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Jakarta Megalopolis: Horizontal and Vertical Observations
Arjan van Helmond and Stani Michiels, Valiz Publishers, 2007, 179 pages.
How do you know Jakarta?
That question is the heart of Arjan van Helmond and Stani Michiels book Jakarta Megalopolis: Horizontal and Vertical Observations.
Stani Michiels is a visual artist and architect. He studied architecture at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and attended the Stedelijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten in Leuven. In 2003, his work was shown at the OK Video festival in Jakarta, which was organized by the ruangrupa artists’ initiative.
Arjan van Helmond is a visual artist. The biographical sketch included in the book states that “the psychological and intuitive associations of architectural spaces are central to his paintings and drawings”. He studies industrial design at Deft University of Technology and visual arts at the Rietveld Acadamie (Amsterdam), Jan Van Eyck Acadamie (Maastrict), and Rijksakadamie van Beeldende Kunsten (Amsterdam). Like Michiels in 2003, he participated in a ruangrupa artists’ initiative called the Apartment Project.
The work they present here is focused on street level urban Jakarta. Michiels is the horizontal as represented by his photo images which are set in contrast to van Helmond’s vertical, represented by the interviews and the personal life stories of Jakartans who live in high-rise apartment complexes. The authors have included essays from four contributing authors which sets their work in the context of Jakarta. The art of Michiels and the interviews of van Helmond combined with these contributing essays telescopes viewpoints from the academic urban studies aspects of Jakarta, images of the street (to remind us of where we are), and the individual trying to make it in the “dream land” of the big city.
Before addressing Michiels and van Helmond’s work specifically it is worth some time to review the contributing essays as they set context.
Agung Hujatnikajennong is an art historian, curator, and critic. He obtained his Master’s in Art Theory at the Bandung Institute of Technology, to which he has been associated as a lecturer since 2001. He works for Selasar Sunaryo Art Space in Bandung and has been involved in various projects of the ruangrupa artists’ initiative in Jakarta. In 2003 and 2005, he was curator of the OK Video festival at the National Gallery of Indonesia in Jakarta.
In his essay Our Mother’s Cruelties he describes Jakarta as a “site of chaos”… …”The city keeps growing in an untamed fashion, enduring ever-escalating numbers of migrants; the spread of slums and the simultaneous mushrooming of luxurious apartments; seas of banal advertisements occupying the shrinking public spaces; waste and pollution; lack of proper sanitation; poverty; annual floods during the rainy season; criminality; traffic jams; and many other problems. For decades, all these issues have kept recurring, but no solutions have been found. Jakarta is a locus of crisis, a labyrinth in which anyone who heroically attempts to alleviate a mess will inevitably end up in a bigger one”…
Hujatnikajennong outlines the history of Jakarta, its colonial past, its growth as the national capital, the financial crisis of 1997-1998 and the violence of that time, the fall of Soeharto. He sees Jakarta now in the context of industrial global capitalism, the power of international capital which creates markets and consumers, controlling labour, changing the face of the city through foreign fast-food restaurants, malls, and cafés such as Carrefour Cempaka Putih and Starbucks Tebet.
…”To me, the appearance of contemporary Jakarta reflects the face of a frustrated mother. Perhaps, as in some other cosmopolitan cities in developing countries, especially in Southeast Asia, there have been too many facades within the city that have made her appear conquered and dominated. She never seems tough or autonomous, perhaps because of her nature as the locus of conflicts and interests. The alternating and ever-changing expressions of cruelty, enticement and sadness on her face should be seen as the way to understand the Indonesian people’s desire to live, to survive, and to stand proud as a society”…
Abidan Kusno is an architectural historian and Associate Professor of at The Center for Southeast Asian Studies of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. His research explores the historical and contemporary conditions of urban politics and city life in Asia. Using Indonesian as his primary case study, his work focuses on the effects of urban change on the social and political identities of the urban population. In 2000, he published Behind the Post-Colonial, Architecture, Urban Space and Political Cultures in Indonesia (London/New York: Routeledge, 2000).
His essay The Seen and Unseen Urban Kaleidoscope begins with the September 2004, bombing in which eight people were killed on a street in the Golden Triangle, as the upscale business, hotel, and shopping area of Jakarta is known as.
