The poor are organizing for a radically different notion of citizenship, based on need rather than on access to the economic and political resources of the modern capitalist economy and bureaucratic state. In the Southeast Asian city, this struggle for territory and over the meaning of the urban development process in general is perhaps of equal, or greater, significance than the perennial struggle over wages and working conditions in the formal sector (also Evers, 1983). It is this that we think the "geography" of the Southeast Asian city should really be all about.