Jakarta (fear of the street, part 3)

 Trisakti Monument, Trisakti University, Jakarta

Turun ke Jalan!

This is the third part of my review of Chapter 4, The Violence of Categories, in Abidin Kusino’s book Behind the Post Colonial Architecture, urban space and political cultures.

I end where Kusno begins: the economic crisis of 1997-1998, the student demonstrations, and the fall of Soeharto. In this coming month of May the tenth anniversary of those events which took place in Jakarta will pass.

Ten years ago Jakarta was in the midst of sever economic crisis resulting from property speculation and overvaluation, systemic corruption of the banking sector, systemic corruption in the government, devaluation of the rupiah, and the weariness of 32 years of Soeharto rule. It has been said that during this economic crisis the poverty rate increased by 300%. Thousands of people were without work. Political discourse descended to the street.

Ten years ago the university students were in the streets protesting for human rights and economic justice, for what they called “reformasi”.

What crackled in the background were violent riots and the deaths of perhaps as many as fifteen hundred people.

Ten years ago Jakarta was burning.

Kusno emphasizes two violent incidences in Jakarta at this time, the first was the student protests culminating in the shooting deaths by the Indonesian army of four students from Trisakti University and second the violent riots which followed and which emerged from the street.

Kusno: “Soon after the shooting, major rioting broke out in about 50 places in metropolitan Jakarta. The main targets were Indonesians of Chinese descent. For more than 35 hours, the “underclass” of Jakarta, from which the student distanced themselves, ran amok, burning and looting places that apparently belonged to Chinese Indonesians. This took place regardless of the presence of the police and military who apparently allowed the riots to occur”.

The downfall of the regime was close at hand and because this is Java there was some mystery in this violence as well. People took advantage of the violence to settle old scores. Some have reported direct government involvement in inciting to riot. The violence was such that no one knew what was going on, who was behind it, where it was coming from, and where it was going. For a real good firsthand account of this and other events in Indonesia that were taking place during this time I highly recommend Richard Lloyd Perry’s book In the Time of Madness: Indonesia on the Edge of Chaos.

Two categories emerge out of these events, “student protestors” and “underclass rioters”.

Kusno: “These two overlapping instances immediately appeared as the unspoken frame work of events in the Indonesian media, thereby reinforcing the categories of violence that were already in place”.

Kusno’s questions are these.

“Why are two difference bodies of protest constituted in one city: the “student ” (and behind them the national media) and the “massa” (considered by the national media as “perusuh”, a term for those who “lost their self control and sense of morality” as a result of the “immediate situation” of the riot)? How are these categories produced? And more particularly, what is the relation of these categories to the ways in which the space of the city is constructed?”

Answers to those questions are discussed in part one and part two of Jakarta (streets of fear).

Perhaps those events at Trisakti are remembered most clearly while is the violence of the street has been lost to a collective amnesia, as Peter Nas suggests.

Still, after the initial protests at Trisakti University and the street riots the scene shifted to Jalan Sudirman, Semanggi, Senayan, and the Parliament Building.

This is the subject of Taking the Streets: Activism and Memory Work in Jakarta, Doreen Lee, Indonesian Studies Working Papers, No. 3, September 2007, University of Sydney.

From Lee:

“The discourse of public space in Indonesia contains both the anxieties and the hopes of the social classes affected by this idea of ‘public space’ and what it promises.

The first idea of public space takes place in the interior zone of a shopping mall, shaped by middle-class ideas of comfort and safety, an idea which operates against the fear of the hot, dusty, and dangerous streets. The second and more recent development, the revival of street politics, uses these dislocations to its advantage, as activists use the street to gain proximity to the rakyat (the People) and to disseminate their political rhetoric in a most spectacular fashion. The city is the setting for these contestations for public space by different groups, made up of multiple and heterogeneous components, which nonetheless approach the street with a shared sense of its wild possibilities. One could say that a metonymy is being established, where increasingly the conditions of the street have come to represent the city.

