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The durability of central city districts in large metropolitan systems of the majority world has largely been attained through intricate intersections of physical, infrastructural, human and discursive materials, as these intersections are continuously remade through shifting constellations of the incremental initiatives of residents. Residents have learned to use the city as a place to continuously explore new relationships among things and extract a wide range of unanticipated capacities from them. This is a collective resourcefulness from which there might be much to draw in terms of using the carbon-driven exigencies of infrastructural transformation as the occasion to reanimate more egalitarian political projects. Although many collective efforts are increasingly being disassembled, the reflections of a single resident of one of Jakarta's most heterogeneous residential districts points to how the revitalization of such efforts might be conceived. The efficacy of political efforts to address intensified vulnerability partly entails replenishing intense mixtures of built and physical environments as provocations and platforms for complex social maneuvers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As millions of urban residents in the majority world attain middle-class status, there is not only a great deal of ambiguity as to what exactly being middle class is, but also an occlusion of many efforts residents themselves have made to attain this status. Because multiple routes have been pursued to improve livelihoods, as well as different conditions and support, there is also a growing ambivalence about the various implications of this attainment. At times, the performance of such status seems to require relinquishing important livelihood practices. While availed of increased consumption, assets and relative autonomy, many such residents are wary of the heightened vulnerabilities that new forms of livelihood and individuation posit. As increased accumulation has been predicated on both the changing global positions of national production systems and the long-term incremental efforts of residents themselves, how the divergent implications of these distinct routes to middle-class status are negotiated on a day-to-day basis are critical issues for the elaboration of urban politics. Focusing on Jakarta, the paper considers some of the ways in which an emergent middle class have improved livelihoods and opportunities, as well as how they hedge their bets in the pursuit of lifestyles and norms conventionally associated with middle-class status. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]