AC KNOW LEDG MENTS I had the privilege of living in the three largest cities in Indonesia during the fi rst twenty- fi ve years of my life. I was born in Medan the same year Suharto came to power. My family moved to Surabaya when I was sixteen and, after completing my architectural engineering degree, I moved to Jakarta and worked there. Out of these three cities, however, Jakarta was the one I knew the least, and this is largely because I only lived there for less than two years before I left for graduate study in the United States, thanks to a Fulbright award. Like other recent migrants to the capital city, I knew of the vast opportu- nities Jakarta off ered but had diffi culties in making sense of a city, which in the early 1990s, was changing far more rapidly than the two cities of my youth. Today, every opportunity to visit my family in Jakarta is also a reencounter with the continuing rapid change of the city and its impact on people’s lives. Little did I realize that my frequent visits would both deepen my understanding of the city and limit my view of Indonesia. I have learned to see Jakarta as the Indonesia I have come to know, and therefore most of my academic work thus addresses aspects of the city’s po liti cal cultures, with a degree of ignorance about other places. The main reason, I think, has to do with the fact that the capital city is still the core of Indonesian life and the center of rapid change, for better and worse. Furthermore, the majority of my extended family and many of my friends and schoolmates from Medan and Surabaya have moved to Ja- karta and made the city their home. These factors perhaps have made it impor- tant to me that I write about Jakarta in order to make sense of the city. After the New Order could be seen as part of my continuing conversation with the city, a loose successor to Behind the Postcolonial and The Appearances of Memory. Like the previous books, After the New Order is discursive in its choices of topics, but its narrative structure progresses in a direction that indi- cates both changes from and continuities with the previous po liti cal order. Readers will notice that I have or ga nized the chapters using terms associated with Fernand Braudel. The notions of longue durée and “conjunctures,” for in- stance, I owe to Binghamton University’s Fernand Braudel Center where I at- tended many seminars as a graduate student in the 1990s, picking up ideas to think about linkages between diverse yet simultaneous phenomena, espe- cially from those presented in the “Culture and the World- System” series or- ga nized by my mentor, Anthony D. King, and Ali Mazrui. The infl uence of this attendance is not so much the adoption of a world- system approach to ix x ac know ledg ments Jakarta, but rather a sense that the worlding of the city might be linked to currents in postcolonial studies and Foucauldian discourse analysis in vogue at the time. While I can locate my intellectual subjectivity in this past learning experi- ence, it is far more diffi cult to recapture the infl uence of diff erent people whom I have had the opportunity to meet since then who have shaped the present work. So as with my previous works, I owe a debt of gratitude to friends and colleagues, old and new, who have supported my work. I especially thank Tony King, Greig Crysler, Michael Leaf, Terry McGee, Manneke Budiman, Suryono Herlambang, Jo Santoso, Gunawan Tjahjono, and the late Wastu Pragantha Tjong for the generous combination of friendship and intelligence that they continue to bring to my intellectual life as well as to my understanding of Ja- karta and the larger world. Among my intellectual peers from this time I in- clude Melani Budianta, Iswanto Hartono, Wardah Hafi dz, Herlily Lila Kurnia, Marco Kusumawijaya, Abdou Maliq Simone, Kemal Taruc, and Mohammad Nanda Widyarta. They have provided important feedback on matters concern- ing Jakarta, its urban politics, and cultures. I am grateful to Arif Dirlik, John Friedmann, Chang Jiat Hwee, Swati Chat- topadhay, Chua Beng Huat, Lai Chee Kien, Laura Kolbe, Goh Beng Lan, William Lim, Meredith Miller, Pitman Potter, Etienne Turpin, and Johannes Widodo for inviting me to join their various research projects without which several top- ics in this book would never have been conceived. I am indebted to Freek Co- lombijn, Christopher Silver, and two anonymous reviewers for reading some of the chapters in manuscript and off ering their constructive comments and thought- provoking criticism. Yudi Bachrioktora, Lakhbir Jassal, and especially Ben Abel at Cornell University’s Asia Library have helped in various ways with research materials and insights. I also want to thank Haripriya Rangan, Phillip Darby, and William Hamilton for supporting the publication of this book in the Writing Past Colonialism Book Series of Hawai‘i University Press. I have written this book as a faculty member of the Institute of Asian Re- search of the University of British Columbia (UBC). All of my colleagues have been supportive for either providing a space within their own research projects to nurture my work or supporting the publication of this book. I am also partic- ularly grateful to Dianne Newell, Arif Dirlik, and Alex Woodside who gener- ously invited me to join them in 2008 and 2009 for a series of most illuminating workshops and fi eld trips with the Peter Wall Summer Institute for Research. Several institutions have provided supportive facilities and intellectual en- vironments in which to complete the writing of this book. I want to thank Lily Kong and Tim Bunnell at the Asia Research Institute of the National University ac know ledg ments xi of Singapore and Susan Henders and Lisa Drummond at the York Center for Asia Research for their support and friendship. I also want to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Institute of Asian Research’s McGee Manuscript Completion Fund for their generous sup- port of my research trip to Jakarta. I wish to thank my family in Jakarta for their love and support over many years without which this and other works on Jakarta would never have been pos- sible. Fatiin, Fatima, Fatini, and Isaak, along with my parents, have supported my intellectual pursuits for many years. My family in Canada— Hong, Christine, Isabel, and now Leia—have provided love, friendship, and joy while I completed this book. Finally I dedicate this book to the memory of Wastu Pragantha (Pak Tjong), whom I fi rst met in 1990 soon after I moved to Jakarta and worked as his teach- ing assistant at Tarumanagara University. We were good friends right up until his death. I turned to him for discussion during every fi eld trip. His generosity allowed me to fi nd a way of seeing and also living the world of Jakarta. Pak Tjong was a classmate of the leading developer, Ciputra, and worked for the legendary Governor Ali Sadikin, two of the most infl uential as well as contro- versial fi gures who have occasionally formed part of my critical stories of Jakarta. In August 2010, Pak Tjong took me to the City Hall, which he helped design, and where he worked for many years. Throughout the many years of our friendship, he was always generous and open to my reading of the city and its people, pointing out my reductive accounts but also continuing to encourage my writing about the city. He would have been keen to see the result of our lat- est fi eld trip, which turned out to be our last, and my depiction of his Jakarta City Hall that appears as the fi rst chapter in this book. Earlier versions of some chapters have appeared in the following journals: chapter 2 in International Journal of Islamic Architecture 1, no. 2 (2012); chapter 5 in Inter- Asia Cultural Studies 12, no. 4 (2011); chapter 6 in Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 32, no. 3 (2011); chapter 7 in Indonesia 94 (October 2012). I want to thank the publishers of these journals for their permission to reuse these materials. Four months after this book manuscript was delivered to the publisher, card- carrying residents of Jakarta elected a new governor. Joko Widodo, previ- ously the mayor of Surakarta, defeated the incumbent Fauzi Bowo. Popularly known as Jokowi, this unassuming, populist leader and his vice governor, Ba- suki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama, are both known as upstanding politicians. They are now expected to manage the complex city of Jakarta, which is plagued by fl ood, corruption, and debilitating traffi c, and is divided by socio-economic xii ac know ledg ments disparity as well as occasional ethnic or religious confl icts. So far they have been doing exceptionally well— giving citizens hope that a new time has fi nally arrived. They seek to bring the social into the consciousness of urban subjects by overcoming uneven development, unfairly distributed public ser vices, and a divided city. One could say that they seek justice within the time of capital. It is however, still not clear what kind of space will be produced in their construc- tion of a new time after Suharto..