Measuring Primitive Accumulation: An Information-Theoretic Approach to Capitalist Enclosure in PIK2, Indonesia

TL;DR

This paper applies information-theoretic and statistical-mechanical tools to quantify the dynamics of land enclosure and spatial accumulation in a large-scale Indonesian development, revealing planned growth patterns and temporal land-use transformations.

Contribution

It introduces an innovative approach combining Fisher-Rao distances, Markov chains, and percolation theory to analyze land enclosure processes quantitatively.

Findings

Identified a significant transformation pulse during 2019-2020 coinciding with construction.

Expected absorption times into built environment are approximately 46 and 38 years for cropland and tree cover.

Detected a persistent giant connected component indicating planned spatial growth rather than stochastic percolation.

Abstract

Large-scale land enclosure for speculative mega-development constitutes a non-equilibrium spatial process whose velocity, topology, and irreversibility remain poorly quantified. We study the Pantai Indah Kapuk 2 (PIK2) coastal mega-development north of Jakarta, Indonesia, using eight years (2017--2024) of Sentinel-2 land-use/land-cover (LULC) data at 10-meter resolution. The landscape is projected onto a Marxian probability simplex partitioning terrestrial pixels into Commons, Agrarian, and Capital fractions. Fisher-Rao (FR) geodesic distances on this simplex identify a transformation pulse of $0.405$~rad/yr during 2019--2020, coinciding with major construction activity. Absorbing Markov chain analysis yields expected absorption times into the built environment of $46.0$~years for cropland and $38.1$~years for tree cover, with a pooled built-area self-retention rate of $96.4\%$. Percolation analysis reveals that a giant connected component containing $89$--$95\%$ of all built pixels persists at occupation probabilities $p \in [0.096, 0.162]$, far below the random percolation threshold $p_c \approx 0.593$, indicating planned rather than stochastic spatial growth. The box-counting fractal dimension of the urban boundary increases from $d_f = 1.316$ to $1.397$, consistent with increasingly irregular frontier expansion. These results suggest that information-geometric and statistical-mechanical tools can characterize the kinematic and topological signatures of capitalist spatial accumulation with quantitative precision.