Sri Palupi
Kalimat bijak di atas diucapkan seorang bapak, Yie Gae Tjie namanya. Ia pemilik galeri di kota Maumere, Kabupaten Sikka, Nusa Tenggara Timur. Di luar kota Maumere, nama Yie – begitu ia menuliskan namanya – barangkali tidak banyak dikenal. Namun siapa sangka kalau sosok etnis Cina kelahiran Maumere ini sesungguhnya adalah pejuang hak asasi.
Di galerinya yang menjual barang-barang seni dan tenun ikat itu untuk pertama kalinya saya mengenal Pak Yie. Kulit putih dan mata sipitnya yang tipikal etnis Cina membuat saya berpikir, ternyata ada juga orang Cina di Flores ini yang mau mengembangkan tenun ikat. Hal yang tidak biasa menurut pandangan saya. Maklumlah, kepala saya yang kecil ini masih belum sepenuhnya terbebas dari stereotip tentang orang Cina.
Ketika akan kembali ke Jakarta, saya sempatkan mampir ke galeri Pak Yie. Bukan untuk membeli kain tenun koleksinya, tetapi untuk bertanya satu hal saja: Apa yang membuatnya tertarik mengembangkan tenun ikat? Ternyata jawaban atas satu pertanyaan itu jauh mengalir dan membuat saya berkesimpulan, Pak Yie seorang pejuang hak asasi dengan keberanian yang jarang dimiliki orang-orang Cina pada umumnya. Kenapa saya menyebutnya demikian?
Simaklah kisahnya berikut ini.
28 July 2009
'Membiasakan Kebenaran, bukan Membenarkan Kebiasaan!'
24 July 2009
Gimana toh pak Presiden?
Presiden Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono di Jakarta, 11 Juni lalu, mengungkapkan keseriusan-nya soal perlindungan TKI.
Wah.. wah.. kalau ukuran keseriusan SBY hanya sebatas 'titipan' saja, pantesan saja korban seperti Atin Suprihatin masih terjadi dan mungkin akan terus terjadi.
16 April 2009
Cities and Citizenship: Civil Society
Marco Kusumawijaya
The rise of civil society is perhaps the best thing one can witness as a result of 1998 reform. It is often not noticed, that along the tragedy in 1998 riots, a strong solidarity among citizens also manifested itself. There is a factor of citizen activists, that have been growing in number but working clandestinely in two decades before 1998.
Picture is originally a design of T-Shirt to help promote saving Benteng Vastenburg in Solo of C. Java, taken from diligent photograher mas Blontank Poer's blog. We join you to promote your T-Shirt design to our readers. Please click this link: Save Vastenburg.
After 1998, we are also witnessing new “activists” organising themselves. They are the less heroic and less pretentious type of activists: a group of mothers, a new circle of young researchers, a group of alumni from the same university or of the same year, a new generation of artists. Nevertheless, they are no less “active” in changing our urban-scape, with actions or discourses.
Notably after 2001, after major medias started to report and give spaces to opinions on urban issues, there have been a wide-spread talks about urban issues among people and professionals of different background. Environmental disasters and new autonomy are a factor in intensifying popular experience of urbanity.
My personal journey as an “urbanist” includes a tour of meetings with groups of people with all kind of backgrounds. Last month, the Driyarkara school of Philosophy started a series of lectures for the public by their professors on the city. In arts, the CP Biennale 2005 is themed Urban Culture; and again Jakarta Biennale 2009 was just completed with overwhelming arts in public spaces where artists encourage interactions with and among the public.
It is arguably hopeful that this strong emergence of public discourse on urbanism will gain bigger momentum and be sustained over the next decade or so. It will sooner or later give rise to a new sense of urban citizenship. Can this energy forge sustainable change towards sustainability?
At least, three components can be proposed to facilitate that:
- a common knowledge base, perhaps in the form of an annual journal of the city, recording major events and ideas that are shaping the city,
- spaces to exchange ideas, actions, solutions, know-hows, alternatives as initiated among citizens and other agents (governments, etc.): regular, periodic citizens’ conferences, continuous exchanges in web-based space, etc.,
- opportunities to develop and to exhibit alternