Technologies of Government: ConstitutingSubjectivities, Spaces, and Infrastructuresin Colonial and Contemporary Jakarta

MICHELLE KOOY and KAREN BAKKER

AbstractThis article seeks to extend recent debates on urban infrastructure access by exploringthe interrelationship between subjectivity, urban space and infrastructure. Specifically, itpresents a case study of the development and differentiation of the urban water supply inJakarta, Indonesia. Drawing on concepts of governmentality and materiality, it arguesthat the construction of difference through processes of segregation and exclusionenacted via colonial and contemporary ‘technologies of government’ has spatial,discursive and material dimensions. In particular, it seeks to ‘rematerialize’ discussionsof (post-)colonial urban governmentality through insisting upon the importance of thecontested and iterative interrelationship between discursive strategies, socio-economicagendas, identity formation and infrastructure creation. In exploring these claims withrespect to Jakarta, the article draws on data derived from archival, interview andparticipant observation research to present a genealogy of the city’s urban water supplysystem from its colonial origins to the present. We illustrate how discourses of modernity,hygiene and development are enrolled in the construction of urban subjects and thedisposition of water supply infrastructure (and are also resisted), and document therelationship between the classification of urban residents, the differentiation of urbanspaces and lack of access to services. The article closes with a discussion of theimplications for analyses of the differentiation of urban services and urban space incities in the global South.

IntroductionJakarta’s urban landscape is cluttered: spaces both beneath and above the city aretraversed by a ‘tangled network’ of public, private and communal infrastructure foraccessing, filtering and distributing a variety of water sources (Febrina, 2006). Themajority of the city’s residents rely on a complex mix of types of water and types ofservice provider: shallow and deep groundwater, piped network water, river water andbottled water on the one hand, delivered through pipes, pumps, private wells, ambulatoryvendors, depots, tanks and networks on the other. Not surprisingly, less than one-third ofJakarta’s estimated 12 million residents have access to a piped water supply in their

The research upon which this article is based was funded by a grant from the Social Sciences andHumanities Research Council of Canada. Assistance from research assistants Endah Shofiani and E.J.Martijn, and cooperation by water supply professionals in Jakarta and staff at local and internationalNGO offices during fieldwork are gratefully acknowledged, as is assistance from archival staff atcolonial archives in Amsterdam and Leiden (the Netherlands) during research in 2003. The authorsbenefited from discussions with Abidin Kusno, Michael Leaf, Teti Argo and Joost Cote.

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homes.1 However, while all households use a heterogeneous mixture of supply sources,poor households typically access lower qualities and quantities of water, purchased atunit costs higher than those for the water available to wealthier households.

Over several decades the lack of access to the city’s centralized piped network, and theassociated impacts upon the urban poor, have provided the rationale for the initiation ofnumerous development programs with the ‘will to improve’ access to clean water inJakarta (Bakker et al., 2006; Li, 2007).2 Premised upon analyses which treat theproblems of persistent exclusion as apolitical and purely technical matters (see Li, 2007),successive programs of development have variously identified the lack of access to watersupply infrastructure as a problem of corruption (Server, 1996), lack of finance (WorldBank, 1974; Akhtar 2005; World Bank, 2005), or of rapid rates of urban growthoutpacing infrastructural development (Hamer et al., 1986; Chifos and Suselo, 2000).Alternately, academic analyses critiquing these interventions point to the effects ofneoliberal restructuring and its concomitant reshaping of urban infrastructure networks(Graham and Marvin, 2001). However, as this article documents, differential access towater supply has characterized the city since the colonial period, and has not beensignificantly altered either by programs of development or the rise of neoliberalism (seeBakker et al., 2006; Kooy and Bakker, forthcoming). How, then, are we to explain thepersistent differentiation of access to water in Jakarta (and, indeed, in urban areas in theSouth more generally)? To answer this question, the article proposes an alternativeconceptual framework which focuses on the relationship between governmentality,identity, urban space and urban infrastructure. We argue that the discursive constructionof the ‘modern’ urban citizen that originally emerged in the colonial period, and whichaccompanied the introduction of a reticulated water network, was predicated uponand subsequently reinforced by racialized, and then class-based, divisions within the(post-)colonial city.

The core of the article presents a historical analysis based upon archival research3 inthe Netherlands, and fieldwork4 conducted in Jakarta throughout the period 2004 to2006. We begin, however, with a conceptual discussion of the interrelationship betweensubjectivities, spaces and infrastructures, before moving on to elucidate the linksbetween the construction of ‘modern’, governable citizens, infrastructure and urbanspace in colonial Batavia and post-colonial Jakarta. Throughout, we focus on theinterrelationship between urban subjectivities and urban infrastructures, arguing thataccess to different types of water supply infrastructure has been deployed both to defineresidents of the city as ‘modern’ or ‘in need of development’, and to rationalize exclusionfrom ‘modern’ water supply services. The article closes with some considerations of therelevance of this ‘rematerialization’ of post-colonial governmentality for the study of(post-)colonial cities and urban spaces. Countering post-colonial critiques of the overt

1 The official (generous) estimate made by the Jakarta Water Supply Regulatory Body in 2004 wasthat 56% of the city’s residents were connected to the network, but this figure included residentswho accessed the network through public standpipes and mobile water vendors. Also, coverageratios should be understood as rough estimates; their calculation is dependent upon a number ofvariables which are only imprecisely measured, such as urban population and average size ofhousehold. Reported figures vary significantly, and do not indicate the number of households whichhave a connection but which rely primarily on other sources (e.g. groundwater) due to quality orservice concerns (e.g. low pressure).

