Urban Governmentality in an Indonesian Ethnic Gathering Place in Taipei

This thesis focuses on an ethnic gathering place—the so called “Little Indonesia” under the process of glocalisation. Little Indonesia is right beside Taipei Main Station which has long played a strategic role in the urban development agenda of Taiwan’s capital city. Due to the flow of labor forces and transnational marriages, migrant workers and brides from Southeast Asia have emerged as significant groups in the city. Those people who are with the same ethnic identity yet different citizenship statuses have faced different dilemmas in the same gathering place. On the other hand, how the gathering place exists and has been represented in the city also reveals the dilemma of urban governance. o answer the main questions: “how Little Indonesia emerges, grows and exists,” participant observation as well as interviews with real estate developers, official governors and local organizations are employed. From the perspective of how governmentality works in between, this paper intends to reveal the existing urbanism in the ethnic gathering place by exploring three dimensions: its politics of location, identity politics, and spatial surveillance. irstly, three factors contributing to the politics of location in Little Indonesia are proposed: market, location and rent gap. The political society has been shaped through past experiences of original residents and governance forces. The time-space delay effect has made this place a “governance leakage” surrounded by mega projects. This governance leakage has created an alternative urban development agenda for these Indonesian people who have been lacking promised basis of citizenship to settle their living right. econdly, in the dimension of identity politics, how social exclusion/inclusion and (de)territorialization have been shaped is discussed. From experiences of different subjects, such as ethnic entrepreneurs or consumers with various ethnic backgrounds, the dynamic and flexible territory between Little Indonesia and the outside society can be discovered. s for the spatial surveillance part, different discourses constructed by media representation and local people in Little Indonesia are examined. Through juxtaposition of various texts such as media, blogs, and oral interviews, I have elaborated how transnationalism from below and above shows up in Taipei, in particular, how media comes as a critical tool of governmentality, for constructing the social consent of spatial order maintenance. In addition, police power as an all-pervasive surveillance mechanism surrounds people in Little Indonesia, meanwhile legitimizes and naturalizes the concrete but also virtual authority of the nation state over Little Indonesia.n the end, by unraveling the entangled relationship of bio-politics and geo-politics in Little Indonesia, I propose three spatial characteristics embedded in the ethnic gathering place—the leakage formed from governance failure, the magnetic site within both attraction and repulsion, and the leverage mechanism that keeps the site lively.