…”Violence is capable of producing unsafe places. It affects the ways we experience and understand the built and spatial environment. Yet violence can also be produced by space. The territorial space of the Golden Triangle , claimed as a significant product of national development , is also a space of exclusion, in which questions of power and identity are at stake… …”Violence and space mutually constitute each other. One is capable of producing and being produced by the other. It is important to understand the social and political forces behind the bombing”…
Kusno adds …”However, there are also other sets of questions. If urban space is capable of producing violence, can it also cure it? Can it criticize its own production of violence? How does the city reconfigure its space for the future? How does it codify the space of past violence? How does one proceed after violence? How do the residents of the city remember the event? How do they process the memory in order to move on and make their lives anew? How do architecture and urbanism engage in the production of violence and collective memories? The question of the roles of architecture and urbanism in registering power and collective memories is of real significance. Jakarta can be seen as an urban palimpsest made up of various stratums of histories and memories, but one that us unwilling to layer these multiplicities beneath the surface. Elements of various tiers co-exist in space, thus challenging the historical narrative of developmental time. Historic places and vernacular settlements are being displaced, but they have not been superseded by the space of capital. The city continues it role as the site for disruption, danger and cries for further development, yet it also serves as the arena for new solidarity and struggles for survival”…
For Kusno the city can be a place for the opportunity of re-imagining the city where the “doubling images of the horizontal and the vertical, the visual and the textual, the real and the representational, the inside and the outside, the past and the present, history and memory, coexist and are interdependent, even though they cannot quite touch each other”. Our understanding must approach the “willingness to take on the seen and unseen kaleidoscope of contemporary Jakarta”.
Gerardo Mosquera is a curator, art critic, writer, and one of the founders of the Havana Biennale. He is Adjunct Curator at the New York Museum of Contemporary Art in New York and the editor of Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America (Cambridge, US: MIT Press/London: in IVA, 1966) and Ciudad Multiple City. Urban Art and Global Cities: an Experiment in Context (Amsterdam: KIT Publishers, 2005).
In his essay The Urban Revolution he addresses the impact of contemporary migration, cultural displacement, rich and poor, and global urbanization especially in Africa, Asia, and Latin America… …”by 2525 urban population will prevail on the whole planet: five billion individuals, two thirds of the world’s inhabitant, with the majority of those occurring in poor countries, will live in cities”.
Are cities prepared for that? Mosquera quotes Calos Monsiváis, “the city is built upon its systematic destruction“.
Mosquera observes that…”fear of the city- rather than fear of the wilderness- is a symptom of our time. Jungles used to be the space of danger and adventure, while cities were the protected realms of civilization. This situation is has reversed nowadays: jungles are those ecologically pure, rather idyllic areas we enjoy looking at on the Discovery Channel, while big cities have become increasing polluted, insecure domains of paranoia, where civil life is more and more difficult”… …”Sub-Saharan Africa has been stereotyped as the territory, par excellence, of wild life and primitivism. Today, on the contrary, it embodies the delirium of modernity and the short circuits of globalization. This region, associated with small villages and tribal life, has achieved the highest rate for urbanization worldwide. In less than twenty years, 63% of its inhabitants will be city-dwellers. In the next decade, fifty million will move from the countryside to West African cities. By 2015, Lagos, with 25.6 million inhabitants, will be the third largest city in the world, surpassed only by Tokyo and Mumbai. The myth of Black Africa has disappeared with the twentieth century. Africa is no longer the jungle, the masks and the lions, but the new chaotic cities and their new – and wilder – urban lions. The colonial narrative of the heart of darkness has moved to dwell inside modernity”.
In the rapidly approaching new urban world Mosquera concludes, “Many issues are at stake: conflicts, social and cultural articulations; dialogues and collisions between new urban cultures and rural traditions; religious clashes; chaotic, wavering dissimilar processes of modernization; massive diasporas; outrageous poverty; social contrasts; traffic of all kinds; fanaticism; violence, terrorism and wars; shantytowns and their culture; global communications and huge zones of silence; homogenizing global tendencies and affirmation of differences; changing identities, cultural and social mixtures; international networks and local isolation; cultural shocks and assimilation…
…What are the implications for the individual? Since September 11th 2001, these problems have come to the forefront – not just for the majority of humankind, but for all of us”.
