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Simone For Other Cities Notes
Simone For Other Cities Notes
Notes
By Abdoumaiq Simone
(for Rujak Center for Urban Studies, December 2010)
This does not mean that the nation’s other major cities are any less relevant
or important in terms of thinking about processes of urbanization, and in
fact, they become the repositories of what remains of the scale of the “city.”
In other words, if we are to think about contemporary city life, then it is to
these cities which we must turn, rather than to Jakarta, to understand a
process of urbanization that may produce larger urban populations and
economies in these cities, but which are unlikely to attain the scale of a
mega-region. Given that these cities function at a level of complexity less
intricate and overwhelming to residents, administrators and policymakers,
they become the sites of important innovation and often enable articulations
between politics, economy, social life and history to become more visible
than in the mega-city or mega-region. Because the factors that need to be
taken into consideration in terms of assessing the implications of new policy
or program initiatives are usually less numerous than in a region like Jakarta,
it is sometimes easier to circumvent political gridlock in order to concretize
new governance and economic practices. A wider range of residents is more
likely to be connected across economic and political sectors secondary cities
and thus capable of experimenting with new relationships across different
institution and territories. These experiments can become incubators of
economic activity, transportation systems and governance particularly suited
to the secondary city and increases their importance as sites of productive
diversity and knowledge for the nation’s urban system as a whole. As long
as Indonesian secondary cities are predominantly seen through the realities
and imaginaries of Jakarta, it is difficult to fully appreciate their status as
producers of urban knowledge in their own right.