Dr. Nurman Nowak

Nurman Nowak was a PhD-candidate and research staff at the institute. His interests concern urban lives and livelihoods in Indonesia.

His dissertation, an ethnography entitled Making the City of Confusion Work, explores how everyday life in Jakarta, shaped by constant change and emergence, is perceived as the phenomenon of Urbanity-as-Force. At its centre is the question of how urban residents, as well as government and capital, interact with this force to make the city function according to their respective needs and interests. It examines how government and capital use science, technology, and power to produce Spaces-of-Ordering and the City of Modernity, while the Urban Rakyat, Jakarta’s poorer urban population, develop Urban Métis through their everyday experience of urban dynamics – practical skills and knowledge that can be mobilised to appropriate urban space which is repurposed as an Urban Common sustained by social relations that create access to space, infrastructure, resources, and possibilities to carve put functioning livelihoods.

Nurman studied Asian Studies at the University of Bonn and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Passau. During his appointment as junior staff in the Jakarta-office of a German political foundation he came in touch with urban issues that eventually became his research themes.