or channelled through Asian leaders” (Yeoh, 1996: 67). This is not to
suggest that colonial powers failed to influence urban development; in fact, the
example of ethnic segregation illustrates how adherence to and ways around
policies might coexist. Such incomplete alignment (and misalignments)
between official policies and the spectrum of everyday lived realities continues
to shape today’s urban development in Southeast Asia.

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 Urban Development in Southeast Asia 11

At least three legacies of the colonial city still leave traces to date. The first is
the increasing power of global trade in the urban economy. Rather than being
places to collect agricultural surpluses as in the cosmic centers, cities became
places to control the kinds of agricultural products to be delivered. The central-
ity of cities in postcolonial economies led to the exponential growth of their
population and territory. Second, the colonial powers brought European infra-
structure to the city, including to connect one city to another. The focus on
sending raw materials and natural resources to the port drove the development
of roads, railroads, and waterways to deliver goods. Such a city-centric eco-
nomic model continued in many parts of Southeast Asia after colonial rule
ended post–World War II, as Southeast Asia’s early postcolonial economies
quickly came to rely on manufacturing and export-oriented production. Third,
the underlying aspirations of the post-independence city, imbued with national-
ist ideals, bear traces of colonial planning and infrastructure. These expectations
and standards have affected both policymakers and societies, resulting in a mix
of nationalist sentiments and colonial debris that can also lead to double
standards between denouncing colonialism in monumental projects and holding
colonial systems in high esteem in infrastructure development projects (Kusno,
2017b). Academic research and publications on urbanization in Southeast Asia
in the early postcolonial period also followed this pattern, largely drawing on
“Western experiences of urbanization, foregrounding economic motivations for
rural-urban migration” (Bunnell, Goh & Ng, 2019), which reinforced the image
of the aspirational city in reference to the colonial, European, or Western world
in general.

2.3 The “Debris” of . . . the “City”?

Cities remain centers of political and economic powers in Southeast Asia, but
the contradictions between their increasingly expansionist developments –
swallowing surrounding rural landscapes and absorbing migrants to support
cities’ roles in trades beyond immediate vicinities – and the continuing mis-
alignment of official realities vis-à-vis everyday lived realities have conse-
quences for the dynamic of urban life that ensues from such urbanization
processes. While the term “city” by definition indicates the social, political,
economic, and cultural organization of a group of people who reside in
a particular geographical location, the magnitude of urbanization in Southeast
Asia requires us to understand how possibly several ways of organizing the city
may be functioning at the same time, at times in parallel, at other times
complementing, and at some other times contradicting each other. It is difficult
to fit such competing layers of urban life with how the city has been defined in

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 12 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

literatures – for example, the Weberian understanding of the city as a place that
features social institutions, political structure, rule of law, and market (Weber,
1921). When urban planning, which is a combination of those features, does not
match realities on the ground, then institutions and structures might not be
working. The question that might arise would be, is it possible that urban
development does not shape cities? Or, worse, does contemporary urban devel-
opment in Southeast Asia ruin cities? Are these urban development manifest-
ations that we see in Southeast Asia really cities or just “debris” of “cities”?
Given the continuing, even increasing, importance of these political and
economic centers in Southeast Asia, most likely what we are encountering is
that we need new perspectives in defining cities as social-political-economic-
cultural expressions of urban development. Therefore, rather than seeing these
urban development expressions as debris of cities, seeing the impact of colli-
sions between competing political and economic powers in driving urban
developments of Southeast Asia is important in revising our understanding of
what a “city” might be.
In postcolonial Southeast Asia, the role of cities has nevertheless become
increasingly important for at least two reasons. First is the growth in the urban
share of the population in national demographics, from 15.4 percent overall in
Southeast Asia in 1950 to 41.8 percent in 2010 (ISEAS, 2009). The United
Nations has projected a continuing increase in that share, to reach approxi-
mately 50 percent in 2025 (Figures 1 and 2). As such, cities have become ever
more important for national governments, in terms of policymaking and to
maintain public support.

47.0

44.5

41.3

38.1

34.5

31.6

1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2014

Figure 1 Proportion of urban population in Southeast Asia (%).

Data source: UN, 2014.

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 Urban Development in Southeast Asia 13

12,00,000

10,00,000

8,00,000

6,00,000

4,00,000

2,00,000

-
1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2014
Southeast Asia North Africa Sub-Saharan Africa
Latin America and the Caribbean East Asia South Asia
West Asia

Figure 2 Urban population at mid-year by major area, in thousands.

Data source: UN, 2014.

The second reason is the paradigm of cities as engines of economic growth,

advocated by international financing institutions that hold significant roles in
infrastructure investments. Urban development has come to comprise a set of
recipes for social and economic progress. All “developing” regions have
trended toward an increasing urban population in recent decades, as urbaniza-
tion has become an important indication of development. Cities, as showcases
of progress, are also spaces of intersection between urban and national politics.
This situation reconnects with the historical “debris” of both the “cosmic city”
as a symbolic center of power and the infrastructural approach of the “colonial
city.” It is that mix that has led some cities in the region to become political
stages and landscapes for populist politics, as politicians seek higher seats of
power, and urban development to consist substantially of strategies in the
pursuit of political power.
The fact of Southeast Asia’s cities’ social and economic importance in the
development of postcolonial nation-states has coincided with the growing
interconnectedness of the global capitalist economy. After the colonial era, in
the second half of the twentieth century, manufacturing industries grew and
became propellers of Southeast Asia’s urban economies. During that period, the
“New International Division of Labor” (NIDL), marked by “deep de-
industrialization of the Fordist factory system in North America and Europe”

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 14 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

and the shift of manufacturing industries to emerging economies, resulted in

growing industrial complexes in various cities in Asia (Douglass & Jones, 2008:
26–27). These growing city-scale complexes constituted mega-urban regions
(MURs) –networks of cities that were socially and economically intercon-
nected. Most MURs in Southeast Asia were places where light industries such
as garments and textiles grew to supply the global market, except in Malaysia
where industries focused on electronics (Douglass & Jones, 2008; Warouw,
2019).
Current MURs in Southeast Asia, however, originated before industrializa-
tion in the late twentieth century, mostly as port cities in the colonial era. These
port cities were mostly still under 1 million population in the 1960s, but their
development to become centers of new industrializing economies brought
exponential population growth, as shown by the example of the Jakarta
MUR’s population increase in Figure 3. Industries agglomerated at and around
existing port cities as they offered optimal access to logistical, financial, and
administrative services for export-oriented industrial products (Ortega, 2019).
Special economic zones (SEZs) emerged around existing cities and have con-
tributed to the expansion of mega-urban regions in the form of industrial parks
or other large-scale urban developments, as spaces to attract foreign direct
investment. These SEZs also connect foreign investors with local businesses
and workers, which eventually creates the need for more commercial and
residential space, leading to the mega-regionalization of urban development.
Mega-urban regions are both geographical linkages between local and global
economies and sites of social and environmental inequalities. While attracting

35

30

25
Population (Millions)

20
Jabodetabek
15 DKI Jakarta

10

0
1905 1920 1930 1954 1961 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020

Figure 3 Population of Jakarta-Bogor-Depok-Bekasi metropolitan area

(Jabodetabek) and DKI Jakarta.
Sources: Douglass & Jones, 2008; BPS Census, 2010; and Population Projection, 2020.

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 Urban Development in Southeast Asia 15

foreign direct investments, mega-urban regions, as concentrations of economic

activities, also attract migrants. Migrants from rural areas, seeking jobs in big
cities and in need of affordable housing, often must settle based on informal
agreements in informal settlements (Ortega, 2019). Concurrently, expanding
mega-urban regions consume land in the countryside adjacent to cities, often
involving taking land away from peasants and traditional societies. These land
acquisitions may or may not involve insufficient compensation, deception, and/
or use of force. The closeness between economic and political powers, as well as
the role of politicians in these economic powerhouses of the country, often
intensifies the process of converting land to investors’ private ownership and
allows special procedures that range from bypassing legal processes to prescrip-
tion of special projects (Phuc, Zoomers & van Westen, 2015; Batubara et al.,
2020). These conversions have social and environmental consequences beyond
the transformations of livelihoods and landscapes that they bring, which will be
discussed further in Section 5. Large-scale land-use change to facilitate indus-
trial, commercial, and residential expansion without sufficient attention to
environmental concerns has induced ecological degradation of soil, rivers,
and the sea. The biggest mega-urban regions in Southeast Asia – Jakarta,
Bangkok, Metro Manila, and Ho Chi Minh City – are suffering from land
subsidence, mostly because of overdevelopment and over-extraction of ground-
water. Some rivers in these regions have also degraded to the level of being
biologically dead because of the pollution from industrial and residential waste,
combined with deforestation upstream.
Attention to social inequalities and environmental degradation in these
regions has become imperative in order to increase Southeast Asia’s livability
(Douglass & Jones, 2008), as it is likely that mega-urban regions will continue
to be economic and population centers for some time. Urban planning scholars
have called for innovative structures to govern mega-urban regions, particularly
to allow more coordinated planning across multiple local government areas that
are socially, economically, and environmentally interconnected. Currently,
most of the largest mega-urban regions have metropolitan authorities that
function as coordinating and governing bodies, but the authority of such bodies
may still be limited in monitoring and implementing regional regulations. The
absence of such coordinated governance structures in these MURs is another
tempting entry point that presume that urban development may not build cities
as coherent institutions; rather, it ruins cities, and what we are seeing now are
fragmented debris of social, cultural, political, and legalistic institutions that are
supposed to shape cities. However, social and environmental concerns elevate
the urgency of having innovative governance structures to coordinate MURs.
Hence, the ability to reconfigure parallel social, political, economic, and

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 16 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

cultural processes to reduce the impact of their collisions on social and envir-
onmental realities – in other words, having social and environmental justice
perspectives – is important as an objective in studying cities and urban devel-
opment, as we will see in more detail in Section 5.

2.4 Learning from History

Even as many cities and urban regions in Southeast Asia keep, hide, or
repurpose these layers of historical “debris,” one connecting trend through-
out history has been the legacy of negotiation and struggle over urban
policies and spaces. Regardless of whether points of contestation were
officially recorded, they influenced the course of urban development and
their impacts, as well as traces that remained in lived realities have made it
possible to identify them.
In today’s context, urban areas have continued to accumulate economic
and social activities, be these local, global, or somewhere in between.
Exponential growth of the population and economy of cities after World
War II resulted in pressures on cities’ existing infrastructure. As a result,
demands for infrastructure improvements also grew exponentially, while
plans and reality have historically tended to misalign. Urban transformations
in Southeast Asia often outpace the capacity of planners and city managers to
be able to connect realities on the ground with official policies (Yap, 2019).
Issues such as traffic jams, river pollution, and lack of green areas have
become common problems in big cities such as Jakarta, Manila, and
Bangkok. Singapore is often seen as an outlier among Southeast Asia’s cities
for its relatively advanced infrastructural developments and economic sys-
tem, but to achieve that level the city has relied on heavy interventions in
existing urban landscapes. In many instances, such interventions completely
uprooted the population from existing settlements to make way for new
developments; this phenomenon could be seen as clearing one set of historical
“debris” to make way for repurposing others.
City governments’ inabilities to meet demands for infrastructure and services in
time compel societies to find their own ways to provide for household and shared
community needs (Yap & Thuzar, 2012). “Informal” housing is an example of
how such a dynamic materializes, in the context of a lack of affordable housing;
other examples relate to provision of other goods and public services. As these
provisions are usually ground-up or incremental, their physical appearance may
be less homogenous than is the case for state-provided alternatives, and they may
come across as “unplanned.” In such settings, relations and linkages across
different settlements may be based on compromises between two or more

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 Urban Development in Southeast Asia 17

communities and the availability of space, and the spaces that are constructed may
continue to transform according to emerging needs in the community. They may
be experimental and temporary, but maintaining these spaces requires different
kinds of engagements between residents and urban institutions, and these pro-
cesses of engagement always evolve (Simone, 2019: 72).
Despite the limited capacity of city governments in Southeast Asia to
manage urban development, the ideal image of a city management able to
develop sufficient infrastructure and plan for future development remains
dominant in Southeast Asia (Bunnell & Goh, 2012). Along with the historical
misalignment of planning and realities, the state in Southeast Asia is often
distanced from, with limited control over, the society it governs (Kusno,
2019). The result has been often repeated efforts to plan the city that presume
a high degree of control over large projects but subsequent failure to uphold
regulations (Yap, 2019). Some projects only took place when they gained
enough traction through coalition-building among government actors, devel-
opers, and possibly civil society leaders. Large projects at strategic areas in the
city often involve displacement of existing settlements and communities, even
when they maintain the historical fabric of the city (Roberts, 2019). With the
idealization of large-scale projects and the appearance of ground-up settle-
ments as “unplanned,” planners frame such displacement as for the public
good, which is one of the most common reasons for forced evictions around
the globe.
Historical perspectives on urban development in Southeast Asia context-
ualize contemporary development trajectories in a longer timeline.
Neglecting the importance of history means ignoring the various layers of
urban society and their spatial existence, which might in turn reproduce
challenging social issues and uphold problematic constellations of power
in urban development. A historical perspective also debunks the govern-
ment-propounded myth of an idealized planned city unaffected by how urban
settlements in Southeast Asia have grown over time. The objective of
discussing historical trajectories is not only to gain knowledge about the
past but, more importantly, to increase understanding of how urban develop-
ment in Southeast Asia has led to current trends. The social and political
structures of urban societies in Southeast Asia, in general, have relied on
self-management of small communities, and the role of the state in governing
cities and their local communities has historically been distant in reality
(Kusno, 2019). These circumstances do not mean cities in Southeast Asia are
inferior to their “planned” counterparts in other regions; rather, cities in
Southeast Asia would benefit from moving away from a fixation on top-
down master plans and big projects.

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 18 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

3 Planning for Urban Development

In arguing for the importance of learning from history, the previous section
started to paint a picture of urban development challenges in Southeast Asia.
Terry McGee’s term desakota, the concept of peri-urbanization, and subsequent
terms such as “messy urbanism” (Chalana & Hou, 2016) and “incremental
urbanism” (Dovey, 2014) indicate a sense of being in between what is planned
and what is organic. Abidin Kusno’s “semi-urbanism” (2019) reminds us that
this interaction between formal and informal occurs not only along the fringes
but also in the city. Furthermore, Kusno (2019: 75) argues that “irregular
settlements are constitutive parts of urban development,” both in the city and
in peri-urban areas. Such patterns emerged at the time new modes of capitalist
production kicked in and spurred large-scale industrialization and, eventually,
rapid urban transformation in Southeast Asia (Rimmer & Dick, 2009; Jones &
Douglass, 2008).
This section shifts the discussion closer to the present day to review the
implementation of urban master plans in order to critically scrutinize the “lack
of planning” stereotype in Southeast Asia’s context. Notwithstanding the
uniqueness of the region’s urban patterns, sprung from long-term urban
development trajectories, many cities remain fixated on the need to have
a centralized master plan that relies on regulated control of land. Except
Singapore, cities in Southeast Asia struggle to achieve such a goal, yet
Singapore’s urban planning has become a model to which many city govern-
ments aspire. This contradiction has led to a range of challenges, including
problems resulting from inconsistent plans.

3.1 Elusive Master Plans

Most cities in Southeast Asia have master plans, but fast-paced changes in cities
and problems in getting reliable data on the situation on the ground challenge
planners. Moreover, master plans fail to capture the close interaction between
the “formal” and “informal” in urban spaces, both in the built environment and
in social settings. Two examples, Singapore and Jakarta, illustrate these chal-
lenges in Southeast Asia’s urban planning.

