Operational Jakarta: The problem of representation

As the twenty-first century unfolds with newly formed degrees of hypercomplex interactions and reactions amongst space, time, economy, politics, social dynamics, and cultural paradigms, we are observing new typologies of urbanism that are different in kind, rather than degree, from the previous “urban” upon which the vast majority of present theoretical and practical discourse has been based. The techniques, strategies, and methodologies of the twentieth-century no longer serve to adequately represent or to explain the phenomena of today’s incipient mega-cities. A new vocabulary must be developed. A new way of seeing is required in order to understand and therefor to operate within these new conditions.

The operational drawing thus becomes a functional methodological alternative. By conceptualizing urban zones of operational conditions within a field of probability, one may understand the hyper-urban space as a series of operational paradigms within a networked matrix, whereby form and special arrangement are no longer the parameters of measurement. In order to de-couple the presumption of a non-real spatio-formal reading of urbanity from the operational patterns of urbanity as real observed phenomena, and moreover to represent and communicate these patterns, a new form of mapping is required.

Operational mapping is based upon observed phenomena of social interaction, economic exchange networks, data and communications networks, political territories, infrastructural parasitism, and environmental pressurization as it unfolds in both real and fictive space.

Jakarta serves as an Ideal case-study, from which this methodology has been developed. As a very real case of hyper-complexity, and the explosive terrain of new mega-cities, to observe and “map” Jakarta is to observe and map the future of the world itself.