Sudirman, as well as the destination points of the Semanggi Cloverleaf bridge and the Parliamentary Building at Senayan, became sites of physical outbreaks of violence, with rubber bullets, teargas, water cannons, and batons deployed by the state security forces, and molotovs and rocks thrown back by student demonstrators. This paper takes up one of these addresses and the events marked by its name: Semanggi, the gathering point of the Student Movement during the mass demonstrations of 1998 and 1999. 13 November 1998: The First Semanggi Tragedy. At the gates of Atma Jaya Catholic University, a crowd of student demonstrators and ordinary people protesting the Parliamentary Special Assembly (Sidang Istimewa) were fired upon by state troops. Fifteen reported killed,6 and more than 100 demonstrators hospitalised.

The Second Semanggi Incident, 23 September 1999: protesting the ratification of a new emergency act giving the military unprecedented power, 6 people were killed. In both cases, the military denied issuing live bullets to their soldiers (van Dijk 2001: 453). By now, 8 years on, the violence of the events of Semanggi I and II have attained a finished quality. Finished but unresolved. What happened on that major thoroughfare, Semanggi?

In 1998 Indonesia felt these political reverberations; the feet of hundreds of thousands of demonstrators hitting the street in different cities throughout the archipelago. The call was ‘Turun ke Jalan!’, ‘Descend to the Streets!’. The most dramatic and well-documented of these demonstrations culminated in the violent encounters between state armed forces and student-led demonstrators in Semanggi”…

Nas and Pratiwo argue in The Streets of Jakarta: fear, trust, and amnesia in urban development. University of Leiden. Leiden, that “This concept of fear, as we have described it, has shaped the social and physical environment of Jakarta. It dominates the streets and the mental maps of the streets people construct in their heads. The old gated communities that came into existence during the colonial era and the Soeharto period have been complemented by new ones of a simpler type: the abundance of steel gates that close off the many small roads to the kampongs, such as at Jalan Gadjah Mada. These gates have recently been added to the large gated communities, such as the new towns in the periphery of Jakarta, and the condominiums of the super rich, for example Taman Anggrek. Moreover, the new architecture of malls almost without front windows, or just very thick glass blocks, can be considered a new trend which will probably lead to experiments with malls completely walled on the outside, with windows on the inside in order to receive natural light from an inner courtyard. Spanish architecture could be taken as an example for this new architecture. However, apart from the ‘architecture of fear’ and the ‘planning of trust’, the desire for amnesia is also very strong. People try to forget what happened in 1965 and 1998 and during the many other riots in between. They do not want to talk about the victims and their fate. However, their mental maps still include information on where to go and where not to go, as well as where to contact each other in case of danger. The mental maps of the streets of Jakarta are burdened by both fear and trust, but in order to continue daily street life this is balanced by a strong drive toward amnesia”.

Lee: “The uncertainty of the streets, they claim, has become a part of daily life, as Jakartans retain a mental map of escape routes. People connect with each other to obtain information via remote technologies (cell-phones, radio, and for a time, high-frequency walkie-talkies) out of a sense of flight from danger. Rumors of mass riots and theft feed these uncertainties, creating urban myths and material changes to the architecture of the city, with gates and walls demarcating ever more sharply the lines between the street and non-street spaces.

If, as Nas and Pratiwo argue in The Streets of Jakarta that “ordinary (middle class) Jakartans are compelled to talk about the 1998 riots and to point out the ruins of that violence, their mental maps are of a variety driven by rumour and distance from the event. The middle class subjects of Nas and Pratiwo’s article are devoid of encounters with the street and the productive spaces of alternative politics contained in the activist accounts of that same time period. But this disparity in understanding arises as an effect of the street itself, where rumors of crime and violence bring with them a recognition and rejection of the otherness of those who belong on the streets: namely, the mad, the destitute, and the criminal. Contra to the singularity of ‘I was there’, the repetition of the riot stories say, ‘it could have been me -because I am middle class’. Such avoidance of the street plays out in the urban development of malls, as the upwardly-mobile educated and political classes build fortresses of ‘public space’ that the rakyat cannot afford, even if they might enter to look…

