A comparison between Greater Melbourne Street Directory and Jakarta Street Atlas

Courtesy Gunther W. Holtorf/Falk and Melway Publishing

Acknowledgement

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This essay draws in part upon an essay published with the title 'Cognitive mapping the dispersed city' in Lindner 2006.

Aerial view along airport toll road towards central Jakarta

Author's photograph

Analysis of urbanism in SE Asia

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See Peter Nas's (2003) edited collection on Indonesian cities for a set of essays that represent both tendencies. His introduction to the volume usefully summarises some of the principal strands in the analysis of urbanism in Southeast Asia, and Indonesia in particular.

Bhabha 1994

(Bibliography)
Bhabha, Homi, The Location of Culture, Routledge, London, 1994.

Breman 1982

(Bibliography)
Breman, Jan, 'The Village on Java and the Early-Colonial State', Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 9, no. 4, 1982, pp. 189–240.

Cairns 2006

(Bibliography)
Cairns, Stephen, 'Cognitive mapping the dispersed city', Urban Space and Cityscapes: Perspectives from Modern and Contemporary Culture, ed. Christophe Lindner (Routledge, London, 2006) 192-205.

Calthorpe and Fulton 2001

(Bibliography)
Calthorpe, Peter, and Fulton, William, The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl, Island Press, Washington DC, 2001.

Cohen 1996

(Bibliography)
Cohen, Michael A., 'The Hypothesis of Urban Convergence: Are Cities in the North and South Becoming More Alike in an Age of Globalization', in M. Cohen, B. Rubble, J. Tulchin, and A. Garland (eds), Preparing for the Urban Future and Local Forces, Woodrow Wilson Center Press, Washington D C, 1996, pp. 25–38.

Corner 2002

(Bibliography)
Corner, James, 'The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention', in D. Cosgrove (ed.), Mappings, Reaktion, London, 2002, pp. 213–52.

Cullen 1971

(Bibliography)
Cullen, Gordon, The Concise Townscape, Architectural Press, London, 1971.

de Sola Morales 1995

(Bibliography)
de Sola Morales, Ignasi Rubio, 'Terrain Vague', in C. Davidson (ed.), Anyplace, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1995, pp. 118–23.

Dick and Rimmer 1998

(Bibliography)
Dick, H. W. and Rimmer, P. J., 'Beyond the Third World City: The New Urban Geography of South-east Asia', Urban Studies, 35, 12, 1998, pp. 2303–21.

Duany, Plater-Zyberk and Speck 2005

(Bibliography)
Duany, Andres, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck, Smart Growth: New Urbanism in American Communities, McGraw Hill, New York, 2005.

Google Earth 2008

(Bibliography)
Google Earth, viewed 3 February 2008, http://earth.google.com/index.html

Greater Melbourne Street Directory 2000

(Bibliography)
Greater Melbourne Street Directory, Edition 27, Melway Publishing, Melbourne, 2000.

Herrmann 1962

(Bibliography)
Herrmann, Wolfgang, Laugier and Eighteenth Century French Theory, A. Zwemmer, London, 1962.

Holtorf 2001

(Bibliography)
Holtorf, Gunther, Jabotabek: Street Atlas, Falk Verlag, Hamburg, 2001.

Home 1996

(Bibliography)
Home, Stewart (ed.), What Is Situationism? A Reader, AK Press, Edinburgh, 1996.

Jameson 1984

(Bibliography)
Jameson, Fredric, 'Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism', New Left Review 146 (1984) 59–92.

Jameson 1991

(Bibliography)
Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 1991.

Krier 1998

(Bibliography)
Krier, Leon, Architecture: Choice or Fate, Andreas Papadakis, Windsor, 1998.

Laquian 2005

(Bibliography)
Laquian, Aprodicio A., Beyond Metropolis: The Planning and Governance of Asia's Mega-Urban Regions, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2005.

Laugier 1977

(Bibliography)
Laugier, Marc-Antoine, An Essay on Architecture, trans., Wolfgang Herrmann and Anni Herrmann, Hennessey and Ingalls, Los Angeles, 1977.

Lindner 2006

(Bibliography)
Lindner, Christophe (ed.), Urban Space and Cityscapes: Perspectives from Modern and Contemporary Culture, Routledge, London, 2006.

Lindsey 2006

(Bibliography)
Lindsey, Tim, 'From Soepomo to Prabowo: Law, Violence and Corruption in the Preman state', in C. Coppel (ed.) Violent Conflicts in Indonesia: Analysis, Representation, Resolution, Routledge, London, 2006, pp. 19–35.

Lynch 1960

(Bibliography)
Lynch, Kevin, The Image of the City, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1960.

