“This collection of essays is as thoughtful a recent account of Jakarta as may be found. An enjoyable preface and introduction lead from the personal into the book’s main themes, then successive chapters explore the nature of the kampung community, traffic and congestion, flooding, new towns, urban politics, Islamist urbanism, and the proposed relocation of the capital, followed by the author in conversation, including his reflections on the impact of the pandemic and a thoughtful neo-Marxist discourse on urban theory…. Whether or not the reader is familiar with Jakarta, there is much with which to engage.”

Pacific Affairs

"[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

"No scholar has more persuasively assessed the transformation of twentieth century Jakarta (and urban Indonesia in general) than Abidin Kusno. Jakarta: The City of a Thousand Dimensions brings his analysis to the present through a
critical appraisal of how the urban environment and governance have been shaped since Indonesia’s transition to decentralization."

Planning Perspectives

“On the whole, the book is well-researched, well-written, persuasive…. The book is suitable for use by a general, educated audience interested in Jakarta, South East Asian Studies, or Global South urbanism. Members of this audience include–but are not limited to–graduate students, university professors, artists, journalists, architects, city planners, property developers, politicians and NGO activists.”

South East Asia Research

“Abidin Kusno now has a solid track record of three prior texts, each a revelation and incisive in its uncompromising avoidance of methodology…. Jakarta is another revelation in the analysis of urban development, where each chapter is like one piece of a Rubik Cube that does not reveal itself as whole until the final element is set in place.”

Journal of Urban Design

"Brimming with details, nuance, and anecdotes, this rich and complex assemblage of insights into multiple dimensions of urbanization and urbanism in Jakarta could help us produce narratives of other cities in critical yet stimulating ways."

Journal of the American Planning Association

"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