2 The term ‘will to improve’ is borrowed from Li’s (2007) chronology of (post-)colonialgovernmentality in Indonesia.

3 The Nationaal Archief in Den Haag, KITLV (Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde) inLeiden, and KIT (Koninglijk Instituut Tropical) in Amsterdam.

4 Fieldwork entailed: participant observation with local and international NGOs involved indevelopment and/or activist programs in urban poor communities; interviewing local andinternational water supply professionals in the private sector, donor and engineering community;and discourse analysis of various media, development donor and activist documentations of watersupply in Jakarta from the 1950s to 2006.

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focus on discursive relations of power (McEwan, 2003; Harris, 2004), we argue that theimbrication of infrastructure and identity is an important dimension to the ‘lived reality’of residents of the post-colony.

Technologies of government: constitutingsubjectivities, spaces and infrastructuresRecent work on cities in the South has emphasized the interrelationship between urbanidentities and the spatiality of colonial and post-colonial power and discourse (see, forexample, Bunnell, 2002; Kothari, 2006; Legg, 2006; Myers, 2006). Much of this workextends and critiques Foucauldian theories of governmentality. Paying specific attentionto the process of constructing knowledges through which ‘subjects’ are governed, whichthey actively resist and reshape (Cooper and Stoler, 1989; Stoler, 1995; Li, 1999),post-colonial scholars also document how relations of power are enacted within physicalspace (Legg, 2006), and through material practices (Agrawal, 2005).

Some of this work has highlighted strategies of resistance by subjects, documentingnuanced negotiations between the ‘governed’ and ‘governing’ (Scott, 1985; 1992; Li,1999; Young, 2001; Howell, 2004). Other scholars working within the analytic ofgovernmentality outside of the Western liberal democratic state have emphasized thenecessary contradictions and incompleteness inherent in government seeking ‘diversefinalities’ in the management of all of life (Li, 2007). This has been a useful meansof extending analyses of governmentality to include the role of non-state actors(Rose-Redwood, 2006), and of producing post-colonial development geographies ofurbanization which offer an alternative to the state-centric, often implicitly Northern-biased understandings of cities in the South (Power et al., 2006; Robinson, 2002; 2003).

This work also usefully illustrates the ways in which the construction of differencethrough processes of segregation and exclusion has both spatial and discursivedimensions. In this article, we attempt to broaden this approach to consider thematerial dimensions of post-colonial relations of rule. In particular, we contend thatgovernmentality has a material as well as discursive dimension: relations of power areinscribed in physical space as well as social relations. Governmentality, in other words,has material effects; and material conditions play a role in constituting and/or contesting,government by constraining and shaping their form and effectiveness.

This conceptual stance draws in part on recent debates in political ecology, whichbegins from the assumption that ‘social worlds are as much constituted by materiality asthe other way around’ (Miller, 1998: 3), and draws inspiration from critiques of thenature–culture binary in anthropology, sociology, geography and cognate disciplines(see, for example, Appadurai, 1986; Ingold, 1986; Descola and Pálssen, 1996; Thrift,1996; Braun and Castree, 1998; Whatmore, 2002). Many applications of politicalecology in the South have been to rural areas, and a significant subset have focused onenvironmental issues; Arun Agrawal’s (2005) study of colonial governmentality, forexample, demonstrates the mutual constitutiveness of colonial governmentality, theidentities of colonial subjects and the environment (in this case, the forests of India’sKumaon region). But the mutual constitutiveness between what Agrawal terms‘technologies of government’, subjectivity and materiality is, we would argue, equallyapplicable in urban settings. This assertion is, of course, not limited to urban areas; asrecent work has shown, both rural and urban sites are (often mutually) implicated inpost-colonial governmentalities (see, for example, Bebbington, 2000; Myers, 2006). Buturban areas are of particular interest in part because of recent developments in urbanpolitical ecology and debates over ‘rematerializing’ urban geography, which haveexplored how urban infrastructure and technologies of government are mutuallyimplicated in processes of urbanization (Swyngedouw, 1996; 1999; 2004; Gandy, 1997;2002; 2005; Lees, 2002; Latham and McCormack, 2004; Heynen et al., 2006).

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As Gandy and Swyngedouw in particular have shown with respect to colonialsituations, the social relations of urbanization both shape, and are in turn shaped by,highly differentiated circuits of water flowing within the city (such as polluted rivers andcanals for marginalized, migrant or ‘illegal’ urban populations, which overlap both assupply and effluent with the piped water supply for the affluent). As water supplyinfrastructure is long-lived (well over one hundred years in many instances), thesecircuits and networks simultaneously embody successive ‘relations of rule’ through thepatterns of water supply infrastructure and water use practices they both enable anddisable. An analytical framework of governmentality highlights how these relations aremobilized within particular systems of rule and exert specific effects upon the productionof space and identity. In this case, we illustrate how relations around urban water are botha product, and productive, of a system of colonial authority that was based upon creatingand reinforcing racial and class divisions. In other words, the construction of differencethrough processes of segregation and exclusion enacted via colonial ‘technologies ofgovernment’ has spatial, discursive and material dimensions — through the mutualconstitution of subjectivities, urban spaces, and urban infrastructure. Elucidating theselinks is the focus of our case study, to which the article now turns.

