Clashing Visions of a Third World Metropolis

INDONESIA’S CAPITAL, JAKARTA, IS, LIKE many Third World metropolises, a painful montage of extreme wealth and poverty. Luxury apartment buildings shoot above streets of small, ramshackle homes, huge mall complexes cast their shadows over vendors and beggars plying their trade on sidewalks and buses, and Mercedes-Benzes drive past trains with passengers stuffed into cars and sitting on roofs. While the Jakarta special district government announces plans to facilitate the building of 200 malls, half-finished highway ramps and unfinished skyscrapers stand as architectural reminders of the Asian economic crisis.

Jakarta is one of the most densely populated places on earth. Numbers vary, but by one estimate, the greater urban area of Jakarta encompasses some 21 million people–or nearly ten percent of Indonesia’s population–making it the densest part of one of the densest islands (Java) in the world. The city’s infrastructure and services have not kept pace with the community’s needs. Eighty-five percent of new housing stock is informally assembled by the poor, who are often squatting on land to which they have no legal right. Those lucky enough to have homes or apartments are unlikely to have access to city water (which is not potable) or a formal sewage system, and getting a phone line installed can involve years-long waits. Land titles are often unclear; people occupy land for generations without investing time and money in acquiring a land certificate. And when people do not legally belong to a neighborhood unit, they cannot get identification cards, which in turn means that they cannot legally enroll their children in school, get married, or draw on government assistance for the poor. 

Like many other Third World cities, Jakarta faces countless challenges to development, such as generating funds, attracting good jobs, and building sufficient infrastructure. Perhaps the biggest obstacle to Jakarta’s development lies in the combination of a morasse of corruption, a lack of political will, and the city’s own image of what the city should look like. Jakarta wants to build a shining City of Tomorrow, following the vision of a tightly controlled, spacious, clean metropolis pioneered 80 years ago by Le Corbusier. Unfortunately, as governments around the world have learned, there’s a problem with this vision: it doesn’t actually work. This can only be more true in a context where the government displays a lack of interest in the voices or needs of any of its citizens, let alone the poorest. A group of Jakarta’s poorest citizens is trying to get the government to realize its folly before Jakarta moves past a point of no return. To do so, they must first establish something that goes against the grain of Indonesian government: that poor people actually have a valid, important contribution to make to the city and to the political process.

A Bastard Child of Modernity

In Indonesia, poverty is often thought of as a rural phenomenon, as something that happens on the periphery of development, in areas without telephones, paved roads, and electricity. Jakarta occupies a particular space in the Indonesian imagination as the incarnation of nationalism and of modernity, not as a place in which tens of thousands of people build makeshift homes under toll roads.

The state and city governments have based development plans on this fantasy of modernity. Jakarta’s current land use plan, “Jakarta 2010,” which was passed in 1999, speaks of putting Jakarta “on a par with developed Metropolises in the world… inhabited by an affluent, educated, and accomplished multicultural community in a sustainable living environment.” It excludes the poor by omission from its vision of the city. The previous land use plan that was to run from 1985 through 2005, more openly disdained the poor: a 1994 book produced by the city government to promote Jakarta and explain the development plan openly describes the city’s inhabitants, particularly those who have migrated to the city from elsewhere, as “low quality.”

M. Berkah Gamulya, Advocacy Coordinator of the Urban Poor Consortium, refers to the government’s vision of the “beautiful city” as “the bastard child of an illicit affair between the state and capital.” “It’s an outdated concept of modern,” he explains in frustration. “They’re trying to imitate the West, but these ideas are already out of fashion there. They’re just interested in what the city looks like, the appearance–wanting it to be like Singapore with fountains, monuments, and big buildings–without thinking about social or economic realities.”

Jakarta’s governments and developers have willingly employed any means necessary to implement this vision of modernity. Government agencies routinely allow violations of the plan in order to achieve this vision or cater to particular interests (often those who are willing to hand them envelopes of rupiah). If a developer wants a piece of land, new certificates suddenly appear showing that the developer has owned the land for decades, and residents can be evicted.

NGO activists and academics claim that, in the new plan, instead of addressing these code violations, the city has changed the code to embrace the violations. Jakarta 2010 heralded popular participation as one of its main principles, but the drafting process included virtually no participation from Jakarta’s citizenry nor from the architecture and planning professional communities. And rather than providing “low quality” residents with the resources to become the “affluent, educated, and accomplished” citizens it dreams of, the government’s aim has been to drive them away. City propaganda promotes a clean, modern “city without slums”–and accomplishes this goal by prohibiting street vendors and becak (bicycle rickshaws) from plying their trade or living on the scraps of land where they have made homes.

