Gentrifying the Peri-urban: Land use Conflicts and institutional dynamics at the Frontier of an Indonesian Metropolis

This paper aims to specify the meaning of gentrification in rapidly peri-urbanising metropolitan regions in the context of Indonesia’s rapid transition to decentralisation and democracy. It discusses a case study of conflict over an environmental revitalisation project in a peri-urban area of Bandung City. The analysis focuses on the political processes, tactics and strategies supporting and opposing peri-urban gentrification and their consequences. The analysis illustrates how these political dynamics mediate the interaction between the movement of capital and the spatial reorganisation of social classes. It is argued that in the context of a peri-urbanising metropolis, gentrification needs to be narrated less in terms of class-based neighbourhood succession and more in terms of competing cross-class coalitions emerging at local and regional levels

Planning by opportunity: an analysis of periurban environmental conflicts in Indonesia

In this paper we seek to extend ideas about communicative planning and capacity building in collective action. In doing so, we combine political opportunity structure and Kingdon’s policy window in order to develop an agency-centered approach to opportunity. We argue that we need to see the moments and structures of opportunity not simply as fixed, but as something that actors can ‘make’. The moments of opportunity refer to the dynamic, emerging factors of opportunity. Meanwhile, the structures of opportunity consist of relatively consistent, stable factors of opportunity. This theoretical insight is then applied to two debates on development planning projects in the periurban area of North Bandung Area, Indonesia. Three aspects of institutional capacity result from the practice of ‘constructing’ opportunity in the case study: mobilization of social resources, empowerment of weak actors, and focusing of politicians and policymakers’ attention