Enclave City: How the Hinterland’s Comparative Advantage Shapes Its Fate

The morphological premise of Indonesia’s administrative enclave cities, that a flat city at the geographic center of a regency will function as a service node for the producing hinterland around it, is collapsing functionally, even while the administrative and geographic structures remain intact. This paper compares two Indonesian enclave cities administratively enclosed by their regencies (Solok City in West Sumatra and Mojokerto City in East Java), using Location Quotient, Shift-Share analysis, Klassen Typology, Kernel Density Estimation, and cross-regional correlation matrices of sectoral competitiveness structures across three COVID-19 pandemic eras. Two structurally distinct fates are identified: in Solok, the regency is gradually building competing service capacity that erodes the city’s role (administrative-relic enclave); in Mojokerto, the regency bypasses the city to connect directly with Surabaya’s metropolitan industry, while the city survives through high-tertiary sector specialization (disintegrate enclave). The two fates diverge on a single variable: the comparative advantage of the surrounding regency. The paper proposes administrative-specialist enclavement as a third form of urban enclosure beyond the exclusion (Kleibert 2018) and zoning technology (Ong 2004) concepts that currently dominate enclave discourse. Keywords: enclave city, urban-rural linkage, central place theory, comparative advantage, Solok, Mojokerto.