Circulating ‘citizenship’: modernity, hygiene, and ‘rights’ to waterProducing native subjects: the colonial water supply system

As repeated epidemics of cholera and typhoid swept Batavia throughout the nineteenthcentury, demoting it from the ‘Queen’ to the ‘Graveyard’ of the East, water supplybecame a central concern for the Dutch colonial government (Abeyasekere, 1987). Aselsewhere, new scientific theories of disease transmission via bacteria had begunsupplanting formerly widespread notions of ‘miasmic’ contamination (Goubert, 1986;Gandy, 2006). Disseminated largely by military doctors in Batavia (Moens, 1873), thesetheories proved congruent with the Netherlands’ evolving ambitions for its strategiccolony. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Netherlands Indies colonialgovernment began to legitimize its colonial authority through a racialized hierarchy of‘development’ (Gouda, 1995). However, the existing blurred spectrum of native,5

Chinese, Arabic, Eurasian and full-blood European populations visibly contradicted, andcomplicated, the government’s claim to racial superiority (Taylor, 1983). The ‘natural’dominance of European over native (and Chinese and Arabic), and the new valorizationof ‘modern European life’ as the colonial cultural developmental ideal was contradictedby an ‘Indische’ European population who integrated ‘native’ cultural practices into theirhouseholds, and lacked clear biological markers of particular racial identities (Stoler,1995). Hence, the production of differences to enable more visual distinctions to be madebetween racial categories was considered crucial to colonial control and the colonialgovernment’s campaigns against the ‘degeneration’ of European citizens into native life(see Stoler, 1995; Cote, 2003).

Batavia’s first urban water supply exemplifies this broader project. Following adetailed scientific investigation into both the hygienic qualities of Batavia’s waters, andinto the (lax) hygiene behaviours of the city’s ‘European’ residents (see Moens, 1873),the government exhorted the European residents to ‘take more care’ regarding theirselection and consumption of drinking water, complementing the campaign with theprovision of a clean water source through artesian hydrants. In the 1870s, the city’s firstcentralized water supply system (using artesian water) was built. Intended only for the

5 It is important to note that ‘native’ was by no means a homogenous category, it comprised a widerange of ethnic groups from across the archipelago: Betawi, Buginese, Madurese, Balinese,Sundanese, Javanese and more (see Castles, 1967).

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small minority of European residents living within a narrow strip of ‘development’ in thecentral area of the city (Van Raay, 1915a), the system provided free water to Europeanareas of the city, but deliberately excluded ‘native’ residents. In contrast to the surfacewater from the city’s kalis (canals) upon which natives relied, European households nowhad access to scientifically monitored groundwater, circulated through iron pipes ratherthan the corporeal networks of ambulatory water vendors.

Forty years after the system’s construction, natives — already the majority of urbanresidents6 — were gradually given access through a few public standpipes, but were notprovided with access to household connections until the late 1920s (Maronier, 1929).Even then, records from the 1930s show that 90% of European residents were connectedto the network, and used up 78% of the city’s domestic supply, while comprising only7% of the urban population.7 Native residents relying on mobile vendors rather thanpiped networks for their water paid more than double the cost to European residents(Heetjans, 1923).

Differential access to water supply infrastructure was mobilized discursively by thecolonial administration to deepen the differences between European and native (or,increasingly, ‘modern’ and ‘primitive’) urban residents. The new water supply systemenabled a specific set of material practices related to indoor hygiene that were coded assignifiers of a racially pure European identity.8 European households in the city wereequipped with ‘every kind of modern convenience’ — including ‘indoor bathrooms fromwhich the fresh water from the tap may be showered over the body’ (Gemeente Batavia,1937: 70) — which enabled water-intensive hygienic practices to be carried out daily,and in private. ‘Modern’ relationships between water supply, water quality and thehuman body were now defined through the scientific developments — notably in waterquality assessments — made in the mid-nineteenth century9 (Moens, 1873). The colonialofficial who conducted the first extensive (and scientific) study of the various qualities ofwater supply in Batavia, for example, placed the water use practices of Europeanresidents under a microscope,10 arguing that traditional methods of water treatment —lekstonen and martevanen (a simple lime-sandstone filter and large water pots to allowthe ‘settling’ of particulate matter in river water) — and quality surveillance (largelythrough individual assessments of colour, odour, and taste) undermined the morality andcivilized status of the city’s European residents (Moens, 1873: 416). Europeans wereinstructed to replace their traditional lekstonen and sensory assessments of water qualitywith scientific assessments of hygienic requirements (Maronier, 1929: 230) which werenecessary to address the ‘unseen’ microscopic threats whose recognition was a marker ofcivilization (Moens, 1873: 292).

In contrast, practices such as bathing in canals and drawing drinking water from riverscould be, and were, denoted as ‘degenerate’ and unhygienic. Local scientific studies(largely carried out by military doctors) provided the basis upon which specific watersources were declared ‘sanitary’, and blame for cholera and typhoid epidemics wasincreasingly directed at natives’ ‘hygienic circumstances’ (Maronier, 1929: 225). Theidentity of Europeans as modern and developed was secured through comparison withthe native population. Colonial scientists noted, for example, that, ‘among the nativepopulation it is very common to drink murky water, not or not adequately filtered’

6 In 1875, three years after initial construction of the artesian water supply, native residents made upfour-fifths of the urban population (Abeyasekere, 1987).

