Enclaved Mobility: A Meta‐Geography of BRI Infrastructure‐Led Urbanization in the Bandung Metropolitan Area

ABSTRACT The Jakarta‐Bandung High‐Speed Railway is meant to take Indonesia into the future and drive regional and expansive economic growth. It is also a vital Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) project for China. Based on ethnographic research conducted in the Bandung Metropolitan Area (BMA) from January 2023 to July 2024, this paper analyzes how infrastructure‐led urbanization connected to the high‐speed railway is unevenly affecting the economic lives of communities impacted by the project's construction and operation. This article argues that the railway is creating conditions of improved mobility for certain people and forms of capital, while producing immobility for others. These emerging patterns of differential mobility, in turn, have created enclave‐like development in the BMA, but without physical barriers that differentiate who can and cannot enter these enclave spaces. This analysis frames the rise of enclave development in the BMA as an aspirational meta‐geography of infrastructure‐led urbanization, a proliferating form of urbanization, especially in the Global South. In areas that are envisioned as sites for future world‐class city development in the form of transit‐oriented development (TOD), communities impacted by the railway's construction and operation live in close proximity to middle‐ and upper‐class passengers' improved movement to exclusive mixed‐use developments, while they are isolated from these new mobility patterns in the BMA. As a case study of a renowned BRI project, this article deepens understandings of how uneven urban development arises from infrastructure‐led urbanization, providing insights into the economic geographies emerging from China's increasingly significant role in global urbanization processes.