3.1.1 Singapore: A Model City?

Singapore features two types of formal city plans: concept plans and master plans.
The concept plan is a long-term, 40-to-50-year strategic land use and transporta-
tion plan, which is reviewed every ten years. Since independence, Singapore has
had four concept plans, in 1971, 1991, 2001, and 2011 (URA, 2020a).

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 Urban Development in Southeast Asia 19

The evolution of priorities in concept plans reflects Singapore’s gradually increas-

ing involvement in the global economy. In 1971, the focus was fulfilment of basic
infrastructure, with housing and transportation as the highest priorities, together
with development of new industries as the economy restructured from largely
agrarian to industrial. The plan located new housing estates further from the city
center, connected by mass transportation, with a nature reserve in the middle. The
south of the city, in proximity to the colonial trading port, became the central
business district for global finance and the headquarters of corporations, repre-
senting Singapore’s intention to be the hub of global trade in an industrializing
Southeast Asia.
The second concept plan in 1991 placed more emphasis on business parks,
academic institutions, scientific research, and high-tech industries, aligning
with the expanding knowledge economy of the region (Forbes, 2019).
Southeast Asia was shifting from flows of goods from manufacturing industries
to flows of human capital. Developing a formal education and research agenda
became part of an urban strategy, as cities participate in the globalizing know-
ledge economy. Projects to expand formal education institutions to attract
international students, however, mostly came after the turn of the millennium.
The Singapore Concept Plan 2001 boasted of cultivating “a thriving world-
class city in the 21st century, with rich heritage, character, diversity and
identity” (URA, 2020c). A distinctive feature of the Concept Plan 2001 was
the “Identity Plan,” represented by fifteen nodes, each with a special character
that becomes a theme of their built environment, and a “Parks and Waterbodies
Plan” to present an array of recreational areas. These foci sustained attention on
attracting human capital, particularly urban managers, whom planners touted as
the “creative class” (Florida, 2005). However, an urban strategy of catering to
the “creative class” has received criticism around the world for its tendency to
induce gentrification and thus to increase the costs of urban services and
housing. Such concerns also emerged in Singapore in the first decade of the
new millennium. The rapid increase in property prices was also driven by
a change in public housing provision, from a supply-driven to a demand-
driven mode, and the pegging of public housing prices to private housing prices.
Concern over housing prices led to one of the focus areas under Concept Plan
2011, in which “good affordable homes with a full range of amenities” was
a strategy “to sustain a high-quality living environment” (URA, 2020d).
The shifting priorities in every concept plan are indicative of the rapid
evolution of the city. Recognizing the pace of change, a master plan guides
urban development for a shorter stretch of ten to fifteen years and, based on
a requirement in the Planning Act 1959, is reviewed every five years (URA,
2020b). The Singapore Improvement Trust (SIT) formulated the first master

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 20 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

plan in the mid-1950s, prior to introduction of the strategic long-term concept

plan system. The master plan, now under the Urban Redevelopment Authority
(URA), includes more detailed land use plans for every planning area in
Singapore (Singapore Government, 2019; Lee, 2015). The current master plan
designates five planning areas in Singapore – West, North, Central, North-East,
and East – with zoning and plot ratios1 for each. Before the Minister of National
Development approves it, the master plan must be gazetted for “a period of not
less than two weeks within which the public may make objections and repre-
sentations concerning it” (Lee, 2015: 7).
City governments elsewhere in Southeast Asia have often hailed Singapore’s
urban planning as a model to follow. Priorities and focus areas might shift, and
details have been amended after regular reviews, but urban development has
seemed to consistently follow the concept plans and master plans. However,
even a city as formally planned as Singapore has seen cases in which changes
preceded the master plan review. A case in point was the development of a new
road that removed part of an old cemetery, Bukit Brown. The road plan was
announced by the government in 2011, although it was not in the master plan yet
at the time of its announcement. The road’s delineation only appeared in the
Draft Master Plan 2013 (Lee, 2015). The subject of natural and heritage
conservation became a matter for debate when Master Plan 2013 was revealed
for public feedback, drawing questions from the Singapore Heritage Society
and the Nature Society. This case shows that, although urban development in
Singapore was relatively consistent with what has been planned, there was still
a possibility of initiating a development project outside the plan, preceding the
next master plan – and also the possibility of public resistance to the state’s
schemes.

3.1.2 Jakarta: Master Plan

Jakarta is a case in which the gaps between formal urban plans and reality are
significant. The city government has constantly updated master plans, but
implementation has been inconsistent. Thus far, updates have been more
about reflecting changes that have occurred than directing future developments.
Observers have pointed to the influence of private investors and developers in
driving urban development as one reason for inconsistencies in plan implemen-
tation. Their influence is often strong enough to push through projects that do
not meet the directions of the master plan (Salim et al., 2018).

1
A plot ratio is the maximum gross floor area of a building development compared to the land on
which it sits.

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 Urban Development in Southeast Asia 21

Like Singapore’s first concept plan in 1971, Jakarta’s first master plan in
1965 – named Rencana Induk Jakarta – was a comprehensive urban plan with
emphases on public transportation, green zones, environmental issues, and the
regional impact of Jakarta’s development as the capital city. Train and under-
ground subway systems were main parts of the public transportation plan to
support Jakarta’s population, projected to reach 6.5 million by 1985. Eventually,
Jakarta’s population in 1985 reached approximately 7 million, not far from the
projection, but the subway system did not get built and was only launched in
2019 when the population had already passed 10 million. Instead of achieving
the planned greenbelt around the city and the flood mitigation strategies the plan
proposed, green areas in Jakarta were converted into large development projects
over time (Rukmana, 2015), reflecting the strong political and economic roles of
large developers in influencing and changing the formal master plan.
The updated Rencana Umum Tata Ruang Jakarta (Spatial Plan) 1985–2005
no longer featured trains as a public transportation solution but had dedicated
bus lanes with double-decker buses. The dedicated bus lanes were only built in
2003 and did not include double-decker buses. By then, significant develop-
ments already did not adhere to the spatial plan. Some of these inconsistencies
were imposed by the national government during Suharto’s presidency (1966–
98), which centralized many resources and development initiatives in Jakarta.
Decrees from the national government often overruled the spatial plan. For
example, the northwest coast of Jakarta, which the spatial plan allocated as part
of a coastal forest to prevent land subsidence, became prime real estate for
a consortium of private developers that obtained the permit by national govern-
ment decree. Another presidential decree in 1995 allowed large private devel-
opers to reclaim 10,000 hectares of land in Jakarta Bay, converting the northern
green belt into residential and commercial zones. Eventually the conversion of
green areas in Jakarta Bay became a formal feature in the next spatial plan,
Rencana Tata Ruang Wilayah Jakarta 2000–10. This plan featured reclamation
of artificial islands off the coast of Jakarta Bay, as well as a new flood mitigation
strategy that relied on a large sea wall.
From 1985 to 2005, there were at least thirty violations of Jakarta’s master
plan by large developments (Rukmana, 2015). Such violations were typically
conversions of areas that were originally designated to be water catchments,
protected forests, urban forests, and general green areas, adding up to 9,701
acres of land. All these violations were eventually included in the subsequent
master plan, Rencana Tata Ruang Wilayah 2010, as existing land use.
More recently, private developers have been able to negotiate official plot
ratios by paying “compensation funds” for exceeding the floor-to-area ratio in
the master plan. Jakarta’s government has used these funds to build public

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 22 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

infrastructure, such as roads and public housing, without going through the
official city budget. Some of the new public infrastructure built with these
“compensation funds” has not been in the existing master plan. A well-known
case was the Simpang Susun Semanggi, a circular flyover at a cloverleaf
junction in the central business district. Construction of the flyover started in
2016, with funds from Mitra Panca Persada, a subsidiary of Mori Building
Company from Japan. The flyover was financed by compensation funds the
company paid for breaching the plot ratio on a new building project. The flyover
itself was not in the master plan, but it became a popular development project, as
the Jakarta government publicly promoted it as an effort to alleviate the city’s
worsening traffic jams. The same mechanism came into play when Muara
Wisesa Samudra, a subsidiary company of a larger developer, Agung
Podomoro Land, paid for the Muara Angke housing flats development with
compensation funds to pave the way for developing an offshore reclamation
islet (Siswanto & Raharjo, 2016).
Instead of using their authority to uphold the city’s master plan, the city
government and the national government have played roles in violating it. The
government has authorized violations of the master plan through both formal
and informal negotiations, and it has framed mechanisms like “compensation
funds” publicly as innovative steps rather than violations. Inconsistencies in the
master plan’s implementation and negotiations to change land use and density
allocations have revealed government institutions’ weakness in upholding
regulations and the influence of “elite informal networks” involving “real estate,
national political parties and the military” in gearing urban development toward
profit-making speculation (Herlambang et al., 2019: 645). Such practices have
been reminiscent of Ananya Roy’s (2009: 84) conceptualization of the state as
“an informalized entity,” with reference to planning in India, although the issue
in Jakarta was less the inability to plan than the process of continuous and
contradictory adjustments. Many changes to facilitate profit-making interests in
urban development have been eventually legalized through official alterations
of the master plan or through executive interventions.
Rather than indicating a lack of planning, inconsistencies in master plan
implementation in Jakarta have represented a disconnect between assumptions
of what planning is supposed to do and the realities of urban politics, both
politics among elites and everyday politics on the ground. Although big devel-
opers are dominant actors, there have been occasions when civil society groups
manage to push through their demands. Such dynamics have been most observ-
able in terms of the role of human agency in neighborhoods to negotiate, to
resist, or to take part in the urban transformation of Southeast Asia. We will
return to that agency in Section 4, on urban social movements, and in Section 6,

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 Urban Development in Southeast Asia 23

on Southeast Asia’s urban futures. The misalignments and mismatches between

formal urban development plans and their implementation, such as those we see
in Jakarta, have demonstrated the necessity for studies of urban development to
connect formal processes with realities on the ground, beyond master plan
documents that might or might not be consistent with actual practice.

3.2 Planning versus Informality?

The most obvious example to underscore the importance of understanding cities
differently concerns the ways in which scholars of urban development have
discussed “informality.” While it has often been understood as the opposite of
formal social systems, informality in the context of Southeast Asia’s urban
development has been inseparable from the formal. In urban development,
informality regularly refers to economic activities and settlements. Economic
activities that are categorized as “informal” engage 60 percent of the workforce
in the Asia-Pacific region (ILO, 2019). On the one hand, this formal/informal
differentiation has reinforced the need for technocratic planning, with a sense of
the formal’s superiority. On the other hand, challenging such a dichotomy raises
the risk of falling into exoticization and romanticization of the social fabric of
the “informal” in attempts to advocate for appreciation, if the discussion lacks
deep understanding of the complexities involved. In reality, all economic actors
function in relation to each other and blur such boundaries. Informal economies
may obtain legal status through advocacy and lobbying of local governments
(Matejowsky & Milgram, 2019), for instance, while governments and officials
might establish relationships with nonstate groups to maintain stability and
order at the grassroots level. For example, Ian Wilson’s work (2011) on protec-
tion regimes in post-1998 Jakarta found groups that range from local urban
thugs to religious leaders that function as “middle regimes,” working in coord-
ination with government actors to control small businesses, including informal
businesses on the streets and in settlements. Such an ecosystem of political and
economic actors might, in extreme cases, allow for extrajudicial actions. But
many do not go to such extreme and have become part of everyday life, such as
in the spatial organization of street vendors in many cities.
In urban planning and popular discourses, “unplanned,” “informal” areas in
the city often refer to self-built settlements, neither planned by city officials nor
sanctioned by regulations. The term “informal,” therefore, indicates an inferior
quality of structures and infrastructures. Such assumptions ignore the fact that
inferior parts of the built environment, if any, result from growing social
inequality and power imbalances in urban development. Governments have
not formally recognized many settlements that have existed since the colonial

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 24 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

period because of their lack of access to legal means to seek recognition, and
some residents might not consider “formalization” important because they have
inherited the land across generations (Kusno, 2019). In cities in Indonesia, for
example, the lack of affordable housing spurred densification of these settle-
ments as economic centralization took place. Such urban development com-
bined with the colonial-era legacy of Indigenous compounds’ operating
relatively autonomously in the city in deciding who could settle in them
(Perkasa, Padawangi & Farida, 2021).
Closer examination reveals the formal and informal to be more interdepend-
ent than dichotomous. Like peasants in rural areas who might not have land
titles, urban dwellers might also lack land titles, because land titling processes in
many cities in Southeast Asia are incomplete. However, both long-term resi-
dents and new urban dwellers in areas without land titles might provide afford-
able housing and services in the absence of sufficient government programs.
Lack of government regulations or programs, or failure to implement state
programs, gives the impression that these grassroots initiatives are unplanned.
Nevertheless, in-depth studies in these areas have shown the existence of some
kind of order, with “intricate arrangements and mobilities across different
sectors of organization, different logics of authority and work . . . [and]
a plurality of engagement between residents and different urban institutions”
(Simone, 2019: 72), even though these programs are not government-
controlled. Indeed, residents take pains “to support the necessary myths of
given authorities – to sustain the impression of an overarching order”
(Simone, 2019: 72).
Because the term “informal” is value-laden, as lacking formal regulations and
order, some urban studies scholars of Southeast Asia have used alternative
terms. For example, AbdouMaliq Simone (2014) uses “relational,” as in
a “relational economy” that relies on actions and reactions, social reciprocity,
and the flexibility to plan for different scenarios and possible outcomes. Abidin
Kusno (2019) uses the terms “semi-urbanism” and, later on, “middling urban-
ism” to convey the mix of “official” and “nonofficial” in the city. Taking the
example of the kampung settlement in Jakarta to illustrate semi-urbanism,
Kusno (2019: 77–78) writes: “The land on which the building[s] stand . . .
may lack legal status, but this does not mean that the settlement is illegal . . .
The characteristic of the kampung is such that its domain can be considered as
different from the formally planned parts of Jakarta yet is also tied to ‘all
systems of domination,’ both confirming and deconstructing power.”
The relative autonomy of small enclaves in the city to craft, change, and build
their places, socially and physically, illustrates the possibilities of grassroots
initiatives. Crafted from the bottom up, spaces from the grassroots are results of

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 Urban Development in Southeast Asia 25

negotiations and efforts by various actors who consistently prepare for multiple
possible scenarios, embodying a different process than found in top-down
technocratic approaches (Simone, 2014). These bottom-up initiatives might
result in fragmented and pragmatic responses to policies and projects, but at
some moments of political opportunity they might create small civic spaces –
the spaces in which discussions, debates, and negotiations take place – for
concerted transformative change.