Ma and Wu 2005

(Bibliography)
Ma, Laurence J. C. and Fulong Wu, 'Restructuring the Chinese City: Diverse Processes and Reconstituted Spaces', in L. Ma and F. Wu (eds), Restructuring the Chinese City: Changing Society, Economy and Space, Routledge, London, 2005, pp. 1–20.

McCargo 2003

(Bibliography)
McCargo, Duncan, 'Media as an Agent of Stability? Suharto's Indonesia', in D. McCargo, Media and Politics in Pacific Asia, Routledge, London, 2003, pp. 77–99.

McDonough 2002

(Bibliography)
McDonough, Tom (ed.), Guy Debord and the Situationist International, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2002.

McGee 1991

(Bibliography)
McGee, Terrence G., 'The Emergence of Desakota Regions in Asia', in Norton Ginsberg, Bruce Koppel and Terrence G. McGee (eds), The Extended Metropolis: Settlement Transition in Asia, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1991, pp. 3–25.

McGee 2007

(Bibliography)
McGee, Terrence G., 'Many Knowledge(s) of Southeast Asia: Rethinking Southeast Asia in Real Time', Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 48, 2007, pp. 270–80.

Middling Theory

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Lynch's project sits in the middle ground of the postwar urban design discourse, which in one way or another, sought to bring social, subjective and psychological themes to bear on more technical or formal conceptions of the city.

Lynch's concern for socio-psychological consequences of urban infrastructures and forms suggests certain affinities with Situationist psycho-geographics of the 1950s. But his restrained academic approach eschews the radical aura and alter-potentialities of that project. In terms of his contemporaries, Lynch might, on the one hand, be contrasted with a figure such as Aldo van Eyck who—drawing inspiration directly from the situationist avant-garde—formulated a theory of inter-related socio-psychological 'forms' and architectural 'counter-forms' (Strauven 1998). On the other hand, he might be aligned with someone like Gordon Cullen who promulgated the notion of townscape as an 'art of relationship' activated by the peripatetic gaze of urban subjects (Cullen 1971). Lynch, like Cullen, pitched his work as moderate, reasonable and systematic. His openly determinist attitudes towards architectural and urban research gave his work a strong programmatic and operational thrust.

This moderate programmatic character—as distinct from the avant-garde and assertively contestatory urban speculations of Guy Debord, Asger Jorn, Constant and others (see Sadler 1998)—made Lynch's work attractive to a mainstream planning, urban design and architecture discourse which sought guidance and inspiration in the aftermath of the discrediting of CIAM-endorsed modernism. This facilitated the wide circulation and acceptance of the idea that rapidly changing urban conditions demand the invention of new representational strategies and, furthermore, that socio-psychological dimensions of urban life were integral to this. Evidence for this might be sought in the now orthodox status of subject-centred urban design and planning processes that attempt to operationalise design through the deployment of user-studies, social surveys, focus groups, and a host of community participation techniques.

Nas 1989

(Bibliography)
Nas, Peter, 'Town and Countryside in Indonesia: A Sceptic's View', Sojourn: Social Issues in Southeast Asia, vol. 4, no. 1, 1989, pp. 20–33.

Nas 2003

(Bibliography)
Nas, Peter (ed.), The Indonesian Town Revisited, LIT, London, 2003.

Nas and Boender 2003

(Bibliography)
Nas, Peter and Welmoet Boender, 'The Indonesian City in Urban Theory', in P. Nas (ed.), The Indonesian Town Revisited, LIT, London, 2003, pp. 3–16.

Plant 1992

(Bibliography)
Plant, Sadie, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age, Routledge, London, 1992.

Sadler 1998

(Bibliography)
Sadler, Simon, The Situationist City, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1998.

Sassen 2001

(Bibliography)
Sassen, Saskia, 'Global cities and Global City-Regions: A Comparison', Global City Regions: Trends, Theory, Policy, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001.

Statistics Indonesia 2008

(Bibliography)
Statistics Indonesia, 2008, viewed 3 February 2008, http://www.bps.go.id/

Strauven 1998

(Bibliography)
Strauven, Francis, Aldo van Eyck: The Shape of Relativity, Architectura & Natura, Amsterdam, 1998.

Streetdirectory.com 2008

(Bibliography)
Streetdirectory.com, Jakarta, viewed 3 February 2008, http://www.streetdirectory.com/indonesia/jakarta

Webster 1995

(Bibliography)
Webster, Douglas, 'Mega-urbanization in ASEAN: New Phenomenon or Transitional Phase to the "Los Angeles World City"?', in Terrence G. McGee and Ira Robinson (eds), The Mega-Urban Regions of Southeast Asia, UBC Press, Vancouver, pp. 27–41, 1995.

Woodier 2006

(Bibliography)
Woodier, Jonathan, 'Perning in the Gyre: Indonesia, the Globalised Media and the "War on Terror"', in B. Cole (ed.), Conflict, Terrorism and the Media in Asia, Routledge, London, 2006, pp. 41–60.