Civic Resilience Laboratory

Keynote Speech: Interstitial Urbanism: Politics, History, & Culture

One of the main (and relatively permanent) features of Southeast Asian cities is a variety of interstitial spaces that exists within a formal city as well as at the peri-urban areas between the city and the countryside. The existence of such a space has been noted especially in the field economy geography but it has not been sufficiently discussed as a socio-spatial manifestation of the region’s political tradition and transformation. This talk will try to provide an outline, preliminarily, on the formation of interstitial spaces and its resilience by considering 1) the region’s political tradition and the impact of colonial rules; 2) how interstitial spaces have survived the onslaughts of urbanization and developmentalist projects; and 3) how such spaces may have reached its limit in the face of current climate crises and socio-economic challenges. I will draw on the works of area studies scholars to conceptualize Southeast Asian interstitial urbanism, and will use Jakarta, the place I continue to learn, as an illustrative material to consider the production and destruction of interstitial spaces.

Keywords: Power; border; interstice; mobility; informality

Bio: Abidin Kusno is a Professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University, Toronto and former director of the York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR). Before his arrival at York, he was the Canada Research Chair in Asian Urbanism and Culture at the Institute for Asian Research at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on urban politics and cultural history of Indonesia and Jakarta in particular. His most recent publication is Jakarta: The City of a Thousand Dimensions (National University of Singapore Press, 2023).