The End of Urban Involution and the Cultural Construction of Urbanism in Indonesia (original) (raw)
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The End of Urban Involution and the Cultural Construction of Urbanism in Indonesia1
2005
Urbanisation in Indonesia, as elsewhere in Southeast Asia, has been low up to the 1970s, prompting some authors to speak of urban involution. Since then a giant mega-city has developed around Jakarta, known as Jabotabek, and other cities like Surabaya, Bandung and Medan have grown to metropolitan proportions. This paper is, however, less concerned with the demographic aspects of urbanization, but with the culture of cities, with urbanism. Lacking a strong tradition of urbanism and having to battle with urban involution, Indonesian urbanism was symbolically constructed through the architecture of significant buildings, monuments and the planning of city space. During the post-independence Sukarno era the dream of Jakarta as the world capital of the emerging forces determined the image of the city, while New Order Indonesia under Suharto rediscovered the pre-colonial past. Global modernism is guiding the virtual construction of Indonesian cities into the third millennium. With the end of urban involution "real urbanism" replaced the "virtual urbanism" of the past and Jakarta evolved into a modern capital of a democratizing and decentralising state. Cases from several Indonesian and other Southeast Asian cities are presented as evidence for these assumptions.
2022
The paper examines New Order Jakarta and Afrizal Malna's engagement with it through his poetry and short stories. In late New Order Indonesia, industrialization generated among Jakarta’s intellectuals a sense of entrapment in an ‘onrushing century’ where the storm of progress had thrown their life into turmoil. What did it mean for them to find their urban experiences structured by this turmoil, which poet Afrizal Malna called an ‘architecture of rain’? Sensing that corporeal and material history may hold the key to this question, I look into why a section of New Order Jakarta’s intellectual class felt they were leading a hyper-fast, overheated life, and how they tried to come to terms with it. Focusing on thing-centred and embodied experiences, I use the tension between Jakarta’s social history and Afrizal Malna’s biography and literary work to spark a different understanding of contemporary Indonesian urbanism.
2014
This article analyses how social imaginaries are shaped and produced in Jakarta. It studies the roots and development of social, cultural and spatial patterns developed since the Dutch colonial period. It focuses on social imaginaries and social representations, which are both complex social and mental phenomena, connecting people with the whole dimension of social world. In Jakarta, the spatial segregation pattern created on purpose by the Dutch clearly separated the Westerners from the Natives. It produced a collective memory that influenced the creation process of representations, in particular regarding residential neighborhoods. This mental process synthesizes the history of the Jakarta in its the production of social imaginaries which allows us to analyse the evolution of power relations and patterns in the context of globalisation . This study on the housing project advertisements, represents a testimony of how a society in a formerly colonised country defines itself in a global world. City development, through the lens of housing projects, can be seen to reflect a collective emotion which reveals that the relationships between Westerners and the Indigenous local community remain asymmetric.
Urban Form of Indonesian Cities During the Colonization Period
pasca.unhas.ac.id
The development and transformation stages of Indonesian cities during the colonization period are unveiled by the manifestation of their urban form. The cities' eminent position in politics, culture and regional economics provides for a diversity of population groups. Like other Western colonizers, the Dutch forced their ideological urban design in establishing and developing the colony. Even though, laws, ordinances, and codes that were established gradually changed due to the characteristic local condition. The social, cultural of the natives as well as physical condition land imposed the Dutch to adapt the existing environment to establish and developed their ideas in town and building design. As a result, a new breed of urban design and architecture materialized in the colony's urban form. This research is basically founded that urban form of Indonesian cities has both physical and social dimensions by tracing the process of developments.
Although Jakarta seems to follow in the footsteps of other major Asian cities in its determination to flood the city with mega-developments, there are hesitations and interruptions along this seemingly smooth path. In the majority world, the onus of developing a viable place in the city largely fell to residents themselves, who then proceeded to elaborate intricate social and economic architectures of collaboration whose logics and operations were not easily translatable into the predominant categorizations employed by urban elites and authorities. These elites then attempted to disentangle these relationships, prioritizing the need for visibility, even as their own methods for retaining control were, themselves, usually opaque. This article explores how these ambiguous modalities of visibility are being reworked in contemporary Jakarta.