3.3 Planning and “Leveling”

Cities in Southeast Asia are agglomerations of these small enclaves of places
that may be relatively autonomous and heterogeneous in their development,
but the money economy, standardization of processes, public facilities, and
cultural institutions may exert some “leveling” influence, albeit “adjusted to
mass requirements” (Wirth, 1938: 18). This influence is more applicable in
the context of authoritative city governments that are capable of standardiz-
ing public services and imposing commonly acceptable cultural practices. An
example is Singapore, where the government has standardized educational
institutions, public services, and planning processes and has identified certain
topics such as race and religion as sensitive issues that require special care in
public discussions, including for the design and use of urban space.
However, this is not the case in most cities in the region. Just as master
plans end in patchy implementation in other cities, the “leveling” influence
of overarching institutions and norms on the city has been continuously
negotiated.
With the increasing scale of cities’ heterogeneity, population, and spatial
expansion has come fragmentation among different groups about what the city
should be. Policymakers’ persistent aspirations to exercise a “leveling” influ-
ence over a range of different grassroots-level aspirations, however, have
resulted in their claiming that the city offers what the mass of the population
requires. These claims might be despite a significant gap between benefits for
one group and losses for others. For example, across cities in Southeast Asia,
old residences have been cleared for big developments and ordinary settlements
demolished to make way for infrastructure projects in the name of making the
city better. Many of these changes have forcefully affected the urban poor
(Padawangi, 2019). Also, new modes of motorized transportation affect how
planners design urban spaces and mobility, as they phase out old modes of
transportation in the name of modernization, along with those workers
(Figure 4). Authorities often present those development projects as facilitating
public goods such as flood protection, recreational spaces, and transportation

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 26 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

Figure 4 Becak – a traditional form of three-wheel-cycle transportation that was

widely used in the early years of Jakarta’s post-independence urban
development – has become marginalized as the contemporary city prioritizes
motorized transport in its planning. City government had previously outlawed
becak as it was considered a hindrance to traffic, although since 2018 it has been
legal again as a result of advocacy and lobbying by urban poor activists and the
becak peddler union in Jakarta.
Source: Author, 2019.

efficiency, but in a heterogeneous, fragmented, and unequal society the projects

entail marginalization.
Urban development has become a process of marginalization of those who
are less politically and economically powerful. Large-scale development pro-
jects and “urban boosterism” – that is, projects aimed at “projecting a positive
image of a city . . . to attract investors, professionals and white-collar workers”
(Kong, 2007: 386) – compete with settlement enclaves for space and resources
to influence the culture of the city and the identity of city dwellers. Many of
these projects have been imposed by higher levels of government, such as
provincial or national governments, or by a dominant private-sector player in
the economy. Amidst this unbalanced spatial competition, obtaining in-depth
knowledge of everyday lived realities through a grounded perspective has
become increasingly important for planners and scholars. There is a pressing
need to refocus urban development to address ongoing injustices and to bring

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 Urban Development in Southeast Asia 27

human agency and political life – space for discussion and debate to inform
decision-making, rather than top-down technocratic approaches – into the
making of cities.

4 Studying Urban Development in Southeast Asia

The tandem between technocratic planning and global capitalism may seem to
dominate the political spaces of urban development in the region, but the
domination has been, and continues to be, incomplete. Massive modernization
projects – encompassing local, national, and transnational financial powers that
compete as well as collude in urban development – have effected large-scale
transformations of urban landscapes, but they have met with grassroots initia-
tives that range from pragmatic compliance to resistance, with strategies ran-
ging from mundane everyday practices to organized social movements. In
Indonesia and the Philippines, for example, collective actions within civil
society against forced evictions and for the rights of the urban poor are visible
and relatively well-organized. In Thailand, advocacy for housing rights has led
to a nationwide participatory housing program for the poor (Archer, 2019).
Foiled by such pushback, most states of Southeast Asia have not been fully
effective in implementing technocratic visions of urban development.
The spectrum of grassroots initiatives around urban development in
Southeast Asia can only be understood through a careful examination of local
social practices. Under pressures of neoliberal developmentalism and
a spectrum of political authoritarianism that stifles political spaces, small and
localized city enclaves still operate their social mechanisms. These local spaces
are hard to see on the surface, yet they are prevalent in everyday urban life.
These local spaces are easily dismissed, or even misunderstood, since their
mechanisms are difficult to understand for those who are not part of them.
Nevertheless, exploring them is important for gaining a critical perspective on
urban development. Studies from cities in Southeast Asia have uncovered some
of these local practices and have suggested a different understanding of urban
development in parallel with the presumptive all-encompassing neoliberal
capitalism.
The attention to these small enclaves of grassroots’ efforts represents
a conscious effort to develop a critical understanding of urban development as
political. Groundedness does not mean that all studies of urban development
must be on a micro scale; rather, it is a necessary perspective to allow one to
scale up spatially from the smallest neighborhoods to cities and then to metro-
politan, national, and global levels without losing sight of actual lived experi-
ences. Without deep knowledge of and connections with communities, research

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 28 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

projects might deploy methods that perpetuate power imbalances in urban

development. A straightforward example is when a research project describes
a lack of infrastructure in one neighborhood in a central area of the city. Inability
to go deeper to understand historical, political, and social constraints and the
extent to which the cultural life of the communities in question relates to the
larger urban context would risk the study’s justifying removal of these commu-
nities to make way for top-down or scaled-up projects with perceivably “better”
infrastructure (Padawangi, 2019). In this case, a research project becomes a tool
that paints destruction as utilitarian – for the good of the majority – but this is
problematic if the researcher’s limited understanding of the communities
involved obscures unequal power structures. Such patterns fit the frames of
neoliberal governance and global capitalism that continue to destroy social
fabric at the local level.

4.1 Limitations of Official Datasets

What tools do we have at hand to study urban development without perpetu-
ating unequal power structures – but still with capacity to affect policy-
making? The familiar ways in which authorities have collected and framed
urban-development-related data that feed into policymaking complicate such
efforts. For example, the United Nations issues its World Urbanization
Prospects annually, but these aggregate data are problematic because the
definition and measurement of the “urban” may vary from one country to
another. Hence, the conclusions they suggest may be misleading (Jones,
2019).
Studying urban development for comparative perspective in Southeast Asia
also raises the issue of city size categorization. Globally, the term “megacity”
refers to a city with a population of more than 10 million. Currently in Southeast
Asia there are only a few megacities. Metro Manila is an agglomeration of
seventeen cities that accounts for 12.7 percent of the Philippines’ population,
while Jakarta, which accounts for 7.1 percent of Indonesia’s population, com-
prises part of the mega-urban region Jabodetabek (an acronym for Jakarta,
Bogor, Depok, Tangerang, and Bekasi) that accounts for 11 percent of the
total population of the country. In Southeast Asia, except for Singapore as a city-
state, each country has one or two cities with significant shares of the popula-
tion. Phnom Penh is home to 51.4 percent of the population of Cambodia;
Bangkok comprises 14.7 percent of the population of Thailand; Hanoi and Ho
Chi Minh City together account for almost 13 percent of the population of
Vietnam; Vientiane contains about 12 percent of the population of Laos; and
Yangon contains almost 10 percent of the population of Myanmar (UN, 2018).

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 Urban Development in Southeast Asia 29

Therefore, the 10 million population cut-off is not very useful in understanding

urban development in the region (Jones, 2019).
Rather than taking a particular number of residents as a threshold to categor-
ize a megacity, one may look at the impact of a city’s social and economic
dominance for the country’s population. Such dominance is often referred to as
characterizing a “primate city” (Rimmer & Dick, 2009). In any case, analysis
based on population numbers must take into account what insight those num-
bers give into the social, cultural, economic, and political life of the city (see
Table 1).
Therefore, in conducting comparative studies, researchers need to consider at
least three aspects: 1) that the comparison is specific to a certain period of time,
since issues related to urban development in the region may change over time; 2)
that the purpose of comparison is clear, with the case studies chosen for
a specific purpose, and that the researchers remain mindful of possibilities and
problems of generalizing from their findings; and 3) that the comparison be
attuned to inequalities in experience of urbanization among different stake-
holders (Koh, 2019). Comparable case studies may not align neatly with official
population-based categories, nor may they compare all aspects of urbanization.
For example, the World Bank’s agglomeration index, which measures density of
urban economic activity and settlement, does not capture the unequal economic
opportunities among different urban populations, though the index is still useful
to identify the development of concentrated urban corridors (Jones, 2019).
The issues with officially reported data do not mean these data are not
usable. There are at least two methods to address accuracy issues among
quantitative datasets across different cities and countries in the region. First,
it is important to be grounded – to have a good grasp of lived/grassroots
realities in urban areas – before assessing datasets from official sources.
Corroborating trends obtained from large datasets with field observations is
the best way to learn about the limitations of datasets, in order to be able to
interpret findings in light of these limitations. For example, residency data
from a civil registry might not capture unregistered migrants who find
housing through informal channels. Income and employment data might
not capture those who work in the informal economy, so treating the data as
if they represent the population might be misleading. In the case of
Myanmar, for instance, quantitative data have been limited, and long-term
trends were almost impossible to analyze through census data because most
surveys before 2014 were partial (Roberts, 2019). To gain knowledge of
realities on the ground, an in-depth qualitative approach is the most useful.
Second, new technologies can be helpful to make sense of the continuously
transforming boundaries of cities, including through peri-urbanization and

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Table 1 List of megacities and primate cities of Southeast Asia

City
City population as
population as percentage of
percentage of urban
country/area population in
Country/ Statistical City population Average annual rate population the country/
area City concept (thousands) of change (%) (2018) area (2018)
2000 2018 2030 2000–18 2018–30
Cambodia Phnom Penh* Urban 1,149 1,952 2,805 2.9 3.0 12.0 51.4
agglomeration
Indonesia Jakarta** Metropolitan area 8,390 10,517 12,687 1.3 1.6 3.9 7.1
Surabaya City proper 2,611 2,903 3,413 0.6 1.4 1.1 2.0
Lao PDR Vientiane* City proper 828^ 1.6 12.0^^ 31.0^^
Malaysia Kuala Metropolitan area 4,176 7,564 9,805 3.3 2.2 23.6 31.0
Lumpur*
Myanmar Mandalay Urban 847 1,374 1,757 2.7 2.1 2.6 8.3
agglomeration
Yangon* Urban 3,573 5,157 6,389 2.0 1.8 9.6 31.3
agglomeration
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Philippines Davao City proper 1,152 1,745 2,256 2.3 2.1 1.6 3.5
Metro Metropolitan area 9,958 13,482 16,841 1.7 1.9 12.7 27.0
Manila**
Singapore Singapore Urban 3,914 5,792 6,342 2.2 0.8 100 100
agglomeration
Thailand Chiang Mai Urban 407 1,135 1,318 5.7 1.2 1.6 3.3
agglomeration
Krung Thep Urban 6,395 10,156 12,101 2.6 1.5 14.7 29.4
(Bangkok)** agglomeration
Vietnam Ha Noi Urban 1,660 4,283 6,362 5.3 3.3 4.4 12.4
agglomeration
Ho Chi Minh Urban 4,389 8,145 11,054 3.4 2.5 8.4 23.5
City** agglomeration

** Megacity and primate city

* Primate city
^ http://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/products/dyb/dyb2.htm
^^ http://data.un.org/CountryProfile.aspx
Note: Not all countries in Southeast Asia are represented. Timor-Leste and Brunei Darussalam are notably missing from this table.
Source: UN, 2018.
 32 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

urban agglomeration. Gavin Jones (2019) pointed to the “surrounding areas” of

cities as one factor that complicates the study of Southeast Asia’s urban
development, especially around the megacities. The “messy” surroundings of
a city exemplify populations and economies that are linked to the urban, but
population categories in aggregated datasets usually strictly follow the city’s
administrative boundaries. This “messiness” reflects gray areas where city
authorities’ functional control diminishes but urban political and economic
processes continue. Such gray areas manifest governments’ incomplete control,
as discussed previously in Section 3, and are important areas to study, but data
categorizations and existing definitions are insufficient to fully understand the
dynamics of urban development in Southeast Asia (Jones, 2019; Cairns, 2019).
The situation gets more complicated when urban agglomerations form mega-
urban regions (MURs), spurring more urban development projects with rising
pressure to convert agricultural land and labor into nonagricultural to increase
“economic productivity” (Jones & Douglass, 2008).
Remote sensing data from satellite and airborne imaging technologies can
provide bases for comparison across the region (Jones, 2019). Stephen Cairns
(2019) has argued that remotely sensed data can also assist in alleviating “city-
centricity” in studying urbanization, because urban development affects not
only cities but also rural areas and rural–urban hybrid landscapes. He explains:
“In Southeast Asia, where empirical data is so often patchy, poorly managed or
even absent, remotely sensed data is an indispensable resource for understand-
ing demographics, city footprints and urban extents” (Cairns, 2019: 123). These
remotely sensed data still need cleaning up, though, because of conditions that
may affect data accuracy, such as light pollution, clouds, and other kinds of
“noise” (Vollmer et al., 2015). One way to complement and clean remotely
sensed data is by checking the details for selected sites through field-based
ethnography. Another approach that is increasingly popular to supplement large
datasets is data crowdsourcing through open-source mapping platforms
(Padawangi et al., 2016).

4.2 Deciphering “Messiness” from Below

An important vantage point in studying cities from Southeast Asia, therefore, is
one that looks beyond official categories to decipher urban realities. Rather than
judging these cities as “messy” or “poorly planned,” the researcher can perceive
the “unknown” of urban processes that require further attention. The two
approaches to address accuracy issues just discussed – cross-checking official
data with qualitative field research or data from new technologies – reflect
different scales of understanding: while one scales upward to remote sensing,

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 Urban Development in Southeast Asia 33

the other scales down to micro-level corroboration. Both require different

skillsets, but they complement each other. However, the micro-level grounded
perspective may be at odds with the task of identifying general trends that
policymaking requires. Therefore, groundedness should be consistent with
efforts to obtain a larger picture rather than offering only a fragmented under-
standing of Southeast Asia’s urban life. Attention to everyday lived realities
should not neglect understanding of the larger context but should connect across
scales.
An important feature of groundedness, and how this micro-level approach
allows a big-picture perspective, is the consciousness it facilitates of power
inequalities in urban development, both in outcomes and in processes. Those
processes include the research that goes into policymaking, including research
that intends to address injustices. Hence, a micro-scale perspective on everyday
lived realities may emphasize bringing human agency, especially that of the
marginalized groups, into urban development politics. Those less powerful
groups are more likely to be in the “messy” category of urban spaces and are
more likely to experience top-down interventions to make up for a perceived
“lack of planning.” Closer examination of common categories of marginalized
groups in the city, which intersect with sociological categories of economic
class, gender, and race, reveals how groundedness can lend nuance to otherwise
limited top-down perspectives.

