ABSTRACT
The chapter talks about the dissolution of the city and countryside divide, the focus is largely on questioning whether the city is winning or the countryside is losing in the development game. The periurban areas in Phillip Kelly's words, are not only new and enduring urban form which is neither rural not urban but incorporates distinctive elements of both, they are also the spaces undergoing rapid urbanization. The aim of this chapter is to offer a different way of seeing centered on the interplay between politics and space that helps to unravel the formation of the periurban as a space of governmentality specific to Indonesian history. Indonesia Before and After Suharto, indicates that mass action politics, like street protest mobilizations, factory strikes, and land occupations, have been revived since the late 1980s. The chapter also points to the connection between the floating mass, the capital city, and the periurban space of exception that the political regime has created.