7 In 1929, 6,926 kampung households were supplied with 24 litres, while 10,392 European householdswere supplied with 84 litres. The European population in Batavia in 1930 was 37,067, while thenative Indonesian population was over 400,000 (Eggink, 1930).

8 Stoler (1995) emphasizes the constitution of European identity through ‘culturally coded practices’.9 The discovery of bacteria and the development of the science of hygiene established new relations

between the water supply and human health, see Goubert (1986) and Melosi (2000).10 Colonial scientists conducted laboratory tests on various sources of ground water, and surface

water, giving readers the detailed biochemical content of each source, and including an illustratedappendix on diagrams of the microscopic organisms (Moens, 1873).

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(Moens, 1873: 402), practices that had until recently also characterized ‘European’households, but which they had now presumably ‘evolved’ out of.

The policing of these distinctions between European and native residents, neverhermetic, proved a source of concern for the colonial administration (Stoler, 1992; Cote,2003). Long-term residents and ‘degenerate Europeans’11 were problematized in colonialreports due to their ‘over-familiarity’ with native culture and practice of unacceptable‘Indische’ traditions (Cote, 2003) — including preferences for ‘traditional’, untreatedwater sources and ‘unhygienic’ water practices. The problematic preference of some ofthe city’s European residents for what were now considered ‘native’ water sources andbathing amenities was noted by the engineers recently arriving from the metropole. Theslow growth of piped water supply from the artesian network was blamed on those whowere ‘born in the Indies’ (i.e. racially mixed despite being legally European). Despite theextension of the artesian water supply system in European areas of the city, someresidents did not ‘graduate’ to using the new artesian water source provided by thegovernment.12

Somebody who has lived in Indië for years, or who was born there, lives in a house with a wellin the inner courtyard, which is never the subject of complaints [over water quality]. From thiswell the ‘mandibak’ (manual-shower-basin) is filled and water is taken for further householdlife . . . The bathroom and toilet are, as with many older homes, somewhat backward inappearance and equipment, compared to current living standards (Koster, 1919: 5).

In contrast, ‘newer European homes’ built by the wave of middle-class, newly arrived,solidly ‘Dutch’ residents were ‘equipped with more hygienically designed bathrooms’(Brandenburg, 1924) that were connected by a piped network to the artesian waterhydrants, replicating the standards of ‘Dutch cities . . . [with] centralized water provisionand other perfect technical and medical services’ (Koster, 1919: 5).

The production of difference between sources and qualities of urban waters, and‘differently modern’ populations also facilitated the desired separation of urban spaces.The colonial government’s construction of an artesian water supply system for Europeanresidents enabled the European population to distance itself from surface water bothspatially (proximity of residences) and bio-physically (replacing drinking water sourceswith groundwater). With the urban landscape in a process of physical transformationfrom the decentralized riverside ‘garden villas’ of the ‘Indische’ or ‘Tempo Dulu’colonial society to a more spatially segregated, and geographically concentrated,European population (see Milone, 1967), the construction of artesian hydrants within thegrowing clusters of European residences facilitated the respatialization of the cityaccording to race, and provided contrasts between the ‘civilized’ urban life of theEuropeans and the ‘primitive’ and rural lifestyles of native residents (see van der Kroef,1954; Van Doorne, 1983). This project was so successful that by the 1920s visitors to thecity observed that: ‘Batavia is a European town built by Europeans, except for the nativesfreely bathing in the canals and rivers’ (van der Kop, 1926: 149, emphasis added). As thedevelopment of the city’s urban water supply infrastructure continued to parallel thepatterns of European urban development in Batavia (Abeyasekere, 1989), the contrast indevelopment and lifestyle between the European and native areas of the city reached alevel which began to embarrass the colonial government. In the 1940s, the government’sVisman Commission recorded the extremity of racial segregation in a city composed of‘two different worlds’ (Van Doorne, 1983).

11 The ‘degenerate’ European residents were largely of mixed descent; legally considered as‘European’, these residents were the offspring of the ‘long time colonial settlers’ who had adoptedan Asianized urban culture, see Taylor (1983) and Milone (1967).

12 In 1923 a housing ordinance addressed this problem, making connection to the city’s piped waternetwork mandatory for all houses of a certain socio-economic class (monthly rent over 25 guilders),the vast majority of which were occupied by European residents (Eggink, 1930).

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One marker of the difference between these two worlds was the disparate levels ofwater consumption which colonial authorities assumed were characteristic of differentraces. Remaining ‘rooted’ in their habits and traditions, and selecting water qualityaccording to colour, taste and smell, native residents were not as ‘modern’ or developed,and so were considered by colonial authorities to have ‘less need’ for access to the city’spiped water supply infrastructure. An engineer (and former Officer of the RoyalEngineers in the Netherlands Indies) appointed by the Municipal Council to review thedesigns for the city’s subsequent water supply system13 calculated the water needs of thecity predicated upon the different water use habits of distinct racial groups: in Van Raay’sdesign the total demand was based upon the prediction that 100% of Europeans woulduse 150 litres per capita per day, 60% of the Chinese/Arabs would use 100 litres percapita per day, and 20% of the native population would use 50 litres per capita per day(Van Raay, 1915b; van Leeuwen, 1917). ‘Non-Europeans’ would, it was accepted,continue to meet their water needs in other ways:

if one asks about the different categories, why widely varying usage figures are assumed[between races], then the reason is partly to be seen in the fact that, per lifestyle (mode ofliving), some have less water needs than others . . . [for natives] a large part of the water usedfor internal purposes [human consumption] is taken from the water supply network, while bathand wash water is taken from the existing bad wells . . . [so] we know that an average of 50litres per day is not enough for the native, this is used as a starting point for the design of thewater system (Gomperts, 1916: 3).

