Over the past several years, the government of Jakarta has embarked on an ambitious plan to “normalize” the city; this project involves three main elements: (1) the “normalization” of work, or the movement of informal jobs into a formal and taxable economy; (2) the “normalization” of housing, or the movement of kampung [a difficult-to-formalize, typically auto-constructed settlement within the city] residents into mid-rise concrete block apartments; and, (3) the “normalization” of the river systems, or the channeling of the city’s main rivers through an extraordinary combination of land grabs, housing demolition, concretization, and infrastructure investment. While nominally presented as a way of increasing the functionality of the city, normalization is in essence an aesthetic project of expulsion. While poverty and urbanization go hand in hand, the project of “normalization” is a strategy committed to their definitive, violent decoupling; there will be poor people, and their will be urbanism, but they will be forcefully segregated. It is as though the process is meant to repeat as many times as necessary until this social sorting takes permanent hold.