ARI Working Paper Series

The past decade has seen a burgeoning of critical trans-disciplinary research on urban inter-referencing and policy mobilities. The trans-Atlantic dissemination of progressive policies and practices of urban planning, management and finance among local governments flourished especially during the first half of the twentieth century, creating direct linkages and communities of practice across the ocean. Trans-Atlantic exchanges continue to be emphasized in the contemporary literature on the subject of the mobility of urban policies – though their progressive content has all but vanished. However, recent literature has also moved to provide something of a corrective when identifying the significant inter-referencing that now exists elsewhere in the world and notably among Asian cities. In this paper we examine the development of urban policy and practice and indications of their travels among Indonesian cities and districts in the era of decentralization. While Indonesia represents a vast and diverse laboratory in and of itself, there is also some evidence of urban policy exchange extending to cities elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. We close by speculating on whether the patterns and processes of dissemination into which Indonesian cities and districts are woven are suggestive of the emergence of a distinctly progressive twenty-first century Asia-Pacific era comparable to that of the Atlantic in the early twentieth century.

Full text is not available, this working paper is withdrawn, as it has now been published as part of a published volume: ‘Urban inter-referencing within and beyond a decentralized Indonesia’, Cities, Vol. 39, August 2014.