Making the city-of-uncertainty work:
Cityness, the flow of things and precarious livelihoods in Jakarta
This research project is an investigation of everyday live in the streets of Kota Tua, the old town of Jakarta. Here space and everyday live is shaped by torrential flows of things and people, experienced as a constant presence of uncertainty - the interplay of unpredictability, incomplete knowledge and associated affects, a set of ethnographic accounts conjoined to the notion of the city-of-uncertainty.
The ethnography provides for accounts about conducts and logics that enables people of the street - street vendors, trash scavengers, street musicians, beggars etc. - to re-shape urban uncertainty, transforming its destructive and inhibiting capacities to (potential) transformative and productive trajectories of maneuvering that allows them to make the city work for their needs, desires and interests in circumstances of constant flux.
The core of these conducts are strategies of provoking and forging relations to the diverse things and people in and of the urban flow of things, a capacity of city-live termed cityness. The dynamic and ever changing associations that emerge exceed the context of the street and simultaneously transcend and augment social, cultural, economic and spatial differences. These insights provoke new ways of thinking about city-making, interactions with uncertainty and social inequality in Jakarta, Indonesia and the wider global south.