Provincializing Dracula urbanism

There exists a long tradition in urban studies of generating neologisms that aim to capture some fundamental characteristic of urbanization and/or urban life. The field has witnessed a proliferation of such urbanisms in recent years. While some urbanisms capture particular epochs of urban governance and development (such as austerity, smart, climate, sustainable, speculative, and pandemic urbanisms), others reflect epistemological and methodological positions (including Southern, global, planetary, ¹ Asian, and comparative urbanisms). As one of the newer of these contributions, Wilson and Wyly's (2022) ‘Dracula urbanism’ aims to capture the centrality of the real-estate state to contemporary urbanization. The authors describe this multifaceted notion as being characterized by a relentless ‘drive to kill and destroy’, terrors of decline, and smart-city building.

As Ananya Roy (2020) writes in another issue of this journal, critical perspectives including postcolonial, feminist, queer, Black and Latinx theories and critiques ‘continue to be read as specialized (rather than universal) traditions of thought’ (20). While finding merit in the capacity of Dracula urbanism to capture the parasitic nature of the real-estate state, I argue that Dracula urbanism reflects a particular form of situated knowledge with global aspirations. In this short contribution, I therefore invite urban scholars, particularly those engaged in comparative urban research (as Wilson and Wyly are in their paper), to consider how critical perspectives can enrich our understanding of cities. To demonstrate this, I firstly ‘provincialize’ (Chakrabarty, 2000) Dracula urbanism. To provincialize ‘implies decolonizing mainstream knowledge claims’ to expose their parochial character (Sheppard et al., 2013: 896). In doing so, I show how this conceptual metaphor constitutes a situated form of knowledge.

I then extend Dracula urbanism by drawing specifically on feminist, postcolonial, and urban political ecology critiques. I invoke vampires found in Indonesian and Malay culture as a lens through which to examine capitalist urbanization, identifying two potential ways to enrich Dracula urbanism. Finally, I close with a call for scholars undertaking comparative urban research to engage more closely with critical perspectives that continue to be treated as occupying the fringes of urban studies. I also raise the question of whether we are seeing diminishing returns with regards to our tendency as urban scholars to coin new urbanisms.

Dracula urbanism as a generalizing theory of cities

Dracula urbanism, Wilson and Wyly contend, is ‘not a new emergence… but a missed set of truths’ (2). As they note: ‘City building across the globe, of course, has a long history of killing off people's ways and spaces’ (4). Testimony to this observation, urban studies scholarship is, and has been especially attuned to the ways that capitalist urbanization preys on and sacrifices marginalized communities to achieve urban renewal and (re)development projects. This raises the question of whether we need another urbanism to capture these processes. Nonetheless, as an urban geographer, I share Wilson and Wyly's concerns about the devastating impacts of capitalist urbanization on the marginalized members of urban societies. My own research is in part concerned with the impacts of ‘expert’ knowledge and administrative techniques on marginalized communities in Jakarta, who find themselves vulnerable not only to the usual suspects of urbanization renewal and redevelopment, but now must contend with discourses of environmental management. Riverbank communities, for instance, have in recent years been represented as a necessary sacrifice in the fight against unruly flood waters (Colven and Irawaty 2019). The plight of these communities is aptly captured in Wilson and Wyly statement that ‘city “rebirth” … purportedly requires strategic death and destruction of human ways’ (12).

Wilson and Wyly chose to compare Jakarta and Flint because both, the authors argue, are furiously engaged with smart city building. They also use these cities as ‘stereotypes’ (Brenner, 2003) on the basis of their representativeness of cities of the global South and North, respectively. Jakarta is also used as a prototypical city (Brenner, 2003) that the authors argue reflects ‘what many global south cities are becoming’ (3). Their article, then, intends to say something generalizable about cities. More specifically, Dracula urbanism aims to elucidate the ‘planetized process’ of smart city building. Cities around the world, including Jakarta and Flint, are conceptualized as being linked via planetary processes (though how exactly these linkages matter or manifest is less interrogated). Yet as I demonstrate below, Dracula urbanism reflects a particular form of situated knowledge. Accordingly, while sharing Wilson and Wyly's concerns about the impacts of capitalist urbanization's more pernicious characteristics, I want to suggest that their comparison of Jakarta and Flint could be enriched via engagements with feminist, postcolonial, and urban political ecology critiques of global (mainstream) urbanism. I proceed by situating and provincializing (Chakrabarty, 2000) Dracula urbanism.

Provincializing Dracula urbanism

Wilson and Wyly describe Dracula as a ‘true “planetist”’ who ‘does not belong to any particular place; he is a creature of the world and roots nowhere. He momentarily resides in castles as a global vagabond that nests in only expedient places’ (4). The implication is that Dracula urbanism and the processes that characterize it are likewise rootless and belong nowhere. Yet Stoker's novel and his particular portrayal of Dracula are both cultural products of a particular time and place. ² Written by an Irish author, Dracula is widely considered a classic example of both English Literature and Gothic fiction. A number of literary scholars interpret the novel as a reflection of Victorian-era anxieties surrounding the decline of British imperialism, the rise of Russia as a geopolitical rival, and the threat of the Eastern European, racialized Other. Arata (1990), for instance, suggests that Dracula represents the European fear of ‘reverse colonization’: the Count travels to the center of Europe to feed off the blood and bodies of European women.