…Shopping malls are ‘like prescriptive institutions such as civil service training institutes’ (Young 1999: 69), where urban sophistication is learned and practised. In Young’s observation, malls in Jakarta are being described as public parks, and serve the function of public space, drawing both the rich and the poor. Note his description of the burgeoning of luxury malls in Jakarta in the late 1990s: In the most opulent malls of central Jakarta (such as Plaza Indonesia, Plaza Menteng, Sarinah Store), or in prestige locations like Pondok Indah, Pasaraya Blok M or Citraland Mall, one can spend hours walking past a seemingly endless array of specialist boutique shops, large national and international department stores, supermarkets, banks, franchised food outlets and the like…Yet, even here, there is an admixture of teenagers in school uniform, sightseers, couples on dates in the restaurants and fast-food outlets…What is being studied most assiduously are the elements of middle-class style”.

And after ten years from “reformasi”?

Lee concludes that, “Malls create a sense-repertoire that can be replicated across the archipelago. While these ‘academies’ of class socialization enable the rakyat class of people to experience the lifestyle of the upwardly mobile, the experience of the mall itself encourages a specific uniformity. Well-dressed youth are the target audience of these malls. It is a uniformity that points to a standard experience and a standard fear; the expansion of air-conditioned sanctuaries is ‘closely connected to middle-class anxieties over the worsening street crimes in Jakarta’.

Coterminous with the development of gated communities, the malling of Jakarta provides a safe haven for the retreat of the middle class, away from the perceived dangers of the street…

…In Kusumawijaya’s words, the mall attracts the middle class by drawing them away from the street, so that the street becomes something to be experienced only from the window of a car”.

The mall may seem a digression in this discussion, but it has emerged discursively as part of measures taken by urban planners and the middle class (consumers) in reaction to the dangers of the streets. The Mall as anti-street presents new challenges to the memorializing of radical politics associated with Semanggi”.

Here again is Abeyasekere’s words. They echo down the long history of Jakarta.

“…from colonial times onwards, governments have sought to impose an inappropriate façade on Jakarta, a façade which was unable to conceal the sprawl of the city.

Is Jakarta the awful culmination of the nation’s past or does it in fact mirror Indonesia’s future? Throughout its history its rulers have certainly intended the latter, but the real city has always taken its own perversely different path, making it to some extent a microcosm of the country at large- a forum for government policies at odds with people struggling to make a life of their own.

The central fallacy which has persisted from 1619 to the present is that it is possible to create a city for the privledged few, cut off from the countryside of the majority poor”.

The evidence, of which I have very direct experience, is that this fallacy is still alive and well and thriving in Jakarta at this very moment.

Jakarta (fear of the street, part 2)

Taman Anggrek, Jakarta 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

West Jakarta

 

I have left Jakarta. Three weeks of eating the Jakarta air and being saturated with advertising (promising much but delivering little) has been interesting to say the least.  But just in time anyway for MENTAL DETOX WEEK.

At my family’s house, just outside of Depok, TelKom Indonesia, has been out of order for the last six days. I had internet access on one of those six days.  But as my family says (almost in a chorus) “well, you know, that’s Indonesia”.

I have come away with over 500 photographs and 17 short videos.  Some of those, after I process it all (both mentally and physically) will filter down into the future postings of Jakarta Urban Blog. That in itself is worth returning for, yes?

In the meantime I have a layover in Seoul, Korea. Here there is high speed internet 24/7. It is free. But, alas it is not Jakarta.  

In any event to keep myself occupied I am posting the second part of my review of Chapter Four: The Violence of Categories: Urban Space and the Making of the National Subject in Abidin Kusno’s book Behind the Post-Colonial: Architecture, urban space and political cultures in Indonesia.

