Afterlives of reclamation: coastal privatization, distanced dispossession, and more-than-human calcifications in Jakarta Bay

Abstract

Coastal reclamation in North Jakarta unsettles colonial, terracentric, and anthropocentric understandings of private property. This paper foregrounds two intersecting yet contrasting landmaking practices: elite, ethno-racialized, capital-intensive geoengineering for gated luxury developments, and small-scale kampung shoreline extensions shaped by everyday material improvisations with rubble and calcified mussel shells (Perna viridis)—among other aims, to stake claims to tenurial security. Introducing “distanced dispossession” as an analytical concept, the discussion moves beyond dualistic framings of urban property relations as either state-controlled or privately owned. Instead, it highlights historically sedimented inequalities, ontological erasures, and the material agencies shaping Jakarta’s terra-aqueous urbanization. By centering more-than-human infrastructures and submerged histories, the paper complicates dominant narratives of land, belonging, and exclusion in a rapidly subsiding megacity.