Further, scholars observe the Orientalist nature of Dracula's portrayal. Gomez (2015) for instance, argues that Dracula represents ‘a vampire, a primitive of the East, a nefarious character of the Western thought, a counter- colonial threat of the British Empire’ (87). Underscoring his geographical origins and identity, Gomez (2015) goes so far as to suggest that Dracula's journey from East to West is his attempt to separate himself from his roots and ‘disavow’ his Eastern European identity. Far from placeless, then, the novel reflects a distinctly colonial and Victorian imaginary. Dracula is a folklore figure with cultural baggage. I want to suggest that, by extension, Dracula urbanism is likewise not placeless, but instead a historically and geographically situated (and necessarily partial) way of knowing and theorizing cities.

The figure of the vampire appears in various iterations across many cultures, often manifested in a female body in tales intended to remind women to be obedient (Howells, 2022). Nonetheless, Stoker's particular depiction of Dracula as occupying a male-gendered body has become the established norm in Hollywood, a globally dominant site of cultural production. In fact, anthropologist Michaela Howells argues that it is Stoker's Dracula that marks a transition from cultural representations depicting vampires as primarily women, to almost exclusively men, primarily in the dominant form of the ‘European–American trope’ (Geiszler, 2021).

Across Malaysia and Indonesia, vampires have traditionally taken the form of monstrous women, who come to eat babies and punish men. In Malay culture, Pontianak, ‘a woman who has died as a result of male violence or childbirth and who returns to haunt patriarchy’ (Galt, 2022: 40), uses the sound of a baby crying to lure men and suck their blood. The Indonesian Kuntilanak, meanwhile, makes prey of virgins. ³ Statues found in Bali's temples and airport depict Rangda (widow), an infant-devouring demon queen, as wild and monstrous with fangs, long fingernails, and exaggerated, nude breasts.

These culturally specific representations of the female-bodied vampire have conceptual potential for understanding cities in at least two ways. First, as a woman dreamed up by a patriarchal society and invoked to discipline women, Pontianak has the potential to capture the gendered dimensions of urban redevelopment. Research on the nature of eviction and displacement in Jakarta, for example by Tilley et al. (2017, 2019) has emphasized the gendered impacts on kampung women. As Wilson and Wyly observe, dynamics of eviction and forced resettlement in Jakarta are shaped by specific ideas about who belongs and who does not. Dracula urbanism might therefore be enriched with attention to gender and gender-relations, everyday practices, embodiment, and the home. This approach might thus reveal insights into the differentiated nature of ‘killing’. In Flint, meanwhile, the role of gender in shaping residents’ experiences has remained underexamined compared to the intersections of class and race. ⁴ Invoking Pontianak has the potential to elucidate these overlooked dimensions of capitalist urbanization. Further, greater attention to residents’ lived experiences and things as they are on the ground – not simply as developers, realtors and politicians claim them to be – might also reveal how urban redevelopment is a more contested and less smooth process than Wilson and Wyly's paper suggests (Betteridge and Webber, 2019; Colven, 2020).

Second, Ponkianak invites us to interrogate the socio-natures of smart-city building and capitalist urbanization more broadly. The ‘founding myth’ is that the first sultan of Pontianak city ordered the trees near the Kapuas River that were once home to Pontianak be cut down to construct a mosque. After being forcibly evicted to facilitate the city's foundation and relegated to the forests, this female vampire is typically strongly associated by residents with nature, such as banana and banyan trees, as belonging to the wilderness, and in opposition to modern, civilized life (Duile, 2020). Pontianak thus represents the establishment of the nature-culture divide in modern society. As a conceptual metaphor, then, Pontianak has the potential to capture the false nature of this binary – a central contribution of urban political ecology – and highlight the role of non-human agencies and the material world in shaping the urban. For instance, we might ask: what role has infrastructure played in facilitating killing and death in Flint? How have unruly floodwaters disrupted the projects of the real-estate state and smart city building in Jakarta?

Conclusion

By provincializing ‘Dracula urbanism’, my goal was to highlight the situatedness of this form of knowledge. I then explored how an alternative, equally situated form of knowledge – the myth of Pontianak or Kuntianak – might provide different insights into the nature of cities and urban life. More broadly, however, I want to encourage us as urban scholars to ask ourselves whether we are witnessing diminishing returns with regards to our tendency to coin new urbanisms. A potential risk of this kind of theorizing is that these various urbanisms become (unintentionally) metanarratives that eclipse what is happening on the ground. In my own research, for instance, I have engaged with speculative urbanism, originally coined by Michael Goldman (2011), to understand the relationship between real estate, speculative finance, and water crisis in Jakarta. But I have also been prompted by other scholars to reckon with the limits of this approach and reflect on the impacts of academic scholarship in perpetuating (or burying) particular narratives. For instance, are we overlooking resistance to the processes we theorize, or other ways of being in the world? In this sense, Pontianak might act as a check on Dracula urbanism. She not only threatens the modernist project of capitalist urbanization – haunting cities from her peripheral location in the forest – but she also has the potential to disrupt a form of knowledge production that aims for generalizability at the expense of taking the field seriously.