Cities, 2020
Jakarta, Indonesia's primate city and the world's second largest urban agglomeration, is undergoing a deep transformation. A fresh city profile of Jakarta is long overdue, given that there have been major events and developments since the turn of the millennium (the Asian Financial crisis and decentralisation in Indonesia, among the most important), as well as the fact that the city is a living entity with its own processes to be examined. The inhabitants of the city have also taken centre stage now in these urban processes, including the recent pandemic COVID-19 response. Our paper profiles Jakarta heuristically in two cuts: presenting the city from conventional and academic perspectives of megacities like it, which includes contending with its negative perceptions, and more originally, observing the city from below by paying attention to the viewpoints of citizens and practitioners of the city. In doing so, we draw from history, geography, anthropology, sociology and political science as well as from our experience as researchers who are based in the region and have witnessed the transformation of this megacity from within, with the idea that the portrayal of the city is a project permanently under construction. 1. Everyday Jakarta Present-day Jakarta and its metro area seem a massive and chaotic jumble of concrete, asphalt, vehicles, and people. Each day the streets carry more than 20 million vehicles; every year, approximately 11% more motorcycles, cars, buses, and trucks take to the streets (BPS Provinsi DKI Jakarta, 2018). 1 On average, motorists spend more than half their daylight hours stuck in traffic, and when they can move, their speed is only about 5 km/h during rush period (Tempo.co, 2015). 2 The city (comprising Jakarta and its metro area) spans 4384 km 2 and has a population density of around 13,000 people per km 2 (Idem). Such a high population density makes land one of the most highly desired commodity in the city, a situation not unlike megacities elsewhere. The continual pressures a rising population put on scarce land result in acute mobility problems and permanent infrastructural deficiencies. Concomitantly, the competition for land in Jakarta gives rise to an endless cycle of conflicts, invasions, evictions, and eternal legal disputes between original owners, developers, and other powerful agents (Herlambang, Leitner, Liong Ju, Sheppard, & Anguelov, 2018). Every day, city and countryside seem to merge in this spatial conglomerate, in a sort of babel of skin and eye colors, languages, conversations, memories, shouts, watchful eyes, rumors and gossip. Intermingled with sirens, pounding and drilling, singing birds, helicopters' whumping roar, the adhan, 3 vehicle horns, squealing cranes, croaking frogs, vendors' harangues, quacking ducks, the roar of engines and the whistling of the wind all become part of the same ubiquitous miasma of vomit, urine, sweat, kretek, 4 stagnant water, burning trash, smoked meat, perfume, smog, gorengan, 5 kerosene, open sewage,
Decentralizing Indonesian city spaces as new 'centers'
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol.37, no.3, 2013
"Since the introduction of regional autonomy legislation in 1999, Indonesia has embarked on the world’s biggest experiment with democratic decentralization. The intertwined processes of democratization and decentralization have dismantled Indonesia’s centralized authoritarian system and reordered its governmental structures. These conjoined processes have set in motion conditions for the transformation of a number of Indonesia’s secondary cities into regional ‘centers’ through the influx of new peoples, funding and ways of interacting within localized contexts and with the outside world. In this article I consider Indonesia’s decentralization processes through the lens of the city, focusing on three key areas in the rising profile and development of urban centers. First, I look at the framing of Indonesian cities within contemporary urban discourses to highlight the array of urban spaces that coexist in the era of decentralization. Second, I describe how Indonesia’s decentralization laws have structurally privileged cities by bypassing the provincial level and devolving most state powers directly to sub-provincial administrations. Third, I explore how Indonesian cities compete and cooperate over limited state resources under the decentralized system and why some cities have been able to reinvent themselves as new centers in planning, practice and innovation, and why others continue to lag behind."
Jakarta in Post-Suharto Indonesia: Decentralization, Neoliberalism and Global City Aspiration
Space and Polity, vol. 15, no.1, 2011
"In this paper, an examination is made of Jakarta’s changing political and economic position since the mid 1990s. This period of transformation is dealt with in four parts: the first relates to spatial and administrative changes to Jakarta and its wider urban region; the second considers the impact and implications of the 1997 Asian financial crisis (krismon) and ensuing political transformation which saw the resignation of President Suharto; the third part details the decentralisation laws of 1999 and their implications for urban and regional development; and the fourth considers the context of the 2008–10 global financial crisis (krisis global) in which ‘neo-liberalisme’ became a political slur in Indonesia, ironically at the same time as the governor of Jakarta declared ‘global city’ aspirations."