4.2.1 The Urban Poor

The urban poor in general are marginalized in the context of capitalist urban
development. In Southeast Asia, like in other parts of the world, urban poverty
levels – the percentage of the population in poverty – are generally lower than
rural poverty levels. However, the poverty level is usually calculated based on
a certain threshold for income and basic needs fulfilment. While useful in
describing the magnitude of poverty to a certain extent, poverty levels become
problematic when compared across cities and countries because of differences
in how they are calculated (see Table 2). They may not reflect other possibilities
and opportunities for grassroots advocacy as well as social capital among
communities to help their members escape poverty. In other words, the poverty
level does not indicate aspects of empowerment of the urban poor that may
allow more long-term efforts for sustainable poverty alleviation.
Studying the urban poor from below requires looking beyond distribution of
wealth and resources to develop a grounded understanding of their roles – both
existing and potential – in urban politics. The interaction among the urban poor,
activists, policymakers, and political candidates opens possibilities for the

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 34 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

Table 2 Urban Poverty in Southeast Asia

Country Year Level of urban poverty (%)

Brunei Darussalam n.a. n.a.
Cambodia 2012 6.4
Indonesia 2014 8.3
Lao People’s Democratic Republic 2012 10.0
Malaysia 2014 0.3**
Myanmar 2017 11.3*
Philippines 2012 13.0
Singapore 2017 7***
Thailand 2013 7.7
Timor-Leste 2007 45.2
Vietnam 2014 3.8

* World Bank, 2017

** EPU, 2012
*** Based on Singapore Statistics data on households with income below $1,000 per
month, living in one-room subsidized rental flats. Singapore does not have an
official poverty line. The data do not include low-income migrant workers on
work passes, such as construction workers in dormitories and domestic workers,
who comprise approximately 20 percent of the population.
Source: UN-Habitat World Cities Report 2016.

urban poor to influence urban development. This interaction varies across the
region, with some cities being more open to urban poor advocacy and influence
than others. It is important to realize that the urban poor are not just the
recipients of subsidies, burdens to the budget, or vote banks that they are
often stereotyped as being. The urban poor are a political force in urban
development who require further study because their roles are more nuanced
than development policies have portrayed.
The political role of the urban poor starts from these communities’ compar-
able situations in urban development across various cities. First, individuals in
this income group usually struggle to secure spaces in the city. Not all of them
are migrants, but lack of affordable housing options limits choices for migrants
who settle in the city, as discussed in Section 3.2 on planning and informality.
Residents of older urban neighborhoods may also face displacement because of
gentrification, a process by which wealthier newcomers, with different lifestyle
requirements, replace another group within the population. In addition, many of
the urban poor population face difficulties in securing tenure for their land
because they lack access to legal aid, combined with incomplete and

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 Urban Development in Southeast Asia 35

problematic land registration systems throughout most of Southeast Asia. In

some cases, discriminatory practices in land registration among certain ethnic
groups and corrupt practices in providing land registration services have also
limited access to secure land tenure for the poor. This insecurity results in
precarious situations for the urban poor, as rapid spatial transformations con-
tinue to cater to the role of cities as political and economic centers.
Second, many of the urban poor face challenges in acquiring urban services.
Table 3 provides a snapshot of how much of the urban population lack access to
services in Southeast Asia. These numbers are unlikely to be precise, given the
difficulty of capturing exact quantitative information for those in informal
settings. Nevertheless, they indicate that the issue of access to urban services
and infrastructure extends to a considerable share of the population. Residents
in areas lacking in infrastructure must find other ways to meet basic needs.
When individuals cannot depend on the government, they may rely on other
powerful groups that provide such services at higher cost. For example, city
water providers often deny the poor water services. In such situations, the poor
need to get their water from sellers who charge them much more than the water
utility company charges the middle- and upper-class customers it serves
(Padawangi & Vallée, 2016). Informal racketeering regimes may also exist

Table 3 Proportion of urban population with insufficient improved water,

sanitation, durable housing, and living area in countries of Southeast Asia, 2014

Proportion of urban population with

insufficient improved water, sanitation,
Country durable housing, and living area (%)
Brunei Darussalam n.a.
Cambodia 55.1%
Indonesia 21.8%
Lao People’s Democratic 31.4%
Republic
Malaysia n.a.
Myanmar 41.0%
Philippines 38.3%
Singapore n.a.
Thailand 25%
Timor-Leste n.a.
Vietnam 27.2%

Source: UN-Habitat, 2015.

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 36 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

under the protection of government actors, adding more expenses and layers of
control (Wilson, 2011).
Attention toward the urban poor as a political force is important to give more
nuance to analyses of urban politics. The case of Jakarta’s gubernatorial election
in 2017, in which a challenger who developed friendly relations with conserva-
tive religious groups defeated an incumbent candidate from a minority ethnic
group and religion, illustrates this point. While many observers at the time
claimed the process and result were largely about religion and discrimination,
a closer analysis that considers the political role of the urban poor demonstrates
the significance also of urban development policies for votes – particularly
forced evictions of the poor and development concessions the incumbent
granted mostly to Chinese-Indonesian elite developers (Savirani & Aspinall,
2017; Gani, 2018). This case shows how class consciousness intersects with
religious and ethnic identity in urban politics, as well as how urban development
projects embody that intersection.
Local and regional advocacy groups and networks of urban poor have
emerged across Southeast Asia. To different degrees, the urban poor in various
countries in the region have organized and attempted to address common issues
they face. Representatives from Indonesia, Cambodia, Myanmar, the
Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam joined, too, in formalizing a regionwide
network with the Declaration of Commitment and Action of the Urban Poor
Coalition Asia. Its commitments include developing a savings and financial
system to support community-based housing efforts, community-based map-
ping, securing land for housing, and capacity building, as well as citywide
networked collaborations, including with local authorities and agencies
(UPCA, 2012). The establishment of the UPCA is linked with the work of the
Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR), particularly its program on the
Asian Coalition for Community Action (ACCA), to which we return in this
Element’s final section on urban futures.

4.2.2 Gendered Spaces

The politics of urban development require scrutiny into women’s representation
in policymaking and the resulting built environment, as gender inequality is also
part of power inequality. Urban inequality is in not just economic but also social
and cultural power, including in “gendered and racialized spaces” (Sarkar & De,
2002: 6). As a region of “uneven capitalist development combined with enor-
mous local diversity,” Southeast Asia and its urbanizing landscape show “pro-
cesses of state and nation formation, global economic restructuring, and
overseas labor migration” that have “created fluid geographies of gender,

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 Urban Development in Southeast Asia 37

race, and class that cut across national boundaries” (Ong & Peletz, 1995: 8).
Besides the creation of gendered industries, with more women working in the
growing garment and textile industries under the “new international division of
labor” that developed with economic globalization starting around the 1970s,
the social and economic transformations urbanization causes bring different
experiences of urban spaces along gender lines. Urban spaces are sites of
“political agency and contested power,” places in which the material and
symbolic are important in their gendering and “sexing” (Tonkiss, 2005).
The growing number of women being absorbed into the industrialized work-
force and gaining access to public services such as education and healthcare
represent an important impact of urban development for women. However,
gender inequalities in Southeast Asia’s urbanization recommend in-depth quali-
tative corroboration of these numbers. Representations of gendered bodies are
separable neither from local cultural and nationalist discourses nor from mater-
ial realities of urban development. “Postcolonial forces of dislocation, ethnic
heterogeneity, nation-building, and international business have blurred, con-
fused, and made problematic cultural understandings of what it means to be
male or female in local societies” (Ong & Peletz, 1995: 4). On the one hand, the
association of women with nurturing and domestic roles – “refined and modest,
dependent and subordinate wife or daughter” (Hatley, 2002: 132) – in combin-
ation with urbanizing landscapes had propelled women to find particular eco-
nomic opportunities. For example, women in rural Thailand, especially in the
1990s, ventured into becoming food sellers as “relatively autonomous business-
people,” although still without the status of white-collar women in the capitalist
economy (Yasmeen, 2002). On the other hand, the stereotype of “docile and
obedient” women, derived from this idealized construction, also led rural
women to be perceived as suitable workers in manufacturing industries under
male superiors (Warouw, 2019). Yet, as the industrialization of Southeast Asia
brought/incurred feminization of the labor force, labor activism increased/
thrived in urban industrial centers, even under authoritarian regimes such as
that in Indonesia under Suharto (1965–98). Women’s labor activism grew
through a combination of factors, including freedom from traditionally imposed
gender constraints, especially for migrant women (Silvey, 2003), and increased
connections with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) (Mills, 2005) and
transnational feminist networks (Ford, 2008).
The transformation of gendered spaces in urban development is more com-
plicated than just a story of women’s empowerment. The growth of women’s
activism in urban centers of Southeast Asia does not eradicate the assumption of
the female as delicate, prone to crime and harassment. Women’s appearance in
controlled environments, such as shopping malls, is generally considered more

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 38 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

acceptable and hence has led to the stereotypical capitalist-consumer-culture

association of urban women with shopping. Gendered stereotypes shape one’s
opportunities in the public sphere but, at the same time, construct specific
realms for social activism. For example, it was a protest by women in
Indonesia in 1998 that eventually snowballed into the series of demonstrations
that led to the resignation of President Suharto. Suara Ibu Peduli (The Voices of
Concerned Mothers, SIP) staged a protest in February 1998 against rising milk
prices amidst the Asian financial crisis. A popular conservative newspaper
scorned them as “mothers who did not breastfeed their children,” but they
continued to bring tools of housewives into public space during their protests,
expanding the nurturing image of women beyond the boundaries of the home as
“concerned mothers of the nation” (Budianta, 2003). This maternalist ideology
inspired SIP women and those who joined them after the first protest, much as
happened during the women’s suffrage movement in the United States, in the
context of which Margaret Dreier Robins from Brooklyn called all women “to
mother the world by entering the arena of the larger society through suffrage,
politics, and the professions” (Flanagan, 2002: 118).
The persistence of maternalist ideology in urbanizing Southeast Asia has thus
far opened women’s access to the public sphere but also limited their range.
Unlike the suffragettes of the US progressive era, SIP women in Indonesia did
not push for professional involvement in society but built their activism around
addressing everyday problems, including securing affordable milk, basic food,
and children’s scholarships, and helping women establish small businesses in
their communities (Pujiwati & Upik, 2007). The case of rural Thai women who
work as food sellers in Bangkok, for instance, demonstrates this same tension:
the stereotype of women as nurturing caregivers and good cooks boosts their
business but also limits the women by entrapping them in low-profit jobs. The
persistence of idealized gender images also leads to gendered aspirations
despite wider education and economic opportunities for women. Ariane
Utomo’s research on college students in Jakarta and Makassar (2005) found
that even many female college students saw domesticity as their main role, as
their society expects them to prioritize family upon motherhood.
Urban development also opens opportunities for wider expressions of mar-
ginalized gender identities and sexualities, but “heterosexist and classist sys-
tems” persist in Southeast Asian cities, as “gendered temporal and spatial
symbols” retain the power “to control lived space and material resources”
(Sarker & De, 2002: 2–3; see also Jackson, 2001). Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and
transgender (LGBT) communities are socially marginalized because their iden-
tities and lifestyles are considered taboo. In the Philippines and Thailand,
displays of “homoeroticism and transgenderism” are “publicly tolerated but

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 Urban Development in Southeast Asia 39

still derided” (Jackson, 2001: 5). Indeed, there are openly transgender or
homosexual public figures in the city-centered entertainment industry, such as
Dorce Gamalama, a famous Indonesian transgender actress, and Kumar, the
first openly gay Singapore entertainer. However, many are forced to live in the
shadows of society, and even in highly urbanized Singapore homosexual inter-
course between two men is illegal. In Indonesia, the presence of waria or banci
(Indonesian terms for transgender people) is widely known, but they are
subjected to marginalization and exoticization in everyday life. Trans brothels
in Singapore’s Bugis Street were famous among British naval servicemen in the
1960s, but upon the closure of the brothels the trans women faced discrimin-
ation when applying for service jobs. Other aspects of discrimination, including
“silence and invisibility” surrounding LGBT people in social life (Oetomo,
2001), affect how marginalized gender groups experience and are represented in
urban spaces and planning processes.

4.2.3 Migration

Migration is not a recent phenomenon in urban development. Historically, the

role of migrants has been not just economic but also social and cultural.
Louis Wirth (1938: 2) wrote of the city’s attraction/appeal: “The city is not
only in ever larger degrees the dwelling-place and the workshop of modern
man [and woman], but it is the initiating and controlling center of economic,
political and cultural life that has drawn the most remote parts of the world
into its orbit and woven diverse areas, peoples, and activities into a cosmos.”
This characterization applies to all large cities in contemporary Southeast
Asia: a good number of their population were not born there. In the largest
cities of countries in the region, the birth rate is rather low compared to that
elsewhere in the country, but the rate of in-migration may be higher (Table 4).
The lowest urban birth rate in Southeast Asia is currently in Singapore, at 1.2
live births per 1,000 population per year, but the population continues to
increase through in-migration. Currently, Singapore’s population is
5.8 million, out of which almost 2 million are foreign workers. About one-
tenth of the resident population are permanent residents, which usually
indicates first-generation migrants. Thailand, Brunei, and Malaysia have the
highest levels of international migrants in Southeast Asia, and most of these
migrants have gone to cities (Kathiravelu & Wong, 2019). Most migration
within national boundaries is from nonurban to urban areas, as these migra-
tions are often economically driven. The share of population in urban areas of
Southeast Asia stood at 41.8 percent in 2010 and is projected to reach
65 percent by 2050.

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 40 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

Table 4 Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of Selected Mega-Urban Regions of

Southeast Asia

TFR of the
City Year Metropolitan Area TFR of Country
Jakarta 1991 2.18 3.02
2000 1.78 2.51
2017 1.5 (2011) 2.34
Bangkok 1984–7 1.60 2.23
1991 1.41 2.06
2000 1.16 1.67
2016 0.8 1.54
Metro Manila 1993 2.76 4.11
2000 2.80 3.81
2013 2.3 2.98
Ho Chi Minh City 1999 1.40 2.09
2018 1.33 2.05
Yangon 2014 1.8 2.22
Vientiane 2011–12 2.0 2.98
Phnom Penh 2014 2 2.63
Brunei Darussalam 2018 1.8
Kuala Lumpur 2011 1.53 2.13
2015 1.40 2.06
Singapore 1988 1.96 1.96
2000 1.60 1.60
2012 1.29 1.29

Sources: Douglass & Jones, 2008; MDHS, 2015-16; PSA and ICF International, 2014;
Ministry of Health & Lao Statistics Bureau 2012; National Population and Family
Planning Board et al., 2018; Jakarta Open Data, 2018; World Bank, 2019; Department
of Statistics Singapore, 2020.

