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Joko Widodo (‘Jokowi’), mayor of the small Indonesian city of Solo (also officially known as Surakarta) between 2005 and 2012, was subsequently elected as governor of Jakarta and then as president of the Republic of Indonesia. This paper examines aspects of Jokowi’s political journey that speak to urban/regional studies debates on the politics of inter-municipal learning. It shows how the emergence of Solo as a ‘best-practice city’ in translocal learning networks enabled small-city civic boosterism and provided a launch pad for Jokowi’s electability in Jakarta. Implications of translocal learning at the ‘sending’ end are thus shown to extend beyond matters of local political legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on cultural geographical work on mobilities and landscape, this article examines parkour in Singapore, a context in which everyday mobile practices are conventionally understood to be heavily constrained and disciplined. As an urban mobile practice that involves bodily adaptation to and dynamic interaction with the prevailing built environment, parkour reveals complex relationships between the self and the landscape. For its practitioners, the doing of parkour holds potential not only for reimagining what Singapore’s urban landscape is or can be but also for reconfiguring understandings of themselves. The term landscaping captures the continuous and concurrent shaping of self and landscape through parkour; landscapes affect individual bodies and are actively (re)constituted through embodied movement. The article engages parkour in more-than-representational terms. By segueing between discursive and phenomenological approaches to mobilities and landscape, a dual emphasis on corporeal experience and representational frameworks highlights how both create and/or regulate such mobile bodies and practices within the landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Behind the Postcolonial: Architecture, Urban Space and Political Cultures in Indonesia By ABIDIN KUSNO London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Pp. xiv, 250. Plates, Notes, Bibliography, Index. Abidin Kusno's addition [...]

During 2010, Language and Speech received 58 new, original manuscripts and 19 revised manuscripts. Of the 77 manuscripts we received, we are glad to report that 16 were accepted for [...]