"[A] wide-ranging yet in-depth study of the city and its multi-dimensional challenges contains a felicitous mix of theoretical investigations grounded in real-life examples. . .Kusno shows what can be done when people come together, whether in the face of flooding, traffic or the desire of government and developers to flee the city. Left alone, the people who call Jakarta home will very likely flourish."Urban Studies Journal
"The urban is a mellifluous, often malevolent, cacophony of enactments, encumbered by plunder, and enlivened by singular inventions—a process no more illustriously embodied than by Jakarta, which has never been as brilliantly explored nor exorcised as in Kusno’s meditations on urban governmentality as a means of ruling from the middle of things, a constant re-arrangement of oscillating fragments and power relations still fumbling for a universal ideal." - AbdouMaliq Simone, The University of Sheffield
"Richly textured, revealing, brilliant and original, Abidin Kusno’s Jakarta constitutes an object lesson in urban analysis, where memory, archetype and self, generate complex substrata to our understanding of cities. Jakarta is a revelation, a new way of exposing the invisible, and a method of talking to the multitude and the common in all of us." - Alexander Cuthbert, University of New South Wales
"Placing his personal experiences of the metropolis in conversation with western social theory, Kusno conveys the insights that thinking through Jakarta makes possible. This essay collection, examining Jakarta’s everyday life, complex spatiality, variegated stakeholders and political, mobility and environmental challenges, will enable the reader to appreciate how Jakarta works." - Eric Sheppard, University of California