The significance of migration in urban development raises several issues,

which, as for other marginalized groups, urge a deeper examination of real-life
experiences beyond what statistics indicate. First, low-wage migrants are likely
to become subjects of “structured inequalities” (Kathiravelu & Wong, 2019:
148). Low-wage migrants in Singapore who come to work in jobs that are
considered “unskilled,” such as domestic work, construction, and cleaning, are
likely to have taken on high debts to finance their work placement through
employment agencies. In general, low-wage migrants invest varying amounts
of financial, social, and time resources to make it to the city before they start
work. They then commonly receive low – if not the lowest – levels of income in

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 Urban Development in Southeast Asia 41

the city, as low wages are one of the main reasons employers recruit from
outside the city. Low income combines with nonresident status, which means
they may not be entitled to various social benefits available to “permanent”
residents in the city, such as education, healthcare, and income subsidies. These
migrant-specific inequalities combine, too, with other social inequalities. For
instance, the intersection of migration status and gender contributes to a gender
wage gap, gender-based discrimination in hiring practices, and harassment in
the workplace (Kathiravelu & Wong, 2019). Furthermore, as part of a transient
population, migrants have fewer political rights in the city, such as to vote in
local elections or endorse political candidates, and lack representation in the
local parliament. The structure renders them dependent on sympathetic resi-
dents to advocate for their rights and interests.
Employment agencies extract labor from outside the city to serve as low-
wage workers in the urban economy, although in cases of internal migration
such recruitment may also be through existing social and personal networks
between city residents and their nonurban counterparts. Migrants may also work
in the “informal” economy through their social and personal networks in the city
or in their residential enclaves (Simone & Pieterese, 2017). In such situations,
migrants’ legal protection depends on their employers. An informal economy
profession as ordinary as street vending also comes with risks of legal repercus-
sions and extortion from more powerful groups, including the authorities. While
a top-down view can capture migrants’ wage inequality, their efforts for eco-
nomic survival in the city are impossible to capture without a view from below.
Yet examining these efforts, as well as the approaches researchers use to study
them, is important to understand the role of migration in urban development and
to inform policies that address inequalities.
Second, urban migration in Southeast Asia consists not only of migration of
low-wage workers but also of those in the “skilled workers” category. Both
“skilled” and “unskilled” migrants are manifestations of global flows in urban
development. Both face limitations in the city, such as restricted access to
benefits that city residents are entitled to as well as to representation in the
local government and parliament. “Skilled” migrants are usually better placed
in terms of their economic status, occupying positions in the workplace the
same as or even higher than those of citizens and other residents. In the global
city paradigm, city governments usually aim to “attract investors, professionals
and white-collar workers,” who are the “skilled” migrants that enjoy elevated
economic status (Kong, 2007: 386; Yeoh, 2005). Hence, the close link between
urban development and migration in Southeast Asia has complex consequences
for socioeconomic inequality in the city. Migrants may constitute both the low
and high ends of the economic spectrum, but those at both poles experience

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 42 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

limited “rights to the city,” having been denied the right to change the city after
their heart’s desire (Baas, 2019: 141; Harvey, 2003: 939). Understanding the
different experiences of migrants in different socioeconomic classes, how their
presence affects urban life in general, and how they interact with the existing
population requires perspectives from the ground.
Furthermore, migration as part of urban development is not just about
movement across territory but also about connections. Migrants embody experi-
ences of migrating and being in-between while also being part of social and
cultural life in two places. Through his work on migrants’ mobility between
Batam and Singapore, Johan Lindquist (2008) introduced the concept of an
“emotional economy” that connects the home and the space of migration.
Migration itself is a gendered phenomenon: in the rantau tradition in
Indonesia, for instance, it is a coming-of-age ritual for men to migrate out in
search of better opportunities, with the expectation of their becoming more
mature and established and therefore higher-status. From this perspective,
migration may or may not entail a permanent move to the city but is rather
a form of connection between two geographies. Therefore, another related
tradition is the regular return home, commonly identified as mudik in
Indonesia or balikbayan in the Philippines. The connection between the home
and the space of migration renders migration a circular phenomenon rather than
a linear progression toward the city.
A direct consequence of this circular aspect of migration is the intensifica-
tion of geographical networks. Physical infrastructure to connect the city to
the homes of migrants becomes an important part of urban development,
mobility between those places becomes an important part of the urban
economy, and communication across geographies intensifies. The reality for
migrants of being in between permanence and transience also has social and
cultural consequences: How do migrants settle in the city, how do they form
social networks in the city, and how do they use urban spaces as part of the
population? In the case of Singapore, there are areas that are more popular
among some migrant groups than others, and each area may be specific to one
migrant group, as demonstrated by the popularity of Little India for South
Asian migrant workers, Lucky Plaza for Filipina domestic workers, and Little
Burma at Peninsula Plaza for Burmese workers (Ferzacca, 2022; Sinha, 2018;
Yeoh & Huang, 1998).

4.2.4 Heterogeneity and “In-between”

As industrialization and massive population increases have occurred in
a condensed time and space in most cities in Southeast Asia, much of that

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 Urban Development in Southeast Asia 43

population growth has been through in-migration. A closer examination of

cities in Southeast Asia enriches discussion of the role of migration in popula-
tion growth and of the social-cultural dynamics of a heterogeneous urban
society. Wirth (1938) argued that it is difficult for city dwellers to know each
other personally when the population increases, and hence they structure their
communication “through indirect mediums.” On the one hand, this delegation is
important in a society with a blasé or “impersonal, superficial, transitory, and
segmental” attitude (Wirth, 1938: 12; Simmel, 1903), leading to the bureaucrat-
ization of city management. On the other hand, a grounded vantage point shows
reality to be more mixed than Wirth suggests. Many migrants have come to
Southeast Asian cities through preexisting contacts and, given the scarcity of
affordable housing, formed enclaves of people from the same background
(Kusno, 2014; Shatkin, 2004). Studies in Yangon, for instance, show residents
forming hybrid communities of different ethnicities, reshaping ethnic and reli-
gious boundaries through informal housing provisions amidst the state’s inabil-
ity to offer affordable housing (Roberts, 2019). These enclaves are also likely be
the first point of entry into jobs in the city. The continuation of relatively close-
knit communities as enclaves in the urban fabric demonstrates that social
relations in the city are not all impersonal.
The ethnic enclave pattern was also observable in cities of North America,
such as in Chicago in the early twentiethth century, as European migrants from
World War I settled in. Wirth observed such patterns as he claimed that different
parts of the city featured specialized functions and that “persons of homogenous
status and needs unwittingly drift into, consciously select, or are forced by
circumstances into, the same area” (1938: 15). More recent studies in Southeast
Asia remind us that settling into enclaves does not protect migrants from being
subjected to the “modern” aspirations the larger society attaches to the image of
the city (Elinoff, 2018). As a result, settlement enclaves became a means of
social and economic survival for those comprising the second class or lower in
the city, while those in the first class represent the “global city” image: they
partake of “croissants and opera” rather than “bread and circuses” (Yeoh, 2005).
The pursuit of global city status, along with the role of cities as nodes in the
global economy, has led to various modes of developmentalism. In Vietnam,
modernization and global integration came with doi moi (economic reform),
leading to years of rapid economic growth and urbanization that specified the
goal of “integration with the global economy” (Tran, 2019). Pen Sereypagna’s
(2018) description of this phenomenon in Phnom Penh illustrates how devel-
opmentalism relates to the image of a modernized, global city: “The micro-
economies of street vendors, stalls and small-scale commercial streets are being
eliminated in the face of new rules and regulations, new shopping malls and new

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 44 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

ideals of cleanliness and hygiene” (Sereypagna, 2018: 47). Enclaves of

migrants are also subjected to requirements of beauty and order to align with
the demands of the global economy, causing some of these enclaves to evolve to
embrace tourism (Figure 5). These transformations are consistent with the
accumulation of “cultural capital” in a global city, which affects people, prod-
ucts, and places (Kong, 2007: 384).
While the density of inhabitants in the city might encourage social partition-
ing, settlement enclaves in Southeast Asia can sustain close, personal inter-
actions, especially in relatively old settlements that have evolved over
a considerably long time. For example, research by the Southeast Asia
Neighborhoods Network (SEANNET) has consistently found that personal
interactions among neighbors can persist in spite of development pressures
and might foster platforms to negotiate for or against those pressures (UKNA,
2020). In Surabaya, Indigenous urban settlements known as kampung have
obtained official acknowledgment as important to sustain, since “if kampung
disappears, so will the culture [of the city]” (Silas, 2020). In fact, the image of
the kampung in other cities has been as an area opposed to the notion of
progress. Many such communities have faced forced eviction in the name

Figure 5 Arab Town in the city of Bangkok, which has evolved into
a neighborhood that offers restaurants, mini-marts, and other functions to
support tourism.
Source: Author, 2020.

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 Urban Development in Southeast Asia 45

of development, but their persistence in a city like Surabaya exemplifies a less

dichotomous relationship between kampung and urban development (Peeters,
2013). An anthropological lens on the city allows one to observe the endurance
of close social interactions that make apparent “that elites and various kinds of
authorities only appear to have a monopoly on envisioning more lasting (urban)
futures and that ordinary city-makers and/or religion-makers are important
players as well” (Sinha, 2018: 264). Most cities in Southeast Asia have these
variations in dense urban living, as the built environment has continuously
mixed impersonal megaprojects with settlements marked by close-knit urban
fabric.

4.3 Groundedness and Multi-Scalar Thinking

Although this section has focused on the limitations of official datasets and the
importance of a grounded perspective in studying urban development, it is import-
ant to avoid pitting one against the other. Motivating the emphasis on groundedness
is the insufficient consideration of everyday life experiences of urban inhabitants,
especially of marginalized groups, in most official urban development planning thus
far. The fact that official data may miss certain populations, or perceive city
boundaries differently or unrealistically, complicates comparison, but qualitative
triangulation, based on grounded knowledge of at least some sites, can help test for
the limitations of the data, to allow scholars and policy practitioners alike to adjust
accordingly. An awareness of the extent to which power inequality has obscured the
experiences of marginalized groups in urban development encourages studies that
challenge unequal structures. Without such awareness, urban research may perpetu-
ate unjust social structures, as technocratic planning continues to be dominant in
economies under global capitalism.
Developing suitable research methods to study socially fragmented land-
scapes, with full knowledge of the colonial and postcolonial contexts of urban
development and awareness of development-induced injustices, is as important
as identifying pertinent research topics. The significance of groundedness is that
it recognizes the value of the human agency of marginalized groups; they are not
mere objects of research but active actors in urban development. Inherent in this
understanding is the recognition that urban development has perpetuated injust-
ices. Since studying urban development in Southeast Asia may result in one’s
becoming part of the urban development process, it is imperative for scholars of
urban Southeast Asia to start with clear objectives: Why are we studying
urbanization, with whom, and for whom? With the range of power inequalities
that shadow and propel urban developments in Southeast Asia, the “who”
question is particularly important. Embedded in clarifying the objectives of

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 46 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

urban scholars of Southeast Asia is the awareness that urban landscapes are
representations of those unequal powers. Of key importance is for researchers to
maintain a critical perspective, given the closeness between academic studies
and their real-life implications in cities of Southeast Asia.

5 Political Ecology and Environmental Justice

Bringing insights from human agency and political life as seen from below into
urban policymaking allows city planners to make social justice a crucial part of
development strategies. The inequalities and patterns of marginalization dis-
cussed thus far imply the need for a new focus not just in studies of urban
development but also in shaping the realities of urbanization. Centering
a concern for justice acknowledges the impossibility of “leveling”
a heterogeneous and socially unequal urban society.
Taking justice seriously as an objective in planning and studying cities also
requires broadening one’s vantage point to view urban development as a set of
processes that affect areas beyond city boundaries. The fixation of urban
development on the convenience and comfort of cities comes together with
enshrining cities as centers of social and economic life. Cities become spaces of
accumulation of wealth and power, as cities turn out to be sites of development
decisions and to be places that absorb resources from rural areas. Compounded
by planners’ violations of master plans in pursuit of profit-making endeavors,
the urban bias that results is clearly observable in its consequences for environ-
mental sustainability. Environmental degradation resulting from unbalanced
urban development occurs both in cities proper and in places that are well
outside the metropolitan area but are still economically and ecologically linked
to city-centric initiatives. Sprawling mega-urban regions also give rise to
environmental challenges, since national environmental policies are often
“too broad to effectively cope with the diversity of urban eco-systems,” and
the tension between development expectations and the need to protect ecosys-
tems persists in most places (McGee & Shaharudin, 2016: 511).
In examining urbanization impacts beyond borders, a focus on justice refers not
only to distribution of benefits, resources, and costs but also to processes of
decision-making and ideological contests regarding urban development. Hence
again the need for groundedness in urban development research to ensure attention
to marginalized groups, both in the process and in the resulting outcomes of
development. Questions of social and environmental justice, therefore, become
lenses through which to study urban development’s impacts on different social
groups, recognizing that race, ethnicity, and gender are inseparable from economic
class in the social construction of those social groups.

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 Urban Development in Southeast Asia 47

5.1 Political Ecology

A political ecology framework is useful in critically analyzing how political
economy interacts with ecology and examining connections between social and
environmental inequalities. Urban political ecology looks at the unequal distri-
bution of power in urban spaces to analyze the differential impacts of policy
decisions among social, political, and economic groups (Marks, 2019). Rather
than focusing only on powerful actors in urban development, political ecology
demands a closer look at power inequality and, consequently, is critical of
development processes, given their impacts on those in the margins.
Scholars of Southeast Asia’s urban development have used an urban political
ecology framework to scrutinize development’s impacts on nature and on
groups that are most affected by development-induced natural degradation.
For example, a political ecology framework to analyze flooding would fault
not a natural cause but political and economic decision-making regarding urban
development. The framework is also helpful in shaping a critical view of
technocratic-infrastructural approaches to urban issues, seeing these as result-
ing from political and economic decisions made in contexts of unequal power
relations. In the case of Jakarta, for example, while politicians and citizens
blame urban poor settlements for floods, a political ecology analysis considers
the urban poor as a disadvantaged group that is marginalized in urban develop-
ment decision-making processes. Their settlements are at the receiving end of
the negative impacts of those developments, while the big developers that cause
environmental degradation can afford more protection for themselves against
the floods (Padawangi & Douglass, 2015). As a closer examination of flooding,
waste, and pollution makes clear, a political ecology perspective shows that
urban development, as human interventions into natural ecologies, brings
differential impacts to people situated in different social, political, and eco-
nomic configurations across the urban landscape.

5.1.1 Flooding
Flooding is both the most common urban disaster in Southeast Asia and also one
the most closely linked to urban development (Padawangi & Douglass, 2015).
A political ecology approach to understand flooding in relation to Southeast
Asia’s urbanization points to the role of urban and national politicians’ interest-
laden decisions as the root of uneven vulnerability to floods (Marks, 2019;
DiGregorio, 2015). Cambodia, Malaysia, and Thailand are the Southeast Asian
countries in which the threat of flooding is greatest, although it is also a threat in
other countries in the region (Kim and Bui, 2019). Most Southeast Asia cities
with populations of more than 1 million have experienced flooding incidents

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 48 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

more than once since 2012 (Table 5). Jakarta and Metro Manila – both among
the world’s top twenty mega-urban regions by population size – are especially
critically unprepared (Douglass, 2010). Development-induced urban flooding
stems from the reduction of green areas in cities and their surroundings,
degradation of the river system for riverine cities, and land subsidence in coastal
cities (Padawangi, 2019; Marks, 2019; Kim & Bui, 2019). Climate change
exacerbates these development-induced hazards, particularly for cities that are
in typhoon paths and coastal areas (Kim & Bui, 2019).
Building physical infrastructure, such as levees and dams, is still a common
strategy to mitigate flooding in cities in Southeast Asia. The city government of
Jakarta, for example, chose to build levees along its main river, Ciliwung, in
hopes of curing Jakarta’s chronic flooding. This strategy required that author-
ities forcefully evict communities to build the levees. While levees may allevi-
ate floods’ impact, they may also both give a false sense of security and reduce
green areas in the city. Widespread flooding in Jakarta in early 2020, including
in areas that are purportedly protected by the river levees, is evidence of the
weakness of such a strategy.
Urban development may also cause flooding and disaster risks elsewhere, as
demonstrated in the case of Thailand’s reliance on electricity produced in Laos.
Laos’ aspiration to become the “Battery of Asia” symbolically frames the
various hydropower projects the country is developing along the Mekong
River. Laos has signed an agreement with Thailand to supply 9,000 megawatts
(MW) of power to Thailand by 2036, although it had only managed to supply
2,100 MW as of 2018. Most of Laos’ hydropower-produced electricity in
Thailand eventually goes into the transmission grid in and around Bangkok
(Marks & Zhang, 2018: 300). The sale of electricity for mostly urban develop-
ment in Thailand generates national revenue for Laos, but the infrastructure
involved imposes disaster risks for the areas in which the dams have been built.
The example of the collapse of the Xe-Pian Xe-Namnoy hydropower project’s
dam in July 2018 – killing 34, causing 100 people to be missing, and displacing
thousands of residents from thirteen villages – is a reminder of the risk that these
rural areas shoulder by being located near hydropower dams (The Nation,
2018).

