Insurgent planner: Transgressing the technocratic state of postcolonial Jakarta

Abstract

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.

Elite capture and urban geography: Analyzing geographies of privilege

“…Work on elite capture in development studies has highlighted widespread contestation of elite captures, ranging across programs in India (Lund and Saito-Jensen, 2013), Indonesia (Fritzen, 2007), Kenya (Bassett, 2020), and Zambia (Musgrave and Wong 2016). There is also urban planning and policy literature framing elite capture as a problem to be addressed through better planning practices, for example, through “insurgent” postcolonial planning (Huq, 2020; Putri, 2020) or resistance to technocratic framings of urban data (Bragaglia, 2021; Davoudi et al, 2020). Yet overall, there is much left to be written about opposition to elite capture, and this topic should be a priority for future research.…”

The political: A view from Jakarta’s kampungs

“…Although hegemonic everyday relations in kampungs might perform as non-deliberative resistance to capitalist accumulative processes, it is no less important to represent those who have been consciously struggling over their livelihoods and rights to housing. These actors collectively contest the commodification of space, like the kampung resistance in Bukit Duri (partly documented in Putri, 2020). This quality of being collectively political is necessarily different from pursuing individual survival strategies.…”

UNRAVELLED HOMES: Forced Evictions and Home Remaking in Jakarta

“…A similar approach was recently employed in a collaboration between evicted kampung residents and Jakarta ' s administration, resulting in the construction of three cooperative-managed rusunawa (Harish, 2022 ). The sustained, years-long participatory design process sought to explore how to recontextualize kampung life within the confi nes of vertical living (Putri, 2020 ).…”