Despite widespread recognition that speculation is integral to capital accumulation, as in other spheres of scientific and everyday life, it received little attention from urban scholars until recently. Yet this has changed rapidly as speculation on land and property has created an affordable housing crisis in cities across the globe. This reflects the broader global capitalist conjuncture, with money capital switching from commodity production to speculation and rentiership. Yet speculation is also socio-cultural; it is shot through with emotional and socio- cultural values that mobilize a future imaginary. Jakarta occupies a particular socio-spatial positionality within this context; that of a southern megalopolis. Urban land transformations reflect the multifarious speculative actions of developers, financial institutions, an emergent middle class but also the urban majority. Those displaced from informal settlements by real estate and infrastructure imaginng a world class city for the middle class, practice their own everyday speculation with alternative urban futures in mind, also shaping central city and peri-urban land transformations. Beyond land and housing, speculative activities are refashioning urban transportation and infrastructure construction, and are central to how Jakartans address their profound water-related challenges—flooding, land subsidence, sea level rise, and water infrastructure. Assessing the impact of speculation on urban life and morphology requires attention to its implications for social and environmental justice and urban sustainability and resilience. This event will take place online via Zoom.
Speaker and Chair Biographies:
HELGA LEITNER is a Research Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095. E-mail: hleitner@geog.ucla.edu. She has published on the politics of scale, citizenship, and belonging; politics of difference and race relations in urban multicultures; social and environmental justice activism; urban resilience; and most recently on urban land transformations, livelihoods, and finance capital in cities of the Global South.
ERIC SHEPPARD is a Research Professor in the Department of Geography at The University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095. E-mail: esheppard@geog.ucla.edu. His scholarship embraces geographical political economy and sociospatial theory, currently focusing on uneven geographies of capitalist globalization, more-than-capitalist practices, southern urban theory, urban social movements, and urban land transformations.
Prof. Hyun Bang Shin (@urbancommune) is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science and directs the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre. His research centres on the critical analysis of the political economy of speculative urbanisation, gentrification and displacement, urban spectacles, and urbanism with particular attention to Asian cities. His books include Planetary Gentrification (Polity, 2016), Neoliberal Urbanism, Contested Cities and Housing in Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Exporting Urban Korea? Reconsidering the Korean Urban Development Experience (Routledge, 2021), and The Political Economy of Mega Projects in Asia: Globalization and Urban Transformation (Routledge, forthcoming). He is Editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and is also a trustee of the Urban Studies Foundation.