Routledge Handbook of Urban Indonesia
After more than two years in the making, my co-editor, Sonia Roitman of the University of Queensland, and I are thrilled to announce our new edited book, "Routledge Handbook of Urban Indonesia". We started this project at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic when we did not know its magnitude, severity, and effects on our personal and professional activities. In these two years, the world has changed unimaginably and we have had to adapt to new ways of living and working. The project was delayed due to several problems experienced by those involved in the book. Many contributors and family members got sick and had to take over the significant caring responsibilities of family and friends.
The publication of this book is also the celebration of a collective effort from 64 contributors, including some established scholars, i.e., Christopher Silver, Ashok Das, Nicholas Phelps, and Tommy Firman and early career scholars from Indonesian universities and elsewhere. As the first book in English that compiles a variety of case studies of Indonesian cities, this book offers the opportunity for a deep exchange of ideas with researchers and practitioners working outside Indonesia and an expansion of conversations and debates about similarities and differences between Global North and South, and among the regions in the South.
"To the world of academic urbanists beyond Southeast Asia, Indonesia is known largely through studies of its metropolitan center, Jakarta, and surrounding desakota landscapes. Roitman and Rukmana have assembled a long-overdue volume that begins to do justice to this urban diversity. They bring critical postcolonial planning perspectives to bear on 19 cities, including several that have never featured in the Anglophone urban studies literature and remained "off the map" of urban planning discussions. Even more significantly, this skillfully-curated handbook compels and enables us to revisit planning theory and practice from urbanizing Indonesia." - Tim Bunnell, National University of Singapore