Perversely, while the limited extension of the piped water supply into native areas of thecity was rationalized by their lack of ‘development’, the natives’ limited ability to access(and afford) this water supply reinforced their status as ‘undeveloped’. Continuing to useriver water for the majority of their needs, native residents thereby confirmed their‘primitive’ status, as they did not observe the delineation of proper, private spaces fordomestic water use. The kalis were of particular concern. Batavia’s canals were ‘scenesof considerable activity from early morning till late afternoon. The banks of the canals,the steps that lead down into them, and the bamboo rafts are all crowded with throngs ofhalf-naked native washerwomen and laundry men’ (Vervoort, 1926: 266). Colonialhygiene officers and engineers considered this to be a public display of ‘theirundeveloped approach to the functions of life’ and their ignorance of the ‘proper formsof urban life’ (Van Breen, 1919: 138). Observing native residents using the city’s canalsand rivers for bathing and laundry, colonial chroniclers described the natives ‘glimpsedin Batavia’s canals’ as ‘children’ in both their practices, and mindset (Vervoort, 1926:266). Conveniently for the colonial government, this justified the continued need forcolonial control; the ‘children’ of the Netherlands East Indies would continue to requirethe guidance of their colonial parent.

The continued threat to public health and morality posed by large-scale use ofuntreated groundwater and surface water sources for drinking water and sanitation withinthe city resulted in repeated calls to extend the water supply network to kampongsthroughout the duration of the colonial administration. The ‘deeply rooted evil’ of publicbathing (Van Breen, 1919: 131) was, for example, targeted by the Municipal Councilthough the construction of communal, yet enclosed, washing and bathing facilities fornative residents — to ‘keep the [native] population out of the canals’ (Van Raay, 1915b:142). These facilities established ‘private’ spaces for domestic functions, andsimultaneously differentiated the waters in which it was ‘proper’ to wash oneself, one’sclothes and one’s household items. Native residents had to be led to rationalize their useof urban space (and water) according to what was ‘hygienic’ and proper; bathing in openwaterways was ‘distasteful’, and the ‘dignified [i.e. educated] adult native’ was to be

13 A spring water supply system delivering pressurized, potable water into the city was completed in1922 (Smitt, 1922).

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taught the proper ways to divide bathing and cleaning from recreation, and the properspaces and sources of water for these newly distinct functions (Karsten, 1958: 42).

Yet projects to ‘improve’ native hygiene were riven with contradictions, andsurprisingly (at least to the colonial authorities) met with resistance. Resistance surfacedthrough vandalism of standpipes, and a widespread refusal of natives to pay for waterfrom the public standpipes that were gradually extended into the kampongs (Maronier,1929; Argo, 1999). This, in turn, stymied further extension of the network, intended bythe colonial authorities to be run on a cost-recovery basis (unlike the free connectionsavailable to Europeans). Yet the failure to extend the network provoked reactions fromthe ‘modern natives’ who had begun to emerge out of Batavia’s ‘cosmopolitan’ urbanenvironment. This new type of colonial subject embraced Western technologies in orderto criticize the ways in which they were used to perpetuate, rather than eliminate, theinequities of colonial rule (Kusno, 2003). For example, the new spring water networkcreated in Batavia in the 1920s was mobilized as a symbol in anti-colonial criticism.Pointing to the ‘drifting of colonial action on calls to improve water supply and sanitationin native communities’, modern native subjects complained about the lack of watersupply infrastructure in native areas of the city, and argued for a more equitabledistribution of clean water to reduce native mortality rates and disease (Mrazek, 2002).

The evolution of ‘natives’ into modern residents threatened to disrupt the colonialsystem of classification, and their appropriation of the issue of the piped water supply forpolitical purposes was perceived as a threat to the established colonial order. Whenthe ‘newly modern’ native residents criticized the contradictory ways in which thegovernment engaged the colonized with modernity, the differences in the physical andspatial nature of the city’s ostensibly ‘public’ water supply became mobilized as acritique of colonial government. The ‘modernization’ of natives was, from thisperspective, regrettable:

Many of those who have been longer in the East than just a few years refer with a certaindisdain to the native population in and near the large European towns, and especially manygovernment officials and planters are always prepared to extol the virtues of the village nativein the interior, the simple peasant class, in contrast with the town native, who has come intotouch with European civilization. (Van der Kop, 1926: 153).

