I was delighted to give a talk in the Department of Geography and Environmental Systems at UMBC earlier this fall, and meet with their faculty and students. One of the benefits of becoming online because of the pandemic is that so many more events are being recorded or live-streamed. The talk is based on a paper I’m currently writing that explores the impacts of speculative urbanism on Jakarta’s water resources through the lens of speculation for profit and for survival.
New Spring Undergraduate Class: Land and Environment in Asia /
Land and Environment in Asia
I am excited to be offering a new undergraduate course this coming Spring semester that explores the politics of land in South and Southeast Asia. The course covers themes including urban planning, land tenure arrangements, and property regimes, topics that are closely aligned with my current research on the socio-ecological dimensions of real estate speculation in Jakarta and Bangalore. I’m looking forward to bringing my field sites into the classroom, and for students to engage with these cities.
The course examines the following themes and ideas:
The processes through which understandings of land as a resource and its management via private property regimes has become normalized;
How colonial and postcolonial governments use space and spatial tactics (e.g. mapping) to governance and control their populations;
How land is rendered manageable and investable;
Histories of enclosure, dispossession, expulsion and forced evictions;
How transformations in land use are accompanied by processes of accumulation, dispossession, exclusion;
Examples of radical alternative arrangements to private property regimes, including modes of land ownership and management that exceed capitalist structures.
The course is divided into three parts. In the first part, we examine how land has come to be regarded as a commodity, and with what effects. This part of the course will draw on Tania Li’s recent work on land, as well as research examining the commodification of nature. We will examine historical practices of enclosure and accumulation by dispossession under colonial regimes, as well as the recent global land rush and associated processes of land grabbing.
““Although [land] is often treated as a thing and sometimes as a commodity, it is not like a mat: you cannot roll it up and take it away” – Tania Li”
The second part of the course examines a series of conflicts over land ownership and land use in rural and urban areas. We will be drawing on a couple of books in particular: Gavin Shatkin’s 2017 book The Real Estate Turn in Urban Asia, and the edited volume from Derek Hall, Phillip Hirsch and Tania Murray Li, Powers of exclusion: land dilemmas in Southeast Asia, which recently arrived in the mail and which I’m particularly excited to read. I’ll also be incorporating papers on Jakarta and Bangalore from the Speculative Urbanisms NSF project I have been a part of since 2013.
In the final part, we examines forms of land ownership and use that exceed capitalism and offer alternatives to private property regimes and privatization. I feel that this is where the value of a Southern perspective shines most clearly. Many students cannot imagine a world without capitalism and private property regimes, but there alternatives are practiced everyday in the same spaces and places. This part of the course also serves as a counter-balance to the focus on developers, corporations, the state and private finance capital in the first part.
The Production of Jakarta’s Water Crisis: A Political Ecology of Speculative Urbanism /
I recently wrote a short piece about the talk I gave as part of the London School of Economics Centre for Southeast Asia Studies seminar series, about a month ago. It has been published on the CEAS blog. The opportunity to present my talk to an engaged audience and writing the piece for the blog was a useful exercise as I revise my manuscript and prepare to submit the paper for review. It will feature in a special issue on speculative urbanism, which I’m excited to see come to fruition hopefully some time next year.
In the blog, I introduce an important finding in the paper, which is that the environmental future of Jakarta is also subject to speculation. Thus, I write: “Speculation is not an activity confined to the world of global finance, real estate, and investors. It extends into conversations and debates about cities, which are increasingly dominated by predictions and prophesies of how cities will fare under conditions of climate change”. I also reflect on the risks of researching hegemonic processes like speculative urbanism, capitalism and neoliberalism: namely that we sometimes fail to engage with their respective “outsides”.
““Speculation is not an activity confined to the world of global finance, real estate, and investors. It extends into conversations and debates about cities, which are increasingly dominated by predictions and prophesies of how cities will fare under conditions of climate change.””
You can read my full blog post here. You can also read a reflection piece on my talk here written by Al Lim, a doctoral student at Yale University.
I have really enjoyed interacting with the LSE SEAC community. Directed by Professor Hyun Bang Shin, I have found the centre to be incredibly supportive for early career researchers. I highly recommend that graduate students and faculty connect with the centre via their early Early Career Scholars network, and take a look at the robust scheduling on the site. There are so many excellent events and talks planned, and the Centre makes an explicit effort to organize these at times that facilitate participation from those in the region.
Decolonizing higher education from the Global North: My Reflections on a recent event at LSE SEAC /
I recently attended a roundtable discussion hosted by the LSE Center for Southeast Asia Studies on the topic of decolonization in relation to higher education. The purpose of the roundtable, Prof. Hyun Bang Shin (Director of SEAC) said in his opening remarks, was to consider the emergence and growth of an intellectual initiative across the global North that aims to “decolonialize” higher education and the university, and the potential limitations of these efforts.
The roundtable discussion raised fundamental and difficult questions about how to pursue decolonisation from our respective socio-spatial positions. I wrote some reflections for the LSE SEAC blog which you can read here.
As someone who is invested in postcolonial urbanism and conducts research in post colonies, I was interested to learn more about this conversation which seems, at least to me, to be much more vibrant in the UK and Southeast Asia than in the US.