THE PROTECTING EYES OF THE FATHER, THE DEATH OF THE STREET, AND THE BIRTH OF THE NATIONAL FAMILY

Kusno: “The New Order of Suharto, however, did not legitimize its presence by merely fabricating the threat of “internal” others, initiating the danger of the street and providing security measures. Instead, a second point of tensions associated with a desire to form a new collective subject that represented “modernity” complicated these techniques of social control through the heavy-handed display of power and the spectacle of punishment”.

In 1974 the first student protests, demonstration, and urban youth riots occurred. The regime was beset not only with attempting to bridge the rapidly widening gap between the rich and the poor but also to satisfy demands for upward mobility.

Here again Jakarta would be used as a “symbol of the nation” but not to instill a national or revolutionary spirit as that of the Sukarno generation. This time it would be used to form, as Kusno states “national subjects who were both obedient and “modern”. Suharto’s style was to “guide from behind” like an ever-watchful parent. He is the “smiling general” representing the ideology of “development”. This idea as Kusno states “had its sense of authentic Javanese wisdom in which the children of the family are guided from behind to their destined place. The lesson has been that they know their place, do not get lost, or go astray”.

And here is what happens.

Kuson: “This task, of preventing national subjects from going astray, was perhaps first practiced by the famous Governor of Jakarta, Ali Sadikin, a Sukarno protégé who also worked under Suharto from 1966-1977. From the beginning of his administration, Sadikin found himself dealing with what he came to perceive as the problem of “urban excess”, namely, the migration of people who lacked “urban rationality” to the capital city. Under his tenure, Jakarta was given the title of “metropolitan” and “modernity” was defined in relation to the spaces occupied by the urban poor who were then subjected to the strong arm of the law”.

Here is Sadikin’s twisted logic, “The execution of law enforcement is homage to the poor people (‘rakyat kecil’). They are those with no skill, who are lacking consciousness of the law, who build their houses along riverbanks, along railways, under electric poles, along the green belt, those who sleep under bridges or in the park, or use pedestrian ways and streets for vending, those who ride ‘becak‘ (pedicab).”

The urban problems Sadikin lists are still present today in Jakarta but his war on the becak was a success. Becak, nearly synonymous with Jakarta and Indonesia, were confiscated under force, gathered up, and dumped into the ocean.

Kusno cites Sadikin, “This form of transportation, used by the poor, was too slow for “the economy (which) should move faster” and furthermore, “it is hard to administer, and the leadership simply does not want rustic-looking people pushing bikes around in their capital city”.

Kusno: “Here the memories of the populist politics of the previous regimes and the social environment of the poor became interchangeable. Both became “non-modern” elements in the city. For Sadikin, the capital of the nation must be represented as modern so that “potential troubles” embedded on the streets and in environments constructed as “non-modern”, could be suppressed, eliminated, and transformed”.

FLYING OVER THE KAMPUNG: CLASSIFYING NATIONAL SUBJECTS

Kusno: “Central to the state’s concern about discipline and order in the city, therefore, are the overlapping interests between the government’s promotion of its ideology of “development” on the one hand and the increasing numbers of the new generation of New Order “middle class”, for want of a better word, concerned with their identity, on the other. Here elevated highways occupy a special position, not least because of their “visibility”, like a giant roller coaster stretching over the capital city. The elevated highways are not just a means for de-congesting metropolitan Jakarta; they are also a sign of progress for developmentalist regime that measures its achievement through the way the city is represented…

Driving through the elevated highways suggests an experience of flying over the top of the city, escaping from its congested roads and leaving behind the “lower” classes who are routed through the crowded street at ground level. From this suspended driveway, the details of the urban fabric of Jakarta’s streets and kampung, the poor urban neighborhoods, are transformed into a series of blurred images, giving a sense of detachment from the “worldly” place below. The elevated highway is thus a system of representation that allows some forms and spaces to be visualized and others to be concealed. It is a kind of fluency provided by the city to create a dream-state of upward mobility in order to overcome the contradictions of “development”…