5.1.2 Waste and Pollution

Environmental losses are rarely included in official calculations of urban
development costs and benefits. While urban development may bring benefits
to some, its environmental costs for others may extend well beyond cities’
administrative boundaries or even national borders, as natural landscapes have

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 Urban Development in Southeast Asia 49

Table 5 Flood risk of cities with over 1 million population in Southeast Asia

COUNTRY CITY COASTAL FLOOD RISK

Cambodia Phnom Penh Yes (riverine) High
Indonesia Bandar Lampung Yes High
Bandung No Low
Batam Yes High
Bogor No Low
Denpasar Yes High
Jakarta Yes High
Makassar Yes High
Malang No Low
Medan Yes High
Palembang Yes (riverine) High
Pekan Baru Yes (riverine) High
Samarinda Yes (riverine) High
Semarang Yes High
Surabaya Yes High
Tasikmalaya No Low
Laos Vientiane Yes (riverine) High
Malaysia Johor Bahru Yes (riverine) High
Kuala Lumpur Yes High
Penang Yes High
Myanmar Mandalay Yes (riverine) High
Nay Pyi Taw No Low
Yangon Yes (riverine) High
Philippines Cebu City Yes High
Davao City Yes High
Manila Yes High
Zamboanga City Yes High
Singapore Singapore Yes High
Thailand Bangkok Yes High
Samut Prakan Yes High
Vietnam Bien Hoa Yes (riverine) High
Can Tho Yes (riverine) High
Da Nang Yes High
Hai Phong Yes High
Hanoi Yes (riverine) High
Ho Chi Minh City Yes High

“Low” indicates no flooding; “high” indicates more than one flooding incident in years
2012–17. These are officially reported data and may not include all actual incidents.
Source: Kim & Bui, 2019.

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 50 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

1.60

1.40

1.20
kg per capita per day

1.00

0.80

0.60

0.40

0.20

0.00
Myanmar Philippines Vietnam Lao PDR Indonesia Malaysia Thailand Singapore

1995 2025 (projected)

Figure 6 Projected urban waste generation in some ASEAN countries.

Source: UNEP, 2017.

their own terrains and systems. A case in point is the waste management issues
that Southeast Asia’s cities commonly face. Southeast Asia generates 1.14 kg
per capita in municipal solid waste per day, consisting mostly of healthcare
waste, electronic waste, industrial waste, and construction and demolition waste
(UNEP, 2017). Within Southeast Asia, Indonesia generates the highest amount,
at more than 60 million tons per year, followed by Thailand at almost 30 million
tons (Figure 6). These quantities have surged during the COVID-19 pandemic
that started in 2020, as can be observed from the increase of plastic waste,
heightened reliance on online shopping and food delivery, and a significant rise
in medical waste (Kojima et al., 2020).
Most cities in the region rely primarily on open dumping and open burning to
manage solid waste (Table 6). Singapore uses incineration, but it faces
a shortage of space for ashes, which still need to go to a landfill. In general,
recycling rates are still relatively low, and most cities depend on the informal
sector to recover recyclable materials from open landfills (UNEP, 2017). Open
landfills, usually situated on the outskirts of or outside cities, have environmen-
tal and public-health implications for those areas and communities. In other
words, wealth accumulation in cities produces unequally distributed negative
impacts, particularly among less-wealthy populations.
Such a situation raises critical questions about environmental justice. The
insufficient capacities of governments to uphold regulations and the willingness
of interest-laden state actors to externalize environmental costs add to the
difficulties of alleviating unequal and unjust situations. Almost all countries
in Southeast Asia have some relevant environmental policies, regulatory

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Table 6 Recycling rate and municipal solid waste treatment technology

Treatment/Disposal
Source Collection Sanitary Open Open
Country Segregation Rate (Urban) Recycling Rate Composting Incineration Landfill Dump Burning
Brunei <50% 90% 15% ✓ ✓
Darussalam
Cambodia <50% 80% <50% ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Indonesia <50% 56–75% <50% ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Lao PDR <50% 40–70% <50% ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Malaysia <50% >70% 50–60% (Metal, Paper, ✓ ✓ ✓
Plastic)
Others (<50%)
Myanmar 50% 70% (Metal, Paper, ✓ ✓ ✓
Plastic)
Philippines 50–70% 40–90% 20–33% (Paper) ✓ ✓ ✓
30–70% (Aluminium)
20–58% (Other Metals)
23–42% (Plastic)
28–60% (Glass)
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Table 6 (cont.)

Treatment/Disposal
Source Collection Sanitary Open Open
Country Segregation Rate (Urban) Recycling Rate Composting Incineration Landfill Dump Burning

Singapore 70% >90% 50–60% (Paper, ✓ ✓ ✓

Horticulture)
>90% (Iron,
Construction &
Demolition, Used
Slag)
>80% (Scrap Tire)
>80% (Wood)
>50% (Others)
Overall: 60%
Thailand <50% >80% >90% (Metal) ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
50–60% (Paper,
Construction)
<50% (Others)
Vietnam <50% 80–82% >90% (Metal) ✓ ✓
>70% (Plastic, E-waste)
50% (Paper)
<50% (Others)

Source: UNEP, 2017.

 Urban Development in Southeast Asia 53

frameworks, and strategies on the national level, but lack of coordination

between different levels of government and policymakers results in difficulty
with implementation, a situation that echoes the inconsistent implementation of
urban master plans.
Handling of liquid waste has also been challenging. Disposal of untreated
liquid waste and wastewater, both industrial and domestic (Steinberg, 2007),
directly into rivers or other nearby bodies of water causes degradation of river
water quality across the region. Many rivers in large cities in the region – such as
the Chao Phraya in Bangkok, the Pasig River in Metro Manila, the Ciliwung
River in Jakarta, and the Saigon River in Ho Chi Minh City – have been
declared biologically dead, nearly biologically dead, or heavily contaminated
for the portions that run through the city (Bello, 2016; Johnson and Simonette,
2019; Padawangi et al., 2016). River pollution reflects the problem of urban
development’s turning cities’ backs to rivers, causing rivers to become sewers
and open drains rather than natural resources for water and food.
Air pollution is another important and often overlooked issue for Southeast
Asia’s urban development. Brunei Darussalam has the highest CO2 emissions
per capita in Southeast Asia (Figure 7). However, when computed based on the
concentration of PM 2.5 particles,2 Indonesia is the most polluted country, with
an average of 45.3 μg/m³, which is in the range the WHO identifies as
“unhealthy for sensitive groups” (IQAir, 2018). The most polluted city in
Southeast Asia is Jakarta, Indonesia, followed by Hanoi in Vietnam.
However, ten cities in Thailand dominate the list of the top fifteen most polluted
cities (Table 7). Cities in the Philippines dominate among those in the region
with the cleanest air, interestingly, with cities in Metro Manila, such as
Valenzuela, Parañaque, the old Manila, Makati, Quezon City, Mandaluyong,
and Las Pinas among the top fifteen cleanest. Singapore is also in the list of the
top fifteen cities with the best air quality, despite having to endure regular haze
from forest fires in the region.
Nevertheless, the WHO ranks the air quality in only four cities in Southeast
Asia as “good” – that is, with an annual average of PM 2.5 particles of less than
12 μg/m³. This means that almost all cities in Southeast Asia fall short of WHO
targets. In Indonesia, for instance, besides Jakarta’s being the most polluted city
in the region, seasonal open burning of agricultural land damages Indonesia’s
air quality as a whole and affects the air quality of neighboring countries. The
country’s dependency on coal for energy generation for development needs
(Antara, 2019) – use of coal-powered electricity is projected to increase from

2
PM 2.5 are fine particles that are smaller than human hair. Scientists have linked prolonged
exposure to PM 2.5 pollution to heart and lung diseases that may lead to premature death.

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 54 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

30

25

20

15

10

0
m

ar

nd

m
ne
di

si

si

or
PD
la

na
nm

la
ne

ay
bo

ap
sa

pi

ai

et
ya
al
do

ilip
am

ng
us

Th

Vi
La

M
In

Ph

Si
ar

C
D
ei
un
Br

1990 2000 2012

Figure 7 CO2 emissions, in metric tons per capita.

Source: UNEP, 2017.

25 percent in 2015 to more than 30 percent in 2025 – also raises concern over air
quality and health impacts from coal burning.

5.1.3 Political Ecology as Urban Development Critique

Political ecology’s critical approach to many aspects of urban development that
cause and exacerbate social inequalities positions it as a critique of capitalist
development. Therefore, this perspective goes against the interests of political
and economic elites who profit from urban development projects. As Mayer
(2020: 46) says, of scholars who take a critical approach, “One challenge which
critical social scientists have always faced has grown bigger: neither policy
makers nor corporate elites seem to be paying much attention to their research
findings.” Furthermore, political ecology analysis goes beyond the administra-
tive boundaries of the city, which may not be attractive for policymakers or
politicians who have a specific interest in appealing to their voters. The useful-
ness of a political ecology framework in achieving sustainable environment is
clear, but its appeal may thus be limited among both urban politicians and
influential economic actors.

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Table 7 The fifteen most polluted cities and fifteen cleanest cities in Southeast Asia, based on average PM 2.5 particles concentration

Most Polluted Regional Cities Cleanest Regional Cities

Rank Country City 2018 Average PM 2.5 Rank Country City 2018 Average PM 2.5
1 Indonesia Jakarta 45.3 1 Philippines Calamba 9.3
2 Vietnam Hanoi 40.8 2 Philippines Valenzuela 9.9
3 Thailand Samut Sakhon 39.8 3 Philippines Carmona 10.9
4 Thailand Nakhon Ratchasima 37.6 4 Thailand Satun 11.3
5 Thailand Tha Bo 37.2 5 Philippines Parañaque 12.2
6 Thailand Saraburi 32.6 6 Philippines Davao City 12.6
7 Philippines Meycauyan City 32.4 7 Philippines Makati 13.7
8 Thailand Samut Prakan 32.2 8 Philippines Manila 14.3
9 Thailand Ratchaburi 32.2 9 Philippines Mandaluyong 14.5
10 Thailand Mae Sot 32.2 10 Singapore Singapore 14.8
11 Philippines Caloocan 31.4 11 Thailand Narathiwat 15.2
12 Thailand Si Maha Phot 30.9 12 Philippines Balanga 16.1
13 Thailand Pai 29.4 13 Philippines Quezon City 17.5
14 Thailand Chon Buri 27.3 14 Thailand Nan 17.6
15 Vietnam Ho Chi Minh City 26.9 15 Philippines Las Pinas 17.9

The World Health Organization (WHO) sets a target of less than 10 μg/m³, while defining “good” air quality levels as 0–12 μg/m³. The range of 12.1–35.4
μg/m³ is “moderate,” while 35.5–55.4 μg/m³ is “unhealthy for sensitive groups.”
Source: IQAir, 2018.
 56 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

5.2 Urban Social Movements

Given the differential impacts of the social and environmental consequences of
Southeast Asia’s urban development on various groups, social and environmen-
tal justice continue to be pertinent. The focus of environmental justice on the
relationship among social, political, and economic inequalities addresses the
extent to which urban development harms/damages/reduces quality of life,
especially among marginalized groups. Social justice literatures likewise cri-
tique capitalist urbanization, by assessing the impact of urban development for
different economic classes in the city (Harvey, 1973). Both these literatures
consider principles, processes, and outcomes of justice, as well as intergenera-
tional and intragenerational justice.
Including principles and processes of justice in evaluating development leads
scholars to resistance groups and urban social movements. Since many
Southeast Asian governments implement top-down master plans inconsistently,
and since even those plans that governments follow are subject to change, such
plans can be contested. Urban development challenges present issues around
which civil society groups can organize and mobilize, including through coali-
tion-building among diverse social groups and political actors. Some, though
not all, also build coalitions with political candidates during election seasons.
Powerful political elites and economic actors may make use of such opportun-
ities to assert their interests, but civil society groups can also seize upon them.
The possibilities for civil society groups to push for their agendas to be included
in master plans or other urban policies vary across cities as well as provincial
and national contexts.
In general, social and environmental issues offer potential for civil society
organization and mobilization. While the urban poor have become a political
force in urban development in Southeast Asia, their level of and opportunities
for organizing are still uneven across contexts. Furthermore, community
organizing that is based on delivery of basic services and needs also has its
limitations, because it mixes pragmatic and ideological concerns. In fact,
urban issues generally combine such dimensions, even if they are not directly
related to basic services and needs fulfilment. If a social movement is
successful in achieving its pragmatic concerns, the next question would be
whether ideological concerns remain to sustain its organizing and mobilizing
as a political force.
Environmental movements are examples of movements that may not directly
relate to basic services and needs fulfilment, but still have both pragmatic and
ideological aspects. As environmental issues and their effects on quality of life
become more obvious, civil society groups have emerged in the region to

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 Urban Development in Southeast Asia 57

engage in grassroots efforts to address these challenges – though some groups

are long-standing. The Nature Society Singapore, for example, established in
1921 as the Singapore Natural History Society, has successfully advocated for
more serious attention to the city’s natural environment and biodiversity in
formal policies. Some of the most well-known of its advocacy efforts were its
proposal for a nature conservation area at Sungei Buloh in 1988 and the
conservation of Chek Jawa mudflats in 2001 (Nature Society, 2020).
Recently, the Nature Society has also advocated for the conservation of the
Green Corridor, the land that was formerly occupied by the Singapore–
Malaysia railway. The case of the Nature Society in Singapore shows that
even a city-state that has a relatively more controlled and structured master
plan leaves space for civil society groups to assert their concerns regarding
urban development.
It remains to be seen whether urban social movements in Southeast Asia can
mobilize to redirect the politics of urban development away from technocratic
approaches. These social movements actively play roles in urban development
politics through strategies that include advocacy, capacity-building, lobbying,
and coalition-building with a range of political actors. Their emergence may be
influenced by democratization and political reform, such as in the cases of
Indonesia and the Philippines, but civil society organizations persist and mobil-
ize throughout the region at various levels and scales. The incomplete control of
top-down urban governance in most of Southeast Asia, while posing challenges
for upholding regulations and opening avenues for political lobbying, also
presents a political opportunity for grassroots activists to raise awareness of
injustices and to appropriate spaces for empowerment and agency – a process to
which the next section, on Southeast Asia’s urban futures, turns.

6 Southeast Asia’s Urban Futures

Having discussed the historical and the contemporary, we turn now to possible
futures for urban development in Southeast Asia. The social inequalities of the
past and present affect aspirations for the future. Groups in unequal social
settings may have different priorities, but they still “may have common – or
at least overlapping – visions of aspirational futures” (Bunnell, 2018: 11).
Three distinctive ways of studying Southeast Asia’s urban futures offer
useful insight. The first is through the aspirations of different actors in urban
development. Their positions in the political and social structures of urban
societies affect these actors’ aspirations, but at the same time all share spaces
in and imaginations of the city. The second is through considering technological
advancements in the city, which affect both policymakers and citizens as these

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 58 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

innovations become more pervasive in everyday life. The third is through

grassroots activism and alternative development initiatives that provide
glimpses into ways to move away from the mainstream.