Natives were not meant to be modern — or at least not for another century. Remainingvisibly ‘rural’ in lifestyle, and primitive in habit, the natives ‘bathing in the city’s canals’were at once both ‘distasteful’ and necessary to colonial government. Pictured in anoverwhelming number of the colonial documents on urban development, the ‘natives inthe canals’ both enacted and embodied the contradictions inherent within a colonialgovernment that mobilized different modalities of power (disciplinary, sovereign,government) upon differently positioned subjects (rulers vs. ruled) for ‘diversefinalities’.14

Producing modern subjects: the post-colonial water supply system

The image of the ‘native in the canals’ continued to provoke and contradict governmentalintentions following Independence in 1949. President Sukarno’s global ambitions as aleader in the non-aligned movement (most notably via the Bandung conference in 1955)and his national ambitions of developing and unifying a multi-ethnic, multilingual andshaky nation converged, in part, in a personal project to modernize and beautify Jakarta(Kusno, 1997). However, the public monuments and highly visible infrastructureprojects initiated under Sukarno’s direct oversight were visibly undermined by the

14 Li (2007) describes some of the ‘diverse finalities’ of colonial government in the Netherlands EastIndies as securing orderly rule, entrepreneurial profit and native improvement — all of which werein tension with each other.

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‘masses of poor’ residents and their ‘public striptease’ of washing and bathing in thecity’s canals, compromising its identity as a ‘beacon for the third world’ (Hanna, 1959;Kusno, 1997). Residents with ‘backward urban lifestyles’ who did not contribute tomaking Djakarta a ‘Beautiful, Orderly, and Dynamic city’ by adopting the ‘good normsand standards of city life’ (DKI, 1972: 85) were displaced to the non-serviced peripheryof the ‘international’ area of the city.

At the end of the first decade of independence a piped water supply was only availableto 12% of Jakarta’s population (Fischer, 1959) — and this was considered anachievement given previous years of even lower coverage (Hanna, 1959), and the city’sexponential population growth after independence.15 In the 1960s, it was estimated thatonly 15% of the city’s residents were served with a household connection (Pam Jaya,1992), and as the city continued to grow in both area and population, the majority of thecity’s residents remained excluded from service. The informal, low-income ‘kampong’areas absorbed the majority of low-income migrants to Jakarta,16 and 90% of kampongresidents did not have access to piped water supply (KIP, 1976). By the late 1980s theprovision of piped water still only extended to less than one-quarter of the city’spopulation (Porter, 1996), and in the mid-1990s, only 10% of lower-income residentswere directly connected, while over 60% of the upper-income population had directaccess to the network water supply (Cestti et al., 1994; Porter, 1996; JICA, 1997; Azdan,2001). Large tracts of the poorest areas of the city are without access to water supplynetworks altogether (Forkami, 2006; Sabarini, 2007; Kooy and Bakker, forthcoming).

The stark disparity in water access echoes the spatial and social distance between theEuropean and native populations in the colonial period. While the upper class in Jakartaimport Western bathtubs, whirlpools and home spa sets to ‘turn the bathroom into arelaxing retreat’ (Lubis, 2004), the most impoverished residents of the city scavengewood scraps to construct ‘helicopter toilets’ over rivers and canals to provide themselveswith a bare minimum of privacy and ‘comfort’. Preferring to soak in a bathtub or take ashower rather than use the ‘traditional’ mandi-bak, the urban elite are now ‘too modern’for the level of infrastructure that most urban poor have not even yet achieved. Thedramatic difference in urban lifestyles and infrastructure illustrated by this conspicuousconsumption of Western lifestyle products is justified as the pursuit of a ‘modern lifestylethat emphasizes efficiency, effectiveness, comfort and healthy living’ (Wiradji, 2004: 1).

Perversely, as in the colonial city, the ‘consistent exclusion’ of kampongs from thecity’s ‘public’ water supply system has left residents with little choice other than toperpetuate their ‘unmodern’ identities.17 Living in the unserved interstices of the‘modern’ city, low-income residents build their own shallow groundwater wells andconsume dubious-quality water, or pay up to 15–33 times the official water tariff for avended water supply (Fidrus, 2006; Mukherjee, 2006). With 80% of the city’s shallowgroundwater, and almost 100% of its surface waters, contaminated by e-coli and/orheavy metals (Harsanto, 2005; Simamora, 2007), the persistent use of these free sourcesof water for washing and bathing (and sometimes drinking) by the urban poor enablestheir classification as ‘backward’, not scientifically rational enough to accept the healthrisks within a water source that they cannot see, smell or taste. Ironically, however, atleast one medical study has indicated that e-coli contamination is lower in shallowgroundwater than in the piped water network (which does not supply potable water, andis subject to frequent pressure reductions and leaks which compromise water quality,most particularly in low-income areas) (Surjadi et al., 1994). Dependent upon local,

15 In 1948 prior to official independence, Jakarta’s population was 823,000; by 1952 the populationwas estimated at 1.8 million, and by 1965 this was 3.8 million (Cowherd, 2002).

16 In the 1970s, the informal, low-income communities (kampongs) contained 80% of Jakarta’spopulation and made up 65% of its land area (World Bank, 1974).

17 The history of the development of Jakarta’s water supply infrastructure, and documentation ofpersistent exclusion of particular urban populations is provided in Bakker et al. (2006) and Bakkeret al. (forthcoming).

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context-specific, experiential information (Scott’s ‘metis’) to determine the safety ofdifferent sources of drinking water, residents’ perceptions of clean and safe water areassociated with an absence of odour (including residual chlorine) and sediment; eventhose with access to the city’s piped network water supply system will aerate theirdrinking water in open buckets prior to consumption to dissipate the residual chlorinesmell from treatment (Aman Tirta/USAID, 2006).