…this infrastructure is not merely a representation of the dominant class. It also helps to constitute the general populace by way of city buses that occasionally travel on the elevated highways. On these occasions, the relatively poor urbanites are also provided with a similar new experience of the city, but with different political implications. Here urban space is constructed to define and regulate both the privileged and the poor. They are both celebrated and constituted by the urban infrastructure, constructed to assemble crowds for uplifting purposes…

…This emphasis on the centrality of vision in architecture and urban space constitutes a phantasmagoria of display of the achievement of the New Order in embracing commodity capitalism. Along with the highway net work, it reaches its apogee in the design of department stores, high-rise office towers and real estate housing, all of which are seen to provide a field of vision available for the well-to-do. On the other side, the majority of the poor that live behind this façade, surrounded by images of a metropolis, are conditioned by the visible proof of “historical progress”. From pleasure, alienation and wonder that are derived from spectacle alone a society of consumption is produced (emphasis mine)”.

 

There is a punch line to this which I will attempt to deliver in Jakarta (fear of the street, part 3)…

 

 

 

 

Jakarta (wild monkeys and friends)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are few green spaces in this city. My Green Map of Jakarta lists only 38 sites. Most are small fragments of parks of just a hectare or two or less or they are attached to hotels.

Street vendors, prostitutes, drug addicts, the poor, and the homeless crowd much the public green space. My map shows no connectivity between any of the green spaces dispersed over metropolitan Jakarta.

Of the two largest green spaces listed on my map one is the campus of the University of Indonesia (more in Depok than Jakarta), which is actually quite pleasant, the other is the amusement park at Ancol and is not so pleasant.

However, there is one green space that is quite remarkable. It is number one on the list and is called Cagar Alam Muara Angke.

It is described as follows:

“Muara Angke, Jakarta Barat/Utara. Hutan rawa bakau yang awalnya seluas 70 ha saat ini semakin menyempit. Sebagian rawa telah berubah menjadi empang, tempat pemancingan ikan mujahir dan bandeng, yang popular. Jalan setapak berupa panggung papan (boarwalk) merupakan sarana untuk mengamati monyet; burung gereja, bangau putih, pecuk hitam, dan belibis. Sayang, sampah liar banyak berserakan”.

First, and most amazingly, Muara Angke IS IN Jakarta. It is tucked away between a very garish neo-imperial-roman-housing-tract-shopping-mall for the super rich (only idiots with bad taste and a lot a money need apply) one one side of the river and a poor (this is understated because I cannot think of the word for it) fishing village on the other side of the river.

At Muara Angke there is a new boardwalk running about 1000 meters into a river delta of old mangrove and nipa palm forest. There are open water lagoons, and birds, including ibis, heron, woodpeckers, swallows, and flycatchers, to name a few.

The place is mute with the sounds of the city and loud with the songs of birds. I watched a flycatcher about three feet from the end of my nose go through several renditions of a very nice song indeed before flitting away into the bush. Rather stunning after a full afternoon of Jakarta traffic.

In this place you can actually feel the physical relief of setting your eyes on something green, alive, and entirely non-human.

Muara Angke is just a tiny fragment, some 70 hectares in size, of what the coastline once looked like, oh so long ago.

And here there are monkeys. Not monkeys in a zoo. Not monkeys tied to an end of a rope dancing for a few rupiah. Real monkeys. Wild, free, monkeys. Monkeys in Jakarta.

There are crocodiles (up two three meters in length). Big snakes. Butterflies. Here is everything Jakarta is not.

 

Jakarta (the future and past of transportation, part 2)

 

detail from above

Detail from Shiva, the destroyer and god of bad habits, The National Museum, Jakarta

Here, yet again, is another Mad-Max-Road-Warrior vehicle looking like a chopped and heavily modified Vespa… for two. This was parked when I came across it so I do not know if it runs now or how fast it goes or if it is loud. Probably does all three or did at one time. And you would definitely take your chances in that second seat.

What is striking is that I felt like I had seen this before.

And yes, indeed, I had. Compare the photo detail of the rear fender with the detail from the base of the ninth century statue of the Hindu god Shiva, the destroyer and god of bad habits, that I took at the National Museum. As much as Indonesia is purported to be a Muslim country these images are not coincidental. The Hindu gods are still alive and well in Java.