6.1 Aspirations
Studies of urbanization in Southeast Asia rarely address aspirations, despite
their importance for many urban development-related phenomena (Bunnell
et al., 2019): they “drive urban transformation, usually incrementally but
sometimes also in revolutionary ways” (Goh et al., 2015: 291). Aspiration,
explains Arjun Appadurai (2004), is not just an individual’s desire or choice
for a desired future but a “system of ideas” that comprises perceptions of
“good life, health and happiness” (Bunnell et al., 2019: 54). Aspiration is both
individual and social-structural; it may originate in the realm of the subaltern
or of the powerful. The relationship between the marginalized and the
powerful is not always neatly in opposition, as there are also actors who
advocate, mediate, or intervene to produce alternative aspirations (Goh et al.,
2015). In the urban context, aspirations for a good city and a good urban life
reflect a socially constructed system of ideas that may be specifically
grounded but is also influenced by images from an idealized elsewhere at
the global scale.
Even as it inspires aspirations for a better future life, the city can still be a site
that limits marginalized groups – such as the urban poor, including migrants –
from achieving such aspirations. Limitations in accessing job opportunities and
affordable housing are common hurdles that marginalize migrants in the city.
Those who serve as low-wage workers in industries, for instance, may experi-
ence labor exploitation and gender discrimination. Nevertheless, the city can
also become a space to encounter other urban actors who could work together to
resist injustices. Resistance against oppressive situations and actors can be
covert or open, depending on the situation, but migrants and members of
other marginalized groups may transform their lot through such a process of
struggle (see Warouw, 2019). Indeed, besides being centers of wealth accumu-
lation, cities are also possible sites of labor activism, as well as of housing and
human rights advocacy.
The presence of top-down technocratic governance and the global market
forces that drive big infrastructural and commercial developments in the city
affect urban aspirations of actors from state to grassroots (Bunnell & Goh, 2012;
Ghertner, 2010). The historical linking of urban development and nation-
building is the archetype for how the developmental state might manage and
cultivate aspirations across social and political groups, moving forward. Both

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 Urban Development in Southeast Asia 59

large infrastructure projects and provision of basic services reflect the abilities
of the state and its image of the good life, to be achieved through urban
development. To go even further back in history, the role of cities as ceremonial
centers prepares them to serve as stages for idealized and therefore monumental
images of societal life. Studies of communities threatened with eviction in cities
in Southeast Asia, such as in Ho Chi Minh City, Metro Manila, and Jakarta,
indicate that even residents’ images of a “good city” idealize monumental
buildings and beautiful new developments (Harms, 2012; Shatkin, 2004;
Padawangi, 2018c). The urban poor may have “the capacity to aspire,” yet
they remain “pragmatically modest in their hopes, as they [are] also aware of the
necessity to rely on other actors in the city, whose interests may not align with
their own, to fulfil their aspirations” (Padawangi, 2018c: 215).
The ambitious state’s role in cultivating aspirations and setting criteria for
what constitutes an ideal city comes through most clearly in plans for new cities.
In Phnom Penh, for example, the Diamond Island project emptied out space by
evicting farmers and fishermen to create an “international city.” The plan
operationalized an idea of “one city from around the world” with an eclectic
mix of facsimiles of European, Singaporean, and American architectural icons
to represent “luxurious prosperity” (Yamada, 2019: 313). In the case of
Myanmar, the military-controlled government has built a completely new city,
Nay Pyi Taw, as a new capital, to replace Yangon (which they claimed was “too
congested”). Officially becoming Myanmar’s capital city in 2006, Nay Pyi Taw
has become the new command center of the military (Preecharushh, 2010).
Government aspirations for a more controlled space are also apparent in the
proposal to move the capital of Indonesia from the congested and regularly
flooded Jakarta to a completely new city in East Kalimantan. The winning
design for the new capital city highlights idealized concepts of green city design
and sustainability, framed as a “forest city” (Henschke, 2020). The new city
design also features a smart-city command center facility that represents plan-
ning and control, as opposed to the usual messy city (Henschke & Utama,
2020). The government claims the new city to be the antithesis, and to a certain
extent also an antidote, to urban development challenges generally in Southeast
Asia. But these official and ideal visions rely on clearing existing populations
and livelihoods – for instance, farmers and fishermen from Diamond Island in
Phnom Penh – much as for other mega-projects in the region.
Addressing aspirations in Southeast Asia’s urban development highlights the
importance of human imaginings of a better life and a good city – and how both
context and power relations shape these (Bunnell et al., 2019). Focusing on
aspirations offers a useful perspective for uncovering nuances in and influences
on visions of urban futures; these visions are not fixed but continuously

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 60 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

negotiated, and they involve struggles, resistance, and advocacy. Such

dynamics may vary from one city to another, depending on relationships among
government, civil society, and market actors. In whatever proportion, these actors
will continue to carve out space to shape urban development in the future.

6.2 Infrastructure and Technological Advancements

Urban development relies on infrastructure and technological advancements
to deliver the image of progress, and sometimes futuristic expectations, to the
built environment. These infrastructural and technological advancements are
also part of a circuit of capital and wealth accumulation, while influencing
residents’ imaginations of a “good city.” Some of these technologies are
pervasive in everyday urban life; city residents often take them for granted,
although these technologies inherently preserve power inequality in urban
development.

6.2.1 Ubiquitous Transportation Technologies

Modes of transportation influence the organization of urban spaces and neigh-
borhoods in cities in Southeast Asia. Rapid urban development in Southeast
Asia started along with the boom in automobile and oil production, which
affected the scale of spaces in cities accordingly. Studies from Bangkok,
Metro Manila, and Jakarta noted a period of “rapid motorization and hyper-
congestion” that started with the focus on road expansion in the 1970s
(Chalermpong, 2019). This pattern is most observable in primate cities in the
region, but development of secondary cities also prioritized access for automo-
biles as the most recent transportation technology at the time of industrializa-
tion. Automobile-oriented development continued well into the 1990s. Even in
Singapore – the city in Southeast Asia that is most often hailed for its exemplary
public transportation system, with more than 7.5 million trips taken per day
(LTA, 2020) – urban development, distances, and road sizes are at the scale of
automobiles, which has also caused automobiles to remain the fastest mode of
transportation from point to point.
Over the past two decades, several large cities in Southeast Asia have
expanded rail-based and other forms of integrated public transportation. The
Bangkok Transit System (BTS) began operation in 1999 and gradually
expanded to 109.4 km with seventy-seven stations in 2018 (Chalermpong,
2019). Metro Manila also launched its first rail transit system in 1999; by
2019 it had expanded to 124.4 km of tracks with forty-nine mass rapid transit
(MRT) and light rail transit (LRT) stations. Jakarta launched its first MRT line in
2019, consisting of 20.1 km of railway track and thirteen stations, in addition to

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 Urban Development in Southeast Asia 61

the commuter rail system that started in 2000 and by 2017 was serving 1 million
passengers per day (Andapita, 2019). Jakarta is also known for its bus rapid
transit (BRT) system, which started operation in 2003 and has grown into the
world’s longest BRT system, covering 230.9 km of bus routes.
Development of new transportation modes, while providing alternatives to
automobiles, does not reverse the trend of auto-oriented urban sprawl
(Chalermpong, 2019). Rail-based transit systems in Bangkok, Metro Manila,
and Jakarta, as well as Jakarta’s BRT, have reasonably high ridership for their
capacity. However, high ridership of public transportation does not automatic-
ally stop urban sprawl. The rail transit system in Bangkok induced more real
estate development around train stations, but 14 percent of units were purchased
as second homes (Chalermpong, 2019). Moreover, land use and land cover data
of Bangkok Metropolitan Region show continuous expansion of built-up areas
over the years that is still projected to continue (Losiri et al., 2016). While public
transportation systems are much needed in cities of Southeast Asia, their
introduction as late additions to sprawling cities that have existing dependencies
on automobiles, with spaces at corresponding scales, would be unlikely to
change urban development trends and main modes of transportation. Traffic
congestion in these large cities is still bad despite their public transportation
improvements. Rather, the new transit systems provide alternatives to com-
muters, but if market-driven development continues, the city’s transportation
networks will remain congested.

6.2.2 Information and Communication Technologies

Development of information and communication technologies in Southeast

Asia’s cities is important to urban infrastructural and cultural transformation.
Most recently, many cities in Southeast Asia have latched onto the use of new
technologies, together comprising a “smart cities” model, for efficient urban
management (Table 8). The smart city paradigm relies on relatively advanced
communication technology to deliver information and services, and it usually
operates based on infrastructural capacity to store, manage, and retrieve data in
a compressed time (Hollands, 2008). For example, gathering data on bus
frequency and passenger travel patterns assists policymakers in designing
new routes or altering existing ones. The large amount of data, collected and
analyzed with the help of new technologies, is expected to assist city planners
and other government authorities in making relatively quick decisions.
Technological aspirations related to urban development are not new in
Southeast Asia. Monumental projects, such as Malaysia’s Multimedia Super
Corridor and Singapore’s IT2000, have featured technology to address urban

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 62 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

Table 8 List of twenty-six pilot cities in the current

ASEAN Smart Cities Network (ASCN)

Country City
Brunei Darussalam Bandar Seri Begawan
Cambodia Battambang
Phnom Penh
Siem Reap
Lao PDR Luang Prabang
Vientiane
Indonesia Banyuwangi
DKI Jakarta
Makassar
Malaysia Johor Bahru
Kota Kinabalu
Kuala Lumpur
Kuching
Myanmar Mandalay
Nay Pyi Taw
Yangon
Philippines Cebu
Davao
Metro Manila
Singapore Singapore
Thailand Bangkok
Chon Buri
Phuket
Vietnam Da Nang
Hanoi
Ho Chi Minh City

Source: ASCN, 2018.

challenges and to solve problems. Recently, the ASEAN Smart City Network
(ASCN) that was launched at the World Cities Summit in 2018 has invoked
similar goals. Comprising twenty-six cities across the region, the ASCN aims to
pursue a “high quality of life, competitive economy, and sustainable environ-
ment” by using technological and digital tools (ASCN, 2018: 3). One of the
initiatives in the network is a provision for “matchmaking” city governments
with private sector “solution providers” and “multilateral banks” as financiers
(ASCN, 2018: 7). Such high-tech solutions require governments to have

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 Urban Development in Southeast Asia 63

industry partners to provide platforms to digitally manage services and infra-

structure in cities, including use of data collection tools such as cameras,
sensors, and mobile phones. Usually the industry partners who can provide
such tools are large international players such as IBM and Siemens. In other
words, the Smart City agenda is a new entry point for a profit-making, multi-
national private sector to expand their markets to city governments and citizens
who are increasingly dependent on these technologies to get information needed
to facilitate a more convenient urban life.
While the social science literature on smart cities has offered critical perspec-
tives on the fascination with technology in urban management, these criticisms
seem to have found little traction among policymakers on the implementation
side in Southeast Asia. Scholars have raised questions about privacy issues in
the use of big data for smart city projects, about data security, and about the
ethics of data collection. Scholars have also criticized the widespread use of
CCTV cameras to monitor movements as embodying a modern-day Panopticon
(Foucault, 1975; Norris, 2005). The focus on convenience in city living drives
the implementation of the smart city concept in Southeast Asia further from its
initial premise of supporting human resources, social life, and economic growth
(Allwinkle & Cruickshank, 2011), let alone addressing ethical concerns.
Features of an all-seeing control room in city halls as part of the smart city
agenda (Figure 8) also indicate a form of information centralization and
ongoing state surveillance (Degli-Esposti & Shaikh, 2018).

6.2.3 Cyberspace and Power Contestations in Urban Development

Considering how much digital urban management systems rely on connecting

citizens to those systems, the expanding internet access is a necessary step. In
Southeast Asia, internet access gradually increased starting in the mid-1990s.
The share of the population with internet access is unequal across countries,
with the lowest penetration – below 25 percent – in Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos,
and Timor-Leste, compared to 70 percent and above in Singapore, Malaysia,
and Brunei as of 2015 (Lim, 2019). Big capital cities such as Bangkok, Jakarta,
and Metro Manila have become social media capitals of the world, with
Bangkok topping the chart for number of Facebook users and Jakarta for
Twitter users by 2012 (Al Jazeera, 2012). Cyberspace has emerged as a space
of social interaction, supplementing pre-existing spaces in the built environ-
ment. Access to the internet is still largely concentrated in cities, however, as
they are tied to infrastructure that facilitates internet penetration.
Studies by Merlyna Lim (2017; 2019) demonstrate the influence of the
internet on the ways in which citizens communicate. In countries such as

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 Figure 8 Jakarta Smart City control room, November 2017.
Source: Author.
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 Urban Development in Southeast Asia 65

Indonesia and Malaysia, the Internet has facilitated communications in social

movements that have called for political reforms and democratization, but the
relative impact of access to cyberspace depends on sociopolitical and historical
context and state–civil-society relations (Lim, 2019). While cyberspace com-
munication can transcend city boundaries, civil society initiatives and move-
ments remain concentrated mostly in big cities, and how much internet access
matters for political change still depends on the interactions between cyber-
space and other media and traditional networks (Lim, 2019).
Not only does internet access pave the way for civil society communications,
but it also opens cyberspace to technocratic interventions for urban develop-
ment. Forms of citizen reporting through mobile applications, such as via the
reporting platform on Jakarta Smart City, allow for a more interactive relation-
ship between city government and citizens, but entailing technocratic rather
than political engagement. Mobile applications have also become platforms for
market-driven responses to urban problems, such as the growth of application-
based ride hailing services in various cities, with two big corporations, Gojek
and Grab, originating in Southeast Asia. The state may also impose regulations
on internet content, although citizens may find ways to overcome censorship.
Cyberspace is neither an answer to democratization and political reform nor
a solution to urban problems. Rather, cyberspace offers a platform that urban
development actors can use to advance their interests and is highly likely to
continue influencing future trajectories of urban development in Southeast Asia.

6.3 The Future of Civil Society Activism

The continuing significance of urban development as a purported marker of
national progress suggests an important angle of inquiry into Southeast Asia’s
politics. Politicians’ pragmatic emphasis on “real results,” as they gain political
capital from changes to the city, may well reduce the relationship between state
actors and civil society to one resembling that between corporate producers and
consumers rather than allowing democratic engagement in governance. An
emphasis on visual and physical transformation to indicate progress also
paves the way for government actors’ alignment with private investors to enable
such developments, and these investments may also affect the relationship
between state and society. However, the active involvement of civil society
does not diminish in these circumstances; rather, civil society maintains
a political role in urban politics – as well as national politics – to varying extents
in Southeast Asia.
The persistence of urban social movements for social and environmental
justice, in parallel with the role of urban politicians as entrepreneurial city

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 66 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

managers and the framing of citizens as consumers of urban services, raises at

least three pertinent questions. First, if politicians become urban managers, is
there still room for political life in the city? This question goes back to the
primary concern raised in the first pages of this Element, of the stigmatization of
dissent through the production of (beautiful) spaces as celebrations of consen-
sus. An emphasis on convenience and comfort situates citizens as consumers
and therefore limits their political role in urban development. While citizens in
a democratic setting may influence levels of service delivery, infrastructure
development, and other projects in the city, critical discussions regarding the
negative impacts of urban development may be limited if these discussions
might obstruct perceived notions of progress.
Second, if there is still room for critical discussions and debates on develop-
ment projects and decisions, as well as participation of the grassroots in the city,
how much does urban politics influence the political calculations of state actors?
In a decentralized political system, cities can participate in the global economy
more directly by welcoming investments and inviting global collaborations. But
even in countries whose political systems are relatively more centralized, such
as Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar, regional and global networks of cities
provide platforms for urban politicians to reach beyond national borders. The
ASEAN Smart City Network is one example through which city governments
can look directly for private-sector providers and financial institutions to fund
initiatives. The region also has an ASEAN Mayors’ Forum, which was estab-
lished in 2011 and has met biannually since then, as a platform for discussions
“among ASEAN’s local political leaders, national policy makers, international
development partners and other experts, on how cities and local governments
can collaborate in the priority areas set forth for ASEAN’s [Sustainable
Development Goals] implementation as well as other relevant frameworks to
address urbanization challenges” (UCLG-ASPAC, 2019). Moreover, Southeast
Asian mayors also participate in global platforms such as the United Cities and
Local Governments (UCLG) that facilitate intercity collaborations and agree-
ments. These networking platforms do not directly imply regional or global
power; rather, they are opportunities for urban politicians to showcase their
achievements and gain exposure beyond their immediate administrative
boundaries. These networks can potentially contribute to mayors’ political
capital as they may secure global and regional endorsements that are not
affected by the national political economy. Consequently, the arena of urban
politics in Southeast Asia today reaches beyond national and regional bound-
aries through these platforms.
At the same time, civil society also supports regional and global networks.
This leads to the third question, which is by no means the least important: To

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 Urban Development in Southeast Asia 67

what extent are urban social movements in Southeast Asia pragmatic, and to
what extent are they ideological? Continuing issues in Southeast Asia with
fulfilling basic needs and providing services for marginalized groups make it
challenging to separate the pragmatic and the ideological. Nevertheless, the
presence of civil society networks indicates that voices and actions from civil
society organizations are important aspects to be considered in Southeast Asia’s
urban development. Analyzing their roles and influence requires that scholars
connect general observations to grounded realities, as the concerns of civil
society groups reflect development’s impacts on everyday life. These groups
require attention as part of studies of urban development politics as their
concerns and interests are diverse, their advocacy reach may be uneven, and
their consistencies and capacities may vary.