As in the colonial period, contemporary development problematizes ‘traditional’sensory assessments of water quality as well as the public use of surface waters fordomestic functions by the urban poor. For example, while justifying its interventionsinto hygiene behaviours along with infrastructure investment in Jakarta,18 USAID’sFormative Research records that the idea of ‘cleanliness’ amongst the poorercommunities is ‘based on culture and tradition’, rather than bacteriological criteria (ESP,2006). Illustrating the need to develop the people along with the pipes, focus groupdiscussion reports tell us that ‘mystical’ belief systems still inform people’s perception ofsickness, disease transmission, and influence patterns of water use from ‘sacred springs’(ibid.). Similarly, the World Bank’s ‘Voices of the Poor’ (Mukherjee, 2006) usesstatements about water quality and preferences from the poor to frame them as objects inneed of development. One site visit documents that, ‘Almost all people wash theirclothes, take a bath and defecate at the river even though they have a well. Defecation inthe river is perceived as “clean”, as it does not create a bad smell’ (Mukherjee, 2006: 26).

While the stated preferences of respondents for defecating in running water and theirrelated perception of cleanliness is used to display ignorance and need for education inhygiene behaviour to correct the ingrained habit of ‘the strong cultural preference’(ibid.), the discourse used to interpret the ‘voices of the poor’ echoes the colonial past,when the ‘natives taking pleasure bathing, washing and defecating in streaming water’was demonstrative of ‘their insensitivity to cleanliness and order’ (Van Leeuwen, 1920:198). Preferences for local water sources, ‘traditional’ assessments of water quality, andthe use of public spaces for domestic functions are discursively situated in the culturalpast — as the residents of Jakarta who use ‘polluted’ water supplies and combine avariety of different quality water sources as a livelihood strategy are not presented asbeing in need of ‘access’ and a policy change (such as tenure reform to enable legal watersupply connections for squatter households), but rather as being themselves in need ofcultural and value change (see Mujianto, 2004; Mukherjee, 2006).

Ironically, without access to more sophisticated technologies for assessing waterquality and more reliable water sources, these urban residents will continue to use locallyavailable, easily accessible and free water sources. Indeed, the choice to do so offersimportant, symbolic vehicles of resistance to the urban population, often distrustful ofstate authority that all too often has forced on them forms of ‘development’ that do notmake ‘sense’ according to their standards of living (Jellinek, 1991; 1997). Using thepublic fountains in the city’s iconic Independence Square (Monas) as a place for bathingand laundry (Harsanto, 2005), low-income residents have supplanted the intended‘spiritual symbolism’ of this urban space (see Kusno, 2000) with politically symboliccalls for the government to meet immediate material needs. Illegal connections(estimated at 40,000) have provided another important means of resistance (Harsanto andWahyudi, 2002). As in the colonial past where the sudden imposition of a system of ‘paidkampong water supply’ provoked resentful residents to tamper with pipelines and meters(Maronier, 1929), the urban poor who are ineligible for legal connections pay higherrates to informal ‘middlemen’ (often employees of the municipal water supply company)to provide them with services. Currently, 50% of Jakarta’s network water supply is lostthrough ‘unaccounted for water’ (Nurbianto, 2007), 80% of which is estimated to be

18 USAID funding to increase access to basic services across Indonesia allocated US $311 million from2004–8. The sectors of health, nutrition, safe water supply and sanitation are covered by theprograms: Basic Human Services (BHS), Health Services Program (HSP) and Environmental ServicesProgram (ESP) (http://www.indoensia/usaid.gov).

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from ‘administrative’ rather than physical leakage (Castalia, 2006; Sabarini, 2007; and apersonal communication from Forkami in 2007). And, rather than change theirperceptions of what constitutes ‘clean water’, low-income residents are opting foranother surprising — yet cost-effective — alternative that complicates their portrayal indevelopment discourses. Scavenging garbage dumps for the empty 19 litre water bottlecontainers which can be ‘refilled’ at the ‘air isi ulang’ (water refill) depots, the urban poorare now — like the rich — using bottled water for drinking.19

ConclusionsIn colonial Batavia and post-independence Jakarta, the project of producing ‘civilized’or ‘modern’, developed citizens to ‘properly’ inhabit a productive, hygienic urbanenvironment entailed not only discursive reworkings of the rationalities supportingwater supply delivery, but also physical reworkings of urban space, and subjectiverepositionings of urban identities. Residents whose domestic water practices did notdemonstrate a familiarity with scientific rationalities, modern concern for bodily health,or an appropriately economical use of water have been marginalized both materially anddiscursively. Access to a ‘modern’ piped water supply has continued to remain contingentupon one’s identity as a ‘modern’ citizen — signified in part by a scientific understandingof water quality, the possession of privatized spaces of water use, and an economically‘rational’ understanding of water costs/benefits.

As the colonial and post-colonial governments pursued projects of ‘civilizing’ or‘developing’ their subjects, the associated classification of categories of urban citizenswas translated into differentiated urban spaces; this was both rationalized and reiteratedthrough the urban water supply infrastructure. In other words, the production — andselective distribution — of a ‘modern’ urban water supply has physically facilitated andreinforced the initial discursive (and political) division of populations and urban spaces.Physical and discursive divisions between populations, spaces and waters becameentrenched within the urban landscape with the creation of the colonial water supplyinfrastructure. Post-independence discourses of modernization, hygiene, and watersupply further cemented these divisions, as network expansion was confined to areas ofthe city inhabited by ‘modern’ and ‘developed’ urban residents. Although the discursiveemblems associated with water have largely shifted from racial to socio-economicmarkers of status, through the (post-)colonial era, discourses linking water use withidentity have remained central to determining informal rights to access differentcategories of public water supply services and physical access to such services.

