While precarity and insecurity in a European context are well-defined, in Jakarta, as in many cities of the apparent global South, new waves of “normalization” must be understood as an attack on the informal labor of care and collectivity that have created and maintained a social safety net for the urban poor thus far. This is to say “normalization” is a process that ensures the elimination of the urban poor from the economic centers of the city; it is a process of expulsion, as Saskia Sassen has well described.³ However, it is the very proximity to these centers of economic activity, leading to ad hoc economic opportunities, as well as the mixture of entrepreneurial labor, opportunism, and solidarity that make life viable for kampung residents in the city. By forcing these residents to relocate to high-rises at the edge of the city, the activity of “normalization,” while allegedly devised to eliminate urban poverty, in fact accords to a much more brutal logic designed to eliminate the poor themselves. As a result of such violence, we can begin to discover, much as Lorey describes, “Social practices that are oriented not solely to the self and one’s own milieu, but rather to living together and to common political action, recede ever more into the background and become ever less imaginable as a lived reality.”⁴