6.4 Alternative Development

Despite many challenges, cities in Southeast Asia have indicated possible ways
to implement new approaches to urban development. On the one hand, as
highlighted previously in this Element, governments’ inability to implement
plans and uphold regulations cause development inconsistencies and problems.
On the other hand, those same weaknesses also induce negotiations among
different urban actors, not just those between for-profit developers and the
government that often exacerbate environmental and social inequalities but
also between government actors and civil society groups, as around social and
environmental justice. As a result, cities in Southeast Asia have also become
sites of opportunities for public participation in decision-making (Padawangi,
2019).
The term “alternative development” refers to urban patterns and processes
that contest the commodification of urban spaces by involving citizens as active,
influential agents (Friedmann, 1992). Civil society groups’ course-challenging
participation in urban development depends on the existence of a public sphere,
a “realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can
be formed” (Habermas, 1964: 49), as a space of communication between civil
society and state actors. Studies have traced the collective efforts of civil society
groups to shape the course of urban development in Southeast Asia’s history,
such as the aforementioned role of associations in the formation of Singapore’s
municipal authority (Yeoh, 1996), the role of religious associations in facilitat-
ing advocacies on local concerns such as education and housing, and even the
role of traders and migrants in affecting the development of Trowulan, the
capital city in the Majapahit era (around the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries)
(Perkasa, Padawangi & Farida, 2021). The tendency to dichotomize civil

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 68 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

society and “others,” though, is misleading, as civil society actors can form
coalitions to participate in shaping and directing urban development.
Several notable initiatives from the region have influenced the ways in which
ideal visions of urban development have departed from the usual global city-
oriented images. Central to these initiatives is community organization at the
grassroots in the effort to bring forth more inclusive development. In general,
such initiatives include three key areas at present: 1) inclusive housing and
infrastructure; 2) community-based disaster and climate change resilience;
and 3) community-led financial mechanisms (Archer, 2019). A common
theme of attention to marginalized groups runs through these key areas.
Instead of situating marginalized groups as passive recipients of projects and
services, a focus on community organizing opens possibilities for these initia-
tives to empower communities to address issues that may affect their own
current and future situation.
In terms of housing and infrastructure, as the first key areas of community-led
urban development: much community organizing focuses on addressing hous-
ing affordability, quality, and secure tenure for marginalized groups, particu-
larly the urban poor, who are prone to displacement. Few governments in
Southeast Asia, at the national or local levels, have good strategies to ensure
sufficient availability of affordable housing for the rapidly urbanizing popula-
tion. In most cases, cities rely on private developers for much housing construc-
tion (Kusno, 2014; Shatkin, 2004). Housing by private developers, however,
tends to serve the middle- and upper-income classes through market mechan-
isms and is driven by the profit-making interests of the housing provider.
Meanwhile, the low-income population often faces insecure land tenure, and
lack of legal acknowledgement of their residency leads to their exclusion from
other public programs, such as education and healthcare.
Some housing programs in the region have departed from the usual market-
based provision of housing and reliance on property developers. Indonesia’s
Kampung Improvement Program started in the late 1960s in Jakarta, then was
widely implemented in Surabaya in the 1980s, to improve infrastructure and
secure tenure in older settlements in the city by involving residents in the
process. Gawad Kalinga in the Philippines, a comparable initiative, was
a collaboration with the Housing and Urban Development Coordinating
Council (HUDCC) to build participatory housing and improve infrastructure
together with low-income families. In Thailand, since 2003 the Baan Mankong
upgrading program has adopted a people-driven approach to address tenure
insecurity and poor living conditions (Archer, 2019). These programs are
officially recognized by local governments. On one hand, the programs have
drawn criticism concerning the sustainability of the efforts, further threats of

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 Urban Development in Southeast Asia 69

displacement by market forces and gentrification, and how unequal power

remains among the local community. Overall, there have been questions over
the significance of such efforts for the actual empowerment of the people (see
Elinoff, 2016). On the other hand, these efforts have elevated concepts of
participatory and alternative development as topics for discourse across
Southeast Asia, along with raising possibilities for grassroots efforts outside
official channels, from communities as well as academia, to apply these
concepts.
A significant network in Southeast Asia that works on participatory housing
and infrastructure is the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR), which has
grown to support community organizing efforts in nineteen countries in Asia
and to facilitate connections and collaborations across these communities
(Archer, 2019). Related to the ACHR are the Asian Coalition for Community
Action Program (ACCA) and Community Architects Network (CAN), which
have connected many urban poor activists with architects across the region to
work with low-income communities for housing design and improvements.
Community architects in Southeast Asia are also known for their involvement
with disaster-hit populations – the second key area in community-led urban
development. These architects work with disaster-affected populations to build
both temporary and permanent settlements, weaving/working aspects of resili-
ence into their designs. Although the number of persons and projects, and the
intensity of activities, vary across places in the region, these groups and initia-
tives have increasingly, as alternative voices, called for more inclusive, collab-
orative, and collective approaches to urban development.
Community organizing for participatory housing often requires capacity to
design suitable financial mechanisms. This relates to the third area of commu-
nity-led urban development, namely community-led financial mechanisms. The
Baan Mankong initiative in Thailand, for example, is managed by the
Community Organization Development Institute (CODI), which covers com-
munity initiatives that support participatory housing. Related initiatives include
organizing savings groups and participatory mapping. In other places, an initial
external grant may catalyze a “rolling fund” for home improvements (Archer,
2012). This mechanism allows families to borrow funds for house renovation
with a specified schedule for payback, to allow other families to subsequently
utilize the scheme. This arrangement requires community organizing to decide
on the mechanism and to agree on borrowing and payback rules. There are no
guarantees that these financial mechanisms will work, however, as different
communities may have different capacities and face different challenges.
Nevertheless, the idea of self-organized, self-financed, and cooperative

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 70 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

financial mechanisms offers a potentially workable alternative to top-down,

corporate-driven investments that rely on big investors and governments.
All these possibilities for nonstate influence rely on adequate data, much as
the states’ own development planning does. Some communities in Southeast
Asia have conducted participatory mapping in an effort to get to know their own
city and to address issues from the ground. Participatory mapping involves
discussions within communities, in their neighborhoods, to identify problems to
address and potentials to be harnessed (Taylor, 2019). This effort is related to
the inability of governments to connect with ground realities and plan accord-
ingly. Participatory mapping is a learning process that allows for knowledge
exchange between communities and researchers with a limited grasp of the local
context. The result can be informative for both communities and researchers as
long as there is sufficient trust that the data will be put to good use (Patel, Baptist
& d’Cruz, 2012; Padawangi et al., 2016). Explains Archer: “The mapping
process can identify existing infrastructure and potential hazards . . . and enables
a collective gathering around a common goal” (2019: 462). The unavailability
of reliable official data, government reliance on external consultants who are
unfamiliar with everyday lived realities, and state officials’ lack of capacity to
devise and implement suitable methods to grasp the fluidity, flexibility, hybrid-
ity, and informality of urban societies are reasons to consider participatory
mapping as a possible tool for aligning plans with realities.

7 Epilogue
Southeast Asia remains a rapidly urbanizing region overall, and profit-driven,
large-scale, corporate-funded projects are still growing in many cities. This
Element examines this region’s urban development to offer a new vantage point
that makes sense of various historical layers, contemporary contexts and trajec-
tories, and possibilities for the future. It argues for the importance of grounded
perspectives to recognize the role of human agency, to understand the city as
a political space, and to address development injustices.
Amidst technocratic and investment-driven official narratives, alternative
development initiatives are growing. Some of these alternative development
programs, such as Baan Mankong, Gawad Kalinga, and new iterations of
Indonesia’s Kampung Improvement Program, have become official govern-
ment programs, despite their limitations and shortcomings. Such alternatives
are possible because of available space for actors from civil society, at least in
neighborhoods, to discuss urban problems and potentials in the context of
widespread perceptions of governments’ lack of capacity. In places where the
government is seen as relatively capable of delivering services, such as

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 Urban Development in Southeast Asia 71

Singapore, incentives and spaces to pursue alternative development initiatives

may be more limited, but these initiatives are still not impossible. And voices
from civil society continue to engage on issues such as heritage, environment,
and food security, albeit with different degrees of influence and achievements.
These voices and possibilities are only fathomable through groundedness, both
in studies of and approaches to urban development.
The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic further highlights the importance of
groundedness in studying urban development in Southeast Asia. On the one
hand, the pandemic has paved the way for nation-states to impose top-down
restrictions on social and economic activities. Requirements for social distan-
cing have also made it difficult for civil society groups to congregate, let alone
to organize for consolidated social movements. On the other hand, government
control over the pandemic’s spread has varied from one country to another:
while Singapore and Vietnam have managed top-down control, others such as
Indonesia and the Philippines have grappled with uncontrolled community
spread. Here and elsewhere, the exposed weakness of the government has
sparked initiatives from local communities, including self-managed neighbor-
hood quarantines, food sharing, alternative supply chains from the countryside,
crowdfunding for local needs, and collective farming, demonstrating a range of
responses that can only be comprehended through a grounded perspective
(Padawangi, 2022).
At least three important areas remain key for studies of urban development in
Southeast Asia. First, deeper research into urban history and the multiple layers
of urban development over time would contribute to a better understanding of
urbanization and its political processes. For example, historical perspectives
can trace patterns of migration and the roots of urban segregation to inform
contemporary policies. Historical data can also be part of documenting patterns
of disasters, such as flooding or earthquakes, in order to inform planning for
urban resilience, drawing not just from official documents and policymakers but
also from community-based perspectives. Second, urban development studies
need a continuing focus on social and environmental justice, with the awareness
that development can be both a cause that exacerbates as well as an answer to
alleviate social and political inequality. A focus on justice would provide a base
of knowledge with which to eventually shape urban politics and policies to
address the issue beyond the usual grants and subsidies for the poor, instead
including also empowerment of marginalized groups. Third, studies of urban
development in Southeast Asia need more attention to, and suitable methods to
examine, alternative development initiatives, programs, and projects, in terms
of documentation of their background and current practices and in terms of their
impacts. This structured evaluation is necessary if these alternatives are to

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 72 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

become options to counterbalance the technocratic and big investment-driven

development that currently dominates the pursuit of global city status.
Grappling with all three areas – historical context, social inequality, and
alternative development – requires critical perspectives to ensure scholars
make meaningful contributions to studies of urban development in Southeast
Asia. Studying urban development is an effort to build knowledge in an area that
is dominated by powerful interests in global and local economies. Therefore, the
practice requires a consistently critical and analytical lens. Furthermore, the
importance of urban politics beyond the city level, given networks and issues
that reach to national and global levels, also poses a challenge, as scholars are
continuously lured into political camps. Knowledge and information are power-
ful tools “for those who collect, retain, and thus control it” (ACHR, 2004: 17;
Archer, 2019). Hence, critical perspectives on all actors and processes
involved – from governments to the private sector, and from professionals to
communities – are important to maintain in analyzing urban development.
“Besides strengthening movements,” Mayer notes, “groundedness in empirical
realities” and attention to those who are marginalized in neoliberal urban
development regimes are “preconditions for our research” (2020: 47).
Remaining always grounded can help scholars to avoid perpetuating the “other-
ing” of marginalized groups in urban development, especially if they maintain
a good grasp of research methods and devise appropriate innovations when
traditional research methods prove insufficient.
Urban development in Southeast Asia reflects a sense of human agency (Goh,
2018), through which social actions that challenge dominant structures and
development trajectories are still possible. Studying urban development in this
region is not only a matter of documenting and analyzing the situation but is also
part of that exercise of human agency. As urban development studies continue
to be sources of information and to offer conceptual frameworks for both
official and nonofficial urban interventions, scholars who are involved in the
effort directly and indirectly become part of those interventions. Southeast
Asia’s urban development tells us that there is much room for engaged scholar-
ship, in which scholars immerse themselves in the field to make sense of data
through actual experience, rather than accepting official, formal information as
given. In the process, civil society networks may be important in finding
linkages among concerns as well as identifying topics that need further inquiry.
It is pertinent for urban studies scholars to be aware of their own roles in what
they are studying and to understand the consequences for their subjects of their
perspectives and methods.

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 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

Edward Aspinall
Australian National University
Edward Aspinall is a professor of politics at the Coral Bell School of Asia-Pacific Affairs,
Australian National University. A specialist in Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia, much of
his research has focused on democratisation, ethnic politics and civil society in Indonesia,
and, most recently, clientelism across Southeast Asia.

Meredith L. Weiss
University at Albany, SUNY
Meredith L. Weiss is Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, SUNY. Her
research addresses political mobilization and contention, the politics of identity and
development, and electoral politics in Southeast Asia, with particular focus on Malaysia and
Singapore.

About the series

The Elements series Politics and Society in Southeast Asia includes both country-specific
and thematic studies on one of the world’s most dynamic regions. Each title, written by
a leading scholar of that country or theme, combines a succinct, comprehensive, up-to-
date overview of debates in the scholarly literature with original analysis and a clear
argument.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108669108 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

Elements in the series

Indonesia: Twenty Years after Democracy
Jamie Davidson
Civil–Military Relations in Southeast Asia
Aurel Croissant
Singapore: Identity, Brand, Power
Kenneth Paul Tan
Ritual and Region: The Invention of ASEAN
Mathew Davies
Populism in Southeast Asia
Paul Kenny
Cambodia: Return to Authoritarianism
Kheang Un
Vietnam: A Pathway from State Socialism
Thaveeporn Vasavakul
Independent Timor-Leste: Regime, Economy and Identity
Douglas Kammen
Media and Power in Southeast Asia
Cherian George and Gayathry Venkiteswaran
The Rise of Sophisticated Authoritarianism in Southeast Asia
Lee Morgenbesser
Rural Development in Southeast Asia
Jonathan Rigg
Fighting Armed Conflicts in Southeast Asia
Shane Joshua Barter
Democratic Deconsolidation in Southeast Asia
Marcus Mietzner
Urban Development in Southeast Asia
Rita Padawangi

A full series listing is available at: www.cambridge.org/ESEA

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108669108 Published online by Cambridge University Press