Charles Esche is an art curator and writer. Esche has been director of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven since 2004. He was co-curator of the Instanbul Biennale in 2005 and of the Gwanju Biennale in Korea in 2002. He is also editor of the art journal Afterall, which he founded in 1998. He is also an advisor to the Rijksakadamie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. In 2002, and 2003, he co-organized two ‘Community and Art’ workshops with Asian and European artists groups, including ‘Fixing the Bridge’ in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, in December 2003, in which ruangrupa participated.
His essay Making Sameness brings us back to Jakarta. …”How do you, from a position and background in Western Europe, make artwork (or write) about an Indonesian city without exoticising it? How can you avoid the clichéd response of the multicultural relativist? How do you place it within the stream of your own daily consciousness, not as a special topic but simply as part of a condition of life? In so many ways Jakarta is archetypically other- Asian, Islamic, post-colonial, tropical. Visiting the city, it is easy to be persuaded of the beauty of this otherness, to succumb to its apparently generous chaos, its scale, and its indifferent energy”.
Esche argues that Jakarta is connected closely to the world’s industrial system of production and the cultural consequences of economic globalization. He claims that “the presence of Western Europe is now felt in Indonesia more strongly than ever before, even more than during the colonial period”. Jakarta has become “part of the world’s cultural milieu” and in some ways a threat to that milieu, “a destabilizing element in the global order” because as much as the economic order demands sameness cultural particularities, singularity, resist the “West’s received truths”. …”Europeans can’t change the world any more- because at the most meaningful level it is impossible for us to experience the reasons to change it. We can feel sympathy and common cause in spades. We can support struggle and action. But for the first time since the Renaissance, we can’t be the prime movers. What a city like Jakarta teaches us in this vein is something of a shock. We comprehend its lessons in a visceral way- sometimes responding with terror, sometimes with overwhelming desire, but usually with a sense of displacement that is not so much geographic as attentive”.
The notion of liberal multiculturalism, tolerance and integration, does not work in Jakarta because in the West difference is reflective, it is always compared to a norm, while “in Indonesia, difference is always present. It is internal and external, extending beyond such issues as class, ethnicity, gender and religion- and none of it gets you very far dealing with the city. Its clashing, conflicted street life and the demands of daily conditions of the here and now are more than enough to keep you occupied”.
The same sameness cajoled and demanded by the global economy is turned on its head. Jakarta is part of the whole global system yet not of it. It is here where its striking singularity is visible, in all in its troubles, in all of its Jakartaness. And it is here where the city is the most revolutionary and transformative.
Anyone who lives or has spent time in Jakarta will immediately recognize Stani Michiels photo images of Jakarta. My first reaction on seeing them was a sense of familiarity. In his essay Moving in between Contrasts Michiels explains the photo concept as rising from his own experience of Jakarta while attending the 2001, OK Video festival, “I was inspired almost immediately to give visual expression to my amazement at the urban contrasts in Jakarta”… …”The Structure of the photo project in this book is taken directly from the way I traveled around during my first trip to Jakarta”.
This, of course, was just like Budi and me, out on our day trip into Jakarta. As Michiels comments, “I often looked out the window in fascination at the completely different districts or places that gave way to each other over fairly short distances. For example, low-rise areas that gave the impression of a village complete with chickens running across the road, whilst not so far away there were prestigious office buildings. Further on, Chinese districts could be recognized by the grilles around the buildings”… …”Every journey unwound before my eyes like a film”.
Michiels has described exactly my experience.
Out of Michiels experience of Jakarta then resulted in shooting twenty hours of video film which was then processed with software which he developed to remove the distortion of the video and to produce, what he calls “believable pictures”. The result is that entire streets (some times many kilometers of them) and districts appear in almost endless photographs. His images stretch along Jakarta streets in such a way as to have the same effect as if you were traveling along them. These images also capture the passing of time and the gradual fall of darkness in the city at day’s end.