What would it mean to “de-colonize” colleges and campuses in the settler colonial context of the US?
Universities have a particular role in the history of Native American dispossession. The Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890, signed under Lincoln, funded the establishment of new colleges by granting federally controlled land to states to sell and endow. But this land was not theirs to give. Land-grant universities occupy Native land. They might be better described as Land-grab universities.
“What would it mean to “de-colonize” colleges and campuses in the settler colonial context of the US?”
There has been a push recently to develop Land Acknowledgments. The University of Oklahoma’s Undergraduate Student Congress recently passed a bill implementing a Land Acknowledgment before all meetings. OU faculty and centers also use a land acknowledgment in emails (myself included) and on webpages:
The University of Oklahoma is on the traditional lands of the Caddo Nation and the Wichita & Affiliated Tribes. This land was also once part of the Muscogee Creek and Seminole nations. It also served as a hunting ground, trade exchange point, and migration route for the Apache, Cheyenne, Comanche, Kiowa, and Osage nations. Today, 39 federally-recognized Tribal nations dwell in what is now the State of Oklahoma as a result of settler colonial policies designed to confine and forcefully assimilate Indigenous peoples.
Of course this is not enough. Higher education in the US needs to move beyond an acknowledgement of history, toward decolonization and reparations. Scholars have offered some potential avenues. For instance, colleges might invest in “decolonial praxis” by decentering Western ways of knowing the world, and incorporating Indigenous pedagogies and knowledge. Others, including Dr. Lisa Tilley, suggest that the college’s resources might be put to work in the name of decolonization.
Colleges might also reconfigure their relationships to the global political economy, finding solidarity with Indigenous people’s movements, divesting from fossil fuels and, as la paperson argues in A Third University is Possible (which you can read here for free), counteract war making.
Two *Virtual* Upcoming Talks on Cities, Finance and Climate Risk /
Along with my colleague and co-organizer Dr. Zac Taylor (KU Leuven), I am excited to announce two public talks on Nov 13-14, 2020 exploring the emerging urban political ecologies of climate and financial risk. The talks are part of a broader combined effort to carve out a space and build a network for early and mid career researchers working on these themes. To this end, we are also hosting a workshop for invited scholars, and plan to organize an additional workshop in 2021.
Information about the two speakers and their talks can be found below. To attend, you need to register via the Eventbrite links below so that you can receive the Zoom link to the webinar.
“Puerta de Tierra, Opportunity Zones and Climate Gentrification." Dr. Sage Ponder, Florida State University | Friday Nov 13 at 2PM Central
In September 2017 the US territory of Puerto Rico was struck by a category 5 hurricane while undergoing the process of municipal bankruptcy. The devastation caused by this natural disaster has become caught up with processes of municipal insolvency and recovery, wielding disastrous impacts on everyday patterns and properties of social reproduction at the urban level. Part of the financial and environmental recovery process includes the privatization of major public infrastructures, including crucial elements of the water system and the entire electric grid, as well as the establishment of an island-wide “opportunity zone”, that incentivizes capital gains tax-free real estate investments. This paper uses document analysis and participant observation to first examine the relationship between urban forms of social reproduction, infrastructural repair, and municipal bankruptcy in Puerto Rico, USA. It then works through this interface of finance, environment, and society to consider how processes of economic revitalization and maintenance and repair are producing climate gentrification in the working class neighborhood of Puerta de Tierra, San Juan. Ultimately it reveals two very different imaginaries of Puerto Rican futurity at work: one dominated by the maintenance of colonial debt relations, while a nascent other works to engender new spatialities of collective self-determination and social healing.
Please register your interest here to receive a Zoom link.
“‘All That Is Solid…’: Climate Change and the Lifetime of Cities." Dr. Sarah Knuth, Durham University | Saturday Nov 14 at 8AM Central
As critical urbanists confront climate change, and prospective climate responses, we must ask crucial questions about the ‘lifetime’ of today’s urban fabrics and metropolitan forms. How durable or ephemeral will existing urban geographies prove in the face of societal devaluations and destruction associated with climate change? Will breaks in and with existing urban forms be suffered through climate change impacts, or waged proactively in the name of deep decarbonization? Dystopian climate imaginaries present such material ruptures, mass stranding of real estate assets, and ‘premature death’ as an existential urban crisis. I maintain here that they are, rather, business as usual for urban capitalism, and its own longer-unfolding crisis. Property developers and appraisers have frequently truncated the lifetime of urban built environments, in how they have represented buildings and their long-term value—and non-value—and in how these representations have become material fact. I consider some bodies of critical urban scholarship necessary to exploring such processes and their climate significance, an important task going forward. I argue that this charge demands creative engagements between cultural geography and political economy, including on questions such as sometimes deep-rooted ‘fiscal geographies’ of urban disposability and emerging geographies (and crises) of property insurance.
Speaker Profiles
Dr. CS Ponder is an assistant professor of geography at Florida State University and an Urban Studies Foundation fellow with the University of Minnesota, department of Geography, Environment & Society. Her research is concerned with understanding the racialization of urban finance, and the implications for environmental justice and social reproduction.
Dr. Sarah Knuth is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Durham University. Her research focuses on critical geographies of climate change and energy transition, finance and the green economy.