 

Jakarta (smile)

 

Friends

A city really is a collective of individuals. Some, a few here, have it better than others. Some, most, are just trying to make a life for themselves getting by the best they can in the circumstances they find themselves in. This city can break your heart a thousand times a day. It can madden you with its indifference, frustrate you with its poor planning and ramshackle condition, drive you crazy with talking, talking, talking, with out anything being done. Its poverty is stunning. Its wealth sickening.

How do you know Jakarta? I have written about some of those ways here in Jakarta Urban Blog. 

Right now, in this moment, someone is singing a beautiful song just outside the room in which I am writing this post. Roosters are crowing.  The kampung cats are looking for breakfast.

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words.  I think a smile is worth ten thousand.

Jakarta (the future of transportation)

I do not know what to call it.  Maybe there is an Indonesian name for it but I have not found out what it is yet. It’s a Mad-Max-Road-Warrior kind of thing. It goes fast. It is almost invisible in the congested traffic. It is loud. So forget the Transjakarta Busway. Forget any idea about some kind of elevated train or monorail. Forget any attempt to rationalize the  awful traffic here. I present to you the future of transportation in Jakarta.

Jakarta (the end is near)

 

Jakarta Kota

An interesting article from the AFP is running just now and it is really worth a look.

 

Indonesia’s thirsty capital is a sinking city

JAKARTA (AFP) - Separated by a road and a viscous finger of black, garbage-choked water, the stilt-house slum of Muara Baru and the BMW car dealership that faces it appear as if from different worlds.

But on December 6, 2025, these two extremes of the Indonesian capital will have something in common as a World Bank study shows that unless action is taken, they and much of the coastal city of 12 million will be submerged by seawater. …>go to article

I wanted to get this post out because there have been predictions of the demise of Jakarta for some time. Well, now we have a date.  Anyone up for an end of Jakarta party in 2025?  It’s only a mere 17 years away. Think of that.

Jakarta (an urban studies theory)

 

 

Jalan Thamrin, Jakarta

 

Perhaps someone has thought of this before. If that is so then I can say the idea holds true.

My very direct experience of Jakarta and my mental processing of that experience in the last two weeks have led me to conclude that there are six broad categories through which the modern urban setting can be considered. They may be considered in their literal sense as well in their metaphorical sense. These categories transcend economic status and gender. They are:

Buying
Selling
Consuming
Sleeping
Sex
Death

Urban activities fall into one, several, or all of these categories at any given time. These categories apply in all global urban settings.

Jakarta, being the city it is, displays these categories in some very robust ways.

 

Jakarta (internet censorship)

The news that a number of web sites are going down due to RI government decree is all over the Indonesian blogs this morning.  I am busy processing photos and video so my posting is quite limited but I highly recommend taking a look at Avianto’s journal. Great piece of writing there.  Jakartass also has some choice words.

In a related article in Japan Focus this article by Andre Vitchek is also well worth your time. The New Face of Indonesia’s Islamic Fundamentalism: Pornography Ban Ignores the Starving

Then there is this from Aliran

Tuesday, 08 April 2008

Fifteen people from six countries were arrested today in Jakarta (Indonesia) by Polda Jaya (the Police Corps of Jakarta Raya Territory) for participating in a peaceful people’s gathering to voice their protest against GM rice and call for saving the diversity of local rice to ensure people’s food security.  As you see Jakarta is a rather busy kind of place…

 

As for me I am out in the streets of Jakarta.  Though I have been here many times I am being reminded (once again) how much this city can kick your ass.

 

Saya disini Jakarta

Posting will be a bit sporadic over the next three weeks.  I am in Jakarta (finally).  Hope to post new photos and some short commentary while I am here.   I am working on  Jakarta (fear of the street, part 2) which I hope to post soon. Thanks. Keep reading. Jakarta Urban Blog appreciates it.

Terima kasih…