Municipal infrastructure investments have similarly aimed to hide or remove the poor. Flyovers and toll roads let cars and buses soar over poor neighborhoods without a glance. Housing projects rise far from poor residents’ current homes and jobs, pushing the poor to abandon central neighborhoods for far-flung settlements, while new, more central housing developments boast rents and utility payments unaffordable to even middle-class families. The city is struck by annual floods that swamp all classes of home and can wipe out the assets of low-income families, but the government never makes contingency plans or enforces rules that would prevent the building of villas on cool hillsides that used to absorb water rolling down from the mountains.

Most egregiously, Jakarta’s notorious governor, Sutiyoso, has taken to forcibly evicting low-income families: more than 16,000 families have lost their homes since 2000. A recent presidential decree that gives the government the right of eminent domain for the first time brings the prospect of even more evictions: whereas before the state had to negotiate with–or, more often, threaten and extort–local landowners into giving up land for government projects, they now have the legal right to take land for public projects.

Sutiyoso is a holdover from the autocratic regime of President Suharto, called the “New Order,” that ruled Indonesia from 1966 until the reformasi movement of 1998. The New Order was characterized by military rule, persecution, and corruption. Although a democratic government has taken power, and despite current President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s anti-corruption drive, little has changed within Jakarta. Because Jakarta’s city council re-elected Sutiyoso in 2002, before many electoral reforms had taken effect, he will not face another election until 2007. 

Helping the Urban Poor Fight Back

In 1997, when reformasi was brewing and the monetary crisis was beginning to take its toll on families’ purchasing power, the Urban Poor Consortium (UPC) was founded to help Jakarta’s poor voice their needs. Ari Ujianto, who first joined UPC in 2002 and is now its Research & Development Coordinator, says the organization has an alternative vision for Jakarta: not a “city without slums” but “a city for all people.” “The poor, the rich,” he says, “should all live in Jakarta, not be marginalized, and all have access to resources.” He sees becak drivers and women selling snacks and cigarettes at streetside kiosks as a necessary part of the Indonesian economy, creating work opportunities and affordable goods and services where there would otherwise be even more dire poverty.

The UPC takes the view that the poor should be full citizens, with rights and responsibilities that equal those of the rich. The organization’s strategy to effect this vision has evolved over time. The group first made themselves well known by exposing corruption in the distribution of foreign aid intended for poor families. They then mobilized thousands of poor people to demonstrate for the rights to their livelihood, most famously in a campaign to preserve the right to drive becak within city limits. The state responded to this campaign with violence; becak were seized, and activists received threatening visits and phone calls. In 2002, UPC and the becak drivers took the government to court. The drivers represented themselves in court, which was itself a strong statement in a country where the poor are generally depicted as at best hapless objects of comedy and pity and at worst dirty and stupid. The trial court found that the governor, police chief, and military chief of Jakarta had violated the law. It ordered them to stop seizing becak and to make a financial settlement.

The victory was overturned on appeal, which is a closed process highly vulnerable to pressure from above and bribes from all sides. Despite this defeat, the UPC had put urban poverty in the spotlight and had proved that the urban poor could speak for themselves. UPC, however, had devised its strategies in response to crises like evictions and the prohibition on becak, and did not have strategies for sustaining their work over a longer period–especially once the shock of state violence and defeat impaired their ability to mobilize large numbers of people to respond to evictions and other threats.

“The people were traumatized,” explained Ujianto. “Before, UPC could call a demonstration for the next day and get 8,000 people; after the trauma, it was hard to get 500.”

New Strategies for Building Power

Wardah Hafidz, UPC’s charismatic founder, realized it was time for new strategies that were ongoing and not merely responsive. She invited a South African community organizer to teach UPC about a savings group model being used there to strengthen and organize women. “The savings groups collect three things,” explains Ujianto: “they collect money, they collect people, and they collect information.” One woman in each of the several dozen groups serves as the collector. She makes daily rounds during which she collects deposits and learns who has sick children, who has no running water, who is in danger of eviction. Then at weekly meetings, the group discusses these problems and strategies to address them. While UPC still helps communities with land struggles, particularly the mass evictions that continue throughout greater Jakarta, the savings groups have become an important complementary strategy. As Ujianto puts it, savings groups are a more “feminine,” domestic mode of organizing than the “heroic” demonstrations and land occupations that get activists’ blood flowing. This mode builds groups that stay together whether there is an immediate threat or just the daily challenges of poverty and marginalization.