This analysis has been predicated upon (at least) two claims that are of broaderrelevance to current debates over post-colonialism and urbanization. First, discursivebinaries enrolled in the projects of colonization or modernization — European/native,modern/primitive, civilized/uncivilized, sanitary/insalubrious, developed/backward —are central to the technologies of government enacted in both colonial and post-colonialcontexts, but documentation of the discourses is not sufficient to explain the persistentexclusion of the majority of Jakarta’s residents from access to the water supply system.In ‘materializing’ the analysis of Batavia/Jakarta’s technologies of government, thisarticle has insisted upon the importance of the interrelationship between discursivestrategies, socio-economic agendas, identity formation, and infrastructure creation; aniterative process, with changing patterns of socio-spatial access to water supply as an

19 Supporting a huge growth in the number of small-scale businesses selling generic bottled water,these refill stations provide treated, potable water at less than one-third the price of the brandnames. Generic bottled water from the ‘air isi ulang’ (refill stations) is 3,000 Rupiah for 19 litres,whereas the Aqua brand preferred by the middle-class sells for approximately 10,000 Rupiah for 19litres.

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artefact. The material practices and urban spaces within and for which one uses urbanwater continue to indicate one’s level of hygiene, cleanliness, and suitability for‘modern’ urban life in Jakarta — and have been used to demonstrate one’s ‘right’ to theuse of modern urban infrastructure, as well as shaping decisions about the extension (orwithholding) of infrastructure to specific spaces within the city.

Second, resistance is central to the constitution of these technologies of government,and has its own material effects. The persistence of preferences for local and easilyavailable, yet poorer-quality, water sources by the urban poor is usually interpreted astheir ‘failure’ to develop, but it can also be seen as resistance to a pattern of water supplyinfrastructure development that has consistently made it more difficult for the poor toaccess clean water. Acknowledging excluded groups as active agents in the constitutionof such technologies of government is a necessary conceptual dimension of therematerialization of urban governmentality. Therefore, although the spatial and materialeffects of government have reinforced their discursive positioning of Jakarta’s lesswealthy residents as ‘undeveloped’, the continued practice of behaviours labelled as‘primitive’ can also be viewed as the material product of a strategy of active, informedresistance to urban governance policies that have sought to create the capital city as onelarge ‘gated community’ — denying entrance, livelihoods and citizenship to those whoare ‘not modern’,20 and who do not (or cannot) conform to the model of ideal citizens.

To conclude, it is not our aim to romanticize the current situation amongst urban poorpopulations in Jakarta; the health and related economic implications of relying onpoor-quality water are strong reasons to pursue projects of more equitable access toclean water supplies. Rather, we have argued that more equitable approaches to urbaninfrastructural services require a historicized and politicized understanding of thecultural and discursive as well as economic and technical dimensions of exclusion. Lackof access to infrastructural services in cities in the global South is predicated upon themutual reinforcement of material, spatial, and discursive aspects of ‘technologies ofgovernment’ reliant upon exclusionary models of citizenship. This suggests the need notonly to take seriously the discursive relations of power enacted by colonial governments,but also to pay close attention to how these relations have been materialized in identities,urban spaces, and infrastructures in contemporary cities of the Global South.

Michelle Kooy (melank@interchange.ubc.ca) and Karen Bakker (bakker@geog.ubc.ca),Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Room 217, 1984 West Mall,Vancouver BC V6T 1Z2, Canada.

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RésuméCet article tente d’élargir les récents débats sur l’accès aux infrastructures urbaines enexplorant l’interrelation entre subjectivité, espace urbain et infrastructure. Plusprécisément, il présente une étude de cas sur l’aménagement et la différenciation del’approvisionnement en eau de Jakarta, en Indonésie. À partir des concepts degouvernementalité et de matérialité, il fait valoir que la construction d’une différencepar des processus de ségrégation et d’exclusion, mis en œuvre par des « technologies degouvernement » coloniales et contemporaines, a des dimensions spatiales, discursives

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et physiques. Ce travail vise notamment à « rematérialiser » les discussions surla gouvernementalité urbaine (post-)coloniale en insistant sur l’importance del’interrelation contestée et itérative entre stratégies discursives, programmes socio-économiques, formation d’identité et création d’infrastructures. Tout en explorantces idées dans le cadre de Jakarta, l’article exploite des données issues d’archives,d’entretiens et d’observations participantes afin de présenter une généalogie du réseauurbain de distribution d’eau, de ses origines coloniales jusqu’à nos jours. Il montrecomment les discours sur la modernité, l’hygiène et l’aménagement s’inscrivent dansla représentation des sujets urbains et dans la disposition de l’infrastructured’approvisionnement en eau (et comment s’exprime la résistance) ; de plus, il expose larelation entre la classification des résidents, la différenciation des espaces urbains et lemanque d’accès aux services de la ville. La conclusion termine par les conséquencespour les analyses sur la différenciation des services urbains et de l’espace urbain dansles grandes villes des pays du Sud.

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International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32.2© 2008 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2008 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.