The Impact of New Roads in Southeast Asia
In opening the workshop, Peter Nas (Leiden University) noted that the subject of roads has received scant attention from scholars, even though roads are the inspiration for poetry, literary fiction, and film. For two days, a critical dialogue about the method and theory of studying roads explored through the multidisciplinary backgrounds of the panellists. Paper presentations were divided into three sections: urban road networks (six papers); the road in Indonesian history (two papers); and roads as conductors of rural change (eight papers).The first session of the workshop was about urban road networks and began with a 'meta-theoretical' paper by Terry McGee. McGee analysed how roads shape processes of social and economic change in mega-urban regions of Southeast Asia. The next paper, by Haryo Winarso, argued that land developers in Jakarta prefer land that is inexpensive with poor road access rather than land that is expensive with pre-existing infrastructure. Toll roads in Jakarta and Surabaya, argued Johan Silas, have been major stimulants of development. An overview of Indonesian myths about roads was presented by Alok Pandey and a paper about roads in Yogyakarta by Wolfram Lorenz was discussed in his absence. Peter Nas and Pratiwo presented a paper thick in literary imagery entitled 'The Streets of Jakarta: Toward an Architecture of fear' that stimulated discussion of memories and discourses about roads. Both of the historical papers, by Freek Colombijn and Arjan Veering, addressed the relationship between water transport systems and roads. Colombijn's ecological history demonstrated that transportation networks in Sumatra encouraged the development of specific types of economic specialization.
Session three, which was about roads as conductors of rural change,
occupied the second day of the workshop. The geographical framework
of Southeast Asia was challenged by the papers in this session: two
of the papers were about liminal parts of Southeast Asia Papua
and the Andaman Islands and one of the papers focused on West
Africa. This opened an interesting opportunity to go beyond 'culture-area'
paradigms and compare the processes of State control, local resistance,
and cultural change in a variety of out of the way places. Vishvajit
Pandaya employed a post-modern perspective to describe encounters
between 'primitive' (quotations are his) Andaman Islanders and moderns,
while the paper of Jonathan Rigg contended 
that the post-structuralist and post-developmental approaches break
down in the analysis of some Southeast Asian roads. The impacts of
a new road and bridge in Kotamadya Jambi in Sumatra were described
by Idawati Yara.
A Mee man collecting firewood
on the Trans-Papua Highway.