This is crucial because, as Ujianto points out, “the strength has to come from the poor people themselves. Without them, UPC is nothing.” As an NGO staffed mostly by recent college graduates and other educated activists, and funded by international sources, UPC’s legitimacy depends on developing grassroots groups and leaders. Its organizers work to encourage poor people to redefine their own role in the city. “One of the duties of the organization,” Ujianto says, “is to build their feeling of confidence so that the poor feel like they are equal with the other inhabitants of the city.” UPC pushes the poor to meet directly with the governor and government ministers in whatever clothes they own and normally wear. Together the women in the savings groups visit the confusing, intimidating, gleaming bank buildings that rise above the streets of Jakarta to open joint accounts. In order to avoid internalizing and reenacting state oppression and society’s bias against the urban poor, Gamulya explains, “we have to change the discourse that exists at all levels, and the behaviors not only of the state but of ourselves.”

Despite their unusually strong commitment to these ideals of fundamental social change, UPC is not doctrinaire in its use of tactics, believing that networking is important alongside more traditional grass-roots strategies. UPC does not hesitate to build connections with architects, politicians, government ministers, religious leaders, local leaders, international NGOs and foundations, or other parties that can support its mission. Networking has also involved the formation of a national network to replicate UPC’s work in a dozen cities around the country. With the help of one international organization, UPC is training local leaders in Jakarta and the other cities to document evictions’ true costs: homes, assets, community ties, access to school and jobs, and time and money spent to find new sites or rebuild on the old sites. As Thohir explains, the government fails to recognize that evictions will never successfully realize the government’s goal of eradicating the poor.

“Communities have their own way of dealing with evictions,” he says. “These people don’t want to go back to rural areas where there are no jobs… They just move [within the Jakarta metropolitan area]; the evictions just use up money.”

Jakarta in the Global Context

Jakarta needs to function for all its residents, Ujianto points out. This does include some current city goals, such as making the streets cleaner and safer. The city’s current approach, however, is neither humane nor efficient. Unfortunately, Jakarta’s approach to development is being replicated throughout Indonesia. Smaller cities’ mayors see Governor Sutiyoso’s work as a shining example of development, and are outdoing themselves to build malls, ban street vendors, and raze poor neighborhoods.

The same trends are at work in cities throughout the Third World. A 2003 report from the United Nations Human Settlements Program, The Challenge of Slums, reports that one-third of the global urban population live in slums. Mike Davis writes that more than half of residents of cities in developing countries illegally occupy land. Ken Fernandes, Coordinator of the Asia & Pacific Programme of the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE), says that what is happening in Jakarta is “absolutely similar” to what is happening in other Asian cities. “There is very little understanding of the informal sector,” he explains, so “governments try to ignore or destroy it rather than absorb or integrate it.” Cities see their salvation in foreign investment and big infrastructure projects like expressways, but do not address the problems that cause the influx of migrants into the cities or those people’s needs once they arrive. The Challenge of Slums links these developments to the International Monetary Fund’s Structural Adjustment Programs of the 1980s. The report describes these programs as being “deliberately anti-urban in nature” due to a desire to reverse a perceived urban bias in previous policies.

Through regional and global networks, UPC staff and community leaders compare notes and share strategies with their counterparts in countries like Malaysia and Thailand. In these countries, unlike some other ASEAN states such as Burma and Laos, NGOs and grass-roots community groups have the political maneuvering room to push for change.

Whether the government is responsive to their efforts is, of course, a separate question. UPC’s creative use of grassroots, networking, and transnational strategies gives the organization a power beyond what its numbers or financial resources would suggest. Its image of what Third World cities should be involves profound change in conceptions of the urban poor, which in turn suggests a very different vision of what a city can be. Achieving its vision could start with basic steps that most people–including the urban middle class–could support, notably a more transparent and participatory approach to urban planning and policy making. Though Governor Sutiyoso is entrenched until 2007, local elections planned for the next few years for lower offices offer hope that officials may find it in their own interest to respond to constituents’ needs. If not, UPC will continue to win incremental victories like postponing evictions and helping families save money for emergencies. But without fundamental change in the city’s approach to development and its conceptualization of its citizens and the city’s obligations to them, Jakarta will remain a cautionary tale of Third World urban growth gone wrong.