Prathiwi was formally trained as an engineer architect and spatial planner. She has worked for development initiatives in Aceh, Java, and West Papua in Indonesia, as well as in Central Viet Nam, with varying multinational organizations.

In Jakarta, Ciliwung Merdeka represents a collective body of emergent insurgent planning that has endured throughout the current neoliberal era and the authoritarian regime that preceded it. Within a movement tradition that recalls the Freirean influence on Indonesian societal transformation, the organisation challenges the technocratic state and its ‘rational planning’ ideology. Insurgent planning engages with society at large, laying claim to a fundamental role of participation in emancipation. Together with other Indonesian social-political movements, it helps open a path towards another kind of state, in which a more encompassing conception of right allows diverse materialisation of citizenship at the very local level.

In 1997, Kualanamu was chosen as the site of a new airport in North Sumatra. The central government's unilateral decision created new agrarian conflict and complicated the agrarian issues that had plagued the region since the colonial era. The accumulated conflicts and structural issues left local residents in a precarious state as they became integrated into peri-urban society. This article highlights the complexity of the conflict, the agency–institutional–structural relations that underpin it, and peri-urban resistance within the context of urbanisation and its marginalisation of rural communities.

State-led and market-oriented approaches to sanitation development in Jakarta have favoured the construction of large-scale centralised sewerage systems. This development approach is not always suitable because the principles of modern infrastructure underlying the technological systems are not applicable in informal settlements scattered over the metropolis. Due to spatial fragmentation within the built environment, diverse socioeconomic and fragile geo-ecological conditions in different settlements and the city as a whole, Jakarta needs to adopt a decentralised approach to wastewater management. This article examines governmental dynamics in Jakarta and analyses a sanitation project to introduce improved septic tanks and community sludge-hauling enterprises. The presence of (international) NGOs and civil society organisations is often vital to help communities enrich their technical knowledge of environmental problems and expand their sociopolitical networks. Nevertheless, local initiatives provide a limited response to community sanitation needs and sanitation problems beyond the neighbourhood level. This article argues that the introduction of decentralised sanitation systems requires a new form of state-led infrastructure provision, which involves the (transformative) participation of local actors. In doing so, it extends the notion of decentralised wastewater management beyond purely technological concerns.

No abstract