Michiels images are scattered through the book in small to large scale formats. Michiels has taken his quote of Michel de Certeau to heart, “we must walk in order to read the text of the city“, and has succeeded, through his photo images, in giving us a text of Jakarta as viable and engaging as any of the four introductory essays discussed above.
The last word belongs to Arjan van Helmond in his House and Memory from the ruangrupa Apartment Project. This art project, conducted in 2003, focused on the problems of living and housing in Jakarta. As is the case in many other large Asia cities one response to the housing crisis is to build large high-rise apartment complexes. As van Helmond comments, “…Ruangrupa wanted to look at what happens when a horizontally organized society like Indonesia, where life takes place on the streets, incorporates these vertical buildings”.
For the arts project ruangrupa rented two apartments. One apartment was rented in the Rasuna apartmen building, a high-class apartment complex of seventeen floors. The other apartment was rented in the rumah susun Benhil, a low-class apartment block of ten stories. Van Helmond decided to “investigate the differences between the residences of the Rasuna apartment building and the rumah susun Benhil by focusing on their experience of “feeling at home.” He then had people describe the house they used to live in by means of words and drawings. “…Hearing about their old home would give me an impression of the community of each building, a sense of where people came from, their social position”. Five interviews from each apartment complex were conducted and the drawings of “home” are also included in the books.
At the rumah susun Benhil van Helmond found the apartment complex as something of a “stacked village”. The horizontal street had essentially been turned on end and recreated on the vertical apartment complex complete with hair salon, several restaurants, and social interactions comparable to those found in horizontal neighborhoods. While it appeared that this housing situation offered residents a certain social mobility it was clear that it was still only one step away from the Jakarta slums. The rumah susun Benhil’s appearance as a “stacked village” was the result of the informal street economy being transposed to the vertical. Life here was still on the edge and attitudes about “home” evoked a wide range of feeling, from bitterness at having lost economic status to that of having obtained the freedom to strike out on one’s own or ties to home which were more permanent than the temporary apartment living in Jakarta. Still, the attitudes evoked are set in contrast to how Jakarta is being experienced by the residents of rumah susun Benhil.
Photo images from: Karbon Journal
If the rumah susun Benhil represented something like a “stacked village” the Rasuna apartmen represented the “anonymity of the city”. Here there was a certain detachment from “home” in large part because the Rasuna apartmen represented to the residents a certain degree of upward mobility. More than just one step away from the slums it represents status, utility, transit, or a refuge from the chaos of the city. But again these attitudes are base in part on economic status yet evoked in contrast to how Jakarta is being experienced by the residents of Rasuna apartmen.
What van Helmond has done is to create yet another type of text through which we can know Jakarta. This text is the life of Jakarta’s citizens, their hopes, desires, failures, and successes
How do you know Jakarta?
That question is the heart of Arjan van Helmond and Stani Michiels book Jakarta Megalopolis: Horizontal and Vertical Observations.
The answer is what Budi, I, the four contributing essayists, Arjan van Helmond and Stani Michiels, those who live in and those who are simply passing through, or write about Jakarta have in common.
We are all involved in creating cognitive maps of the city.
This cognitive map making is a process composed of “a series of psychological transformations by which an individual acquires, codes, stores, recalls, and decodes information about the relative locations and attributes of phenomena in their everyday spatial environment” [1].
Simply put, this is the process of making a mental map.
This is how we imagine the city. How we know Jakarta. It has as much to do with Jakarta’s concrete and glass reality as it has to do with our own perceptions of the city and our own structured response to those perceptions.
It is Jakarta imagined in its context of “global city” tied the networks of the global economy, it is Jakarta in its colonial past tied to it colonial history as Batavia, it is Jakarta as Daerah Khusus Ibu Kota, the mother city, it is Jakarta in its singularity and resistance, it is Jakarta in its graphical and photographic representation as art, it is Jakarta as text, it is how we survive Jakarta, and it is how Jakarta can be re-imagined and transformed.
This is what Arjan van Helmond and Stani Michiels book Jakarta Megalopolis: Horizontal and Vertical Observations moves us toward.
[1]Source: citeseer.nj.nec.com/context/58778/0
Downs, R.M. and Stea, D. Cognitive Maps and Spatial Behavior: Process and products In Image and Environment
Downs, R.M. and Stea, D. (Eds.) Chicago: Aldine (1973:8-26)
Jakarta Restructured
A Model of Indonesian City Structure, Larry R. Ford, Geographical Review, Vol. 83, No. 4, pp. 374-396, 1993.
Indonesian cities under the “Krismon”: A great “urban crisis” in Southeast Asia, Tommy Firman, Cities, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 69-82, 1999.
Growth, crisis and spatial change: a study of haphazard urbanization in Jakarta, Indonesia, Charles Goldblum, Tai-Chee Wong, Land Use Policy, Vol. 17, pp. 29-37. 2000.
The three articles considered in this review, A Model of Indonesian City Structure by L. Ford, Indonesian cities under the “Krismon”: A great “urban crisis” in Southeast Asia, by T. Firman, and Growth, crisis, and spatial change: a study of haphazard urbanization in Jakarta, Indonesia, by C. Goldblum and T. Wong, published from 1993 though 2000, are neatly nested in a time frame of rapid economic development and political upheaval in Jakarta. Ford’s article, written in 1993, during a period of high economic growth and political stability, outlines the historical spatial development of the core urban structure of Jakarta. Firman’s article addresses the effects of the Southeast Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s, what Indonesians call the “krismon” and the consequent economic and political impacts on the urban development of Jakarta. Goldblum and Wong’s article addresses these economic and political impacts on the urban development of Jakarta in the context of international financial markets and issues of globalism.
Ford proposes a “morphological model” of Jakarta. This model is expressed as a “generalized diagram of main land use areas” and how they have developed over a temporal (historical) and spatial (landscape) axis. Ford arrived at his “morphological model” by examining the development of Jakarta in its historical context as a Dutch colonial port city, its nineteenth-century expansion as an administrative and European residential center, and its growth along a central spine of development as central set features the urban structure of Jakarta (Ford, 1993).
Originally only eight-kilometers long and not more than one-kilometer wide, this “spine” gave the city what Ford calls its “characteristic dumbbell shape” through separating its old port quarter from its new inland quarter centered on “a park like military training ground” (under Dutch Colonial rule known as the “Koningsplein” and after independence Merdeka (Freedom) Square). In this characteristic shape all development since has adhered. Ford’s “model” of contemporaneous Jakarta consists of nine zones as they have developed and accreted around this central dumbbell shape: the port-colonial city, the Chinese commercial zone, and the international commercial zone, government zone, elite residential zone interconnected in “a golden triangle” of high-rise corporate head quarters, banks, malls, embassies, and gated communities, the middle-income suburbs and industrial zones which are located on the periphery of the central spine and widen into other districts that comprise greater Jakarta, and the kampungs. “Kampung” is an Indonesian word meaning “village” and Jakarta is often referred to as “the city of villages”. “Kampungs”, as Ford states, “are what remains after discussion of all the foreign, planned, elite, and industrial sections of the city” and are “fundamental to any model of Indonesian urbanism”. These urban villages are spatially scattered as the city has grown up around them and are associated with all other urban zones except the elite spine (Ford, 1993).
The article by Firman outlines that before the Southeast Asian economic crisis of 1997, Indonesia, despite inefficiencies in infrastructure, urban poverty, and a reputation of political corruption was experiencing high levels of economic growth and considered to be one of the emerging “tiger” economies of Southeast Asia, on par with Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and South Korea. By the mid 1990s urbanization throughout Indonesia was growing at a rate of 35.9% per year driven largely by urban economic development contributing nearly half of Indonesia’s National Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and half of that GDP was centered on the urban development of Jakarta alone (Firman, 1999). Both the Firman and the Goldblum and Wong articles emphasize the rapid urban growth of Jakarta which now extends into the peripheral cities of Bogor, Depok, Tangerang, and Bekasi, an area covering over 650 square kilometers. Greater Jakarta, with a population approaching twenty million people, is now commonly referred to as “Jabodetabek”, an acronym of the cities listed above. This development has especially impacted the kampungs, a core feature of Ford’s “morphological structure” of Jakarta. As property prices rose in Jakarta and development of the “golden triangle” intensified the kampungs essentially have been removed to outlying districts, as they are converted from residential to business districts. This in turn has accelerated economic growth and property speculation on Jakarta’s periphery.
