Designing Space for the Majority: Urban Displacements of the Human

Cubic Journal is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal. All journal content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). Work may be copied, shared and distributed when authors are properly accredited; this includes outlines of any work. Amendments to the original work needs to be shown. The licensor does not in any way endorse third party views or how journal content is used by others. How to Cite APA AbdouMaliq, S. (2018). Designing Space for the Majority: Urban Displacements of the Human. Cubic Journal, 1(1), 124-135. http://dx.doi.org/10.31182/cubic.2018.1.007

The city existed as the locus through which certain inhabitants could reflect on their being as a singular prerogative untranslatable across other modalities of existence; the formation of a "we" unrelated to anything but itself, yet inscr ibed as the node whose interests and aspirations were to be concretised through enclosure and the ex-propriation of critical metabolic relations (Cohen, 2012;. The capacity to ref lect and manage the recursive intersections of materials, space, and bodies required inscriptions of gradation that specify various levels of capacity and right, designate who was to be considered human or not as the means to capture the volume of labour sufficient to monumentalise the centration of human form, and to constitute the living embodiment of property and freedom (Ruddick, 2015). The capacity of the human to operate according to the maximisation of its position required a notion of free will, of the ability to act freely amongst otherwise constraining interdependencies, and this necessitated relegating certain bodies to the status of property, capable of circulating only through the transactional circuits of economic exchange and valuation.
In the colonial urban, the outlines of the "modern city" took shape against a backdrop of appropriable and disposable labour whose self-reproduction was largely the responsibility of labour itself (King, 1976;McFarlane, 2008). Populations were frequently expelled, not recognised or accor-ded limited and provisional rights. Whereas postcolonial states often sought to extend a broad range of public affordances to urban residents of varying backgrounds and statuses, the impetus of modernisation and the incursions of on-going imperialism largely left the majority of residents of postcolonial cities in a prolonged state of political limbo and underdevelopment (Betts and Ross, 1985;Legg 2007Legg , 2008. All phases of colonial rule did experience substantial resistance on the part of urban majorities, and this resistance was multifaceted in terms of the explicitness of the demands and the organisational vehicles deployed to win spaces of operation (Kipfer, 2007).
Resistance was never simply a claim for inclusion into the prevailing ideological frameworks or administrative disposition of urban life. The subjected, assumed to be largely incapable of concretising multiple collective imaginations, largely operated in the interstices between sheer survival, intensive surveillance and indifference to generate provisional, always mutating forms of urban life not consonant to its hegemonic forms (Scott, 2005;McKittrick, 2013).
These were concretised throughout long processes of "auto-construction." Here the density availed by urbanisation means not just packing in a lot of things into a limited space. Rather, it is the creation of a particular kind of space where people, with their devices, resources, tools, imaginations, and techniques, are always acting on each other, pushing and pulling, folding in and leaving out, making use of whatever others are doing, paying attention to all that is going on, fighting and collaborating. Metropolitan systems throughout much of Latin America, Africa and Asia gave rise to the elaboration of "majority" or "popular districts" that largely served as an interstices between the modern city of cadastres, grids, contractual employment, zoning, and sectorial, demarcated institutions and the zones of temporary, makeshift, and largely impoverished residence. While folding in aspects of each kind of territory, such majority districts were not simply hybrids, but staging areas for a multiplicity of agendas, operations, social compositions, and aspirations. (Holston, 2008;Perlman, 2010;Vasuvedan, 2015;Caldeira, 2016;Minuchin, 2016;Vinay and Maringanti, 2016).
Processes of auto-construction depended upon intricate ways of allocating land and opportunities, working out divisions of labour and complementary efforts, and enabling individuals to experiment with their own singular ways of doing things but in concert with others. Thus, governance institutions were built as distributed across differential relationships and spaces, rather than located in specific offices, bureaus, sectors, territories or functions. In other words, "institutions" existed, but in a dispersed rather than centralised form; institutional functions existed within and across a landscape of relationships of residents as they actively parcelled and settled land, elaborated provisioning systems, and attempted to insert themselves in the flows of materials, food, skills, and money (Benjamin, 2008;Lindell, 2008;Bayat, 2010;Anwar, 2014;Simone, 2014;Perera, 2015).
Such distributed agency did not obviate the consolidation of metropolitan and national institutions endeavouring to exert administrative and political control over these districts. Yet as largely interstitial territories-between divergent logics of accumulation and consolidation-they became a critical arena through which states attempted to configure particular practices of governing (McQuarrie, et al., 2013). Rather than the state developing as an abstract, clearly delineated entity separate from the realities experienced by the majority of residents, states had to "find their feet" operating through engagements with various ways of doing things that did not fall squarely within their purview or within legal frameworks (Singerman, 2009;Roy, 2011;Ghernter, 2014;Boudreau and Davis, 2016). In order for states to attain some traction and legitimacy within the accumulation and management practices of the urban popular, they often had to operate through a wide range of so-called "informal" logics and practices. As Davis (2016) points out the authority of the state does not always coincide with its interests and, as such, informality becomes the locus that attempts to mediate the tensions that ensue when these two aspects of the state conflict.
More significantly, the very shaping of the state -its rules, policies, operational procedures -are largely contingent upon how it addresses and operates through the multiple trajectories of selfevolution that have characterised the elaboration of majority districts.