Firman details the “krismon” as follows: high rates of bank failures due to high foreign debt and extension of loans to companies and individuals that had strong ties to the banks themselves and then were revealed not to be solvent or bankable resulting in severe bad debt and loss of public confidence; overvaluation of the Indonesian Rupiah which had cheapened the costs of imports and increased dependency on imports as components of production and consumption ultimately resulting in a 300% devaluation of currency; the cost of food doubling in a single year with currency devaluation resulting in inflation rates between 80% and 100%; political corruption, collusion, cronyism, and scandal in the government relating to the financial sector; out migration from urban to rural areas as unemployment exceeded 50% of the total work force; economic growth a negative 13.4%; an exploding crime rate; and a poverty rate of 370%. Then, on May 12, 1998, 6000 students demonstrated at Trisakti University (an upscale private university for the sons and daughters of the wealthy elite in north Jakarta) for democratization, equality, justice, and human rights. The army is called out and four students are killed. Jakarta erupts in riots, burning, and looting resulting in the deaths of over fifteen hundred people. The Soeharto government, in place since 1965, falls (Firman, 1999).
Firman’s study reveals “a disastrous urban crisis” in Indonesia which seriously needs to be taken into consideration and calls for urban rehabilitation and development programs “in the very near future”. He concludes that “poverty will now become the most important issue in urban development” encompassing job creation, provision of basic needs, food security, health care, education, potable water for the poor, and rehabilitation of infrastructure severely damaged in the urban riots of May, 1998 (Firman, 1999).
Goldblum and Wong assert that since the 1980s multinational corporations have found financial, market, and regulatory advantage by moving their centers of production from core developed nations to peripheral developing nations. The opening of new markets, cost reductions in components of products, enhanced competitiveness through sub-contracting production and manufacturing where labor costs are low, and favorable government policies toward foreign direct investment, have increased profit margins for multinational corporations through the globalization of markets. While some may consider this the bright side of globalization, the dark side, as Goldblum and Wong point out, is the transformation of developing economies of Southeast Asia in negative ways. For, example, they point specifically to impacts of global financial markets on property speculation in Jakarta through the rapid urbanization and expansion of financial and industrial districts resulting in a greater Jakarta (“Jabodetabek”) which is engulfing adjoining districts, creating a classic “urban sprawl”. The spatial character of core Jakarta itself has been altered through accelerating development in the “golden triangle” resulting in the destruction of the core “kampungs”. Industrial expansion and property speculation induced by multinational corporations and global financial markets, they suggest, has resulted in large influx of migrants to the ever expanding workforce stressing urban infrastructures beyond their ability to cope (Goldblum, 2000).
While Firman’s article focused on the urban crisis in the context of economic change and response during the Southeast Asian economic crisis, Goldblum and Wong examine the growth and spatial change of urbanization in Jakarta in terms of globalization, core-periphery relations, land use policy, property speculation, and the consequent spatial effects these issues have had on urban Jakarta. Ford’s article, then, can be viewed as an explication of the spatial core of urban Jakarta in its historical development, while Firman’s, and Goldblum and Wong’s demonstrate that this core structure is far from stable under internal and external, positive or negative, economic and political stress. In addition, Ford only addresses Jakarta’s urban “morphology” as the sum of historical processes but without detailed reference to the economic and political processes which have profoundly influenced the creation of that structure in the first place. Firman, Goldblum, and Wong essentially turn this view upside down. Their articles emphasize how, in a rapid period of economic and political change, the urban landscape, and indeed, the destiny of a people and nation, can be altered.
Citations
Ford, L. 1993. A model of Indonesian City Structure. Geographical Review, Vol. 83, No.4. (Oct., 1993), pp. 374-396.
Firman, T. 1999. Indonesian cities under the “Krismon”: A great “urban crisis” in Southeast Asia, , Cities, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 69-82.
Goldblum, C., T. Wong. 2000. Growth, crisis and spatial change: a study of haphazard urbanization in Jakarta, Indonesia, Charles Goldblum, Tai-Chee Wong, Land Use Policy, Vol. 17, pp. 29-37.