Interfacing disarticulation
At the same time, as metropolitan systems become increasingly articulated to a wide range of production networks, commodity chains, and  (Sundaram, 2010;Weinstein, 2013;Vigar, 2014).
In such conditions, "real governance" was often subcontracted out to various types of extrajudicial authority or a local political class was cultivated by availing various favours and moneymaking opportunities (Elyachar, 2005;Fawaz, 2008;Klink, 2013;Jaglin, 2014). Perhaps more importantly a long-honed capacity of such districts to live in close proximity to the poor and evolve forms of reciprocity and patronage increasingly became the target of political elites so as to drive a wedge between these relationships (Dill, 2009;Datta, 2012;Gago, 2015). States frequently preyed on majority districts' fear of impoverishment, particularly as industrial and public sectors jobs started disappearing and various types of informal entrepreneurship were increasingly overcrowded.
In some cities, ruling political machines stoked various forms of ethnic and religious conflict that upended long traditions of mutual accommodation (Weinstein, 2013). In some cities the proliferation of violence or environmental danger generated mistrust and fears that local assets would be devalued. In various constellations of decline in which different combinations of rent-seeking, maximised ground rent, local insecurities, weakening social ties were at work, residents of majority districts, both volitionally and involuntarily, sought to re-establish themselves in new areas of the city or in the apartment blocks proliferating across most Southern cities (Harms, 2013;Zeiderman, 2016).
With its long history of consolidating the "human" as a self-referential subject of history detached from long-chains of signification that come from the capacity to continuously translate the cognitive and behavioural operations of human life in terms of its interdependencies with other species and materials, the urban finds itself constantly in need of "salvation." The urban repeatedly calls for intervention; there is always a sense of urgency to address, a series of problems to solve. As a complex ecological machine, the urban, in its intricate interweaving of infrastructure, affect, materials, design, and bodies, nevertheless, enables the detachment of "the resident" as an individuated agency capable of endless improvement (Braun, 2014;Amin, 2015;Szeman, 2015). Regardless of its dependency on archives of tertiary retention (Stiegler, 2009), on technical capacities that are indifferent to the well-being of the organism, and on a cognitive assemblage that distributes capacities of calculation and decision-making beyond the realm of consciousness (Hansen, 2012;Hayles, 2016), the surfeit of arrogance underlying such privileged individuation (of human action and thought) can only decompose into a proliferation of divides and conflicts as such a process of "defacement" intensifies.

Spatialising Efficacy
The cruel irony of contemporary urbanisation is

Restoring the Majority
Over the past decades, poor communities adopted What unites different kinds of residents of these complexes is the tendency for them not to consider this place as a "home," at least in the sense that is culturally syntonic to what they have known in the past. The stability of home itself, at least in Jakarta, is something that is slowly diminishing as an overarching value in favour of the importance of circulation, of being able to spread out across various provisional affiliations that are no longer locally based. In this way, one could look at these complexes in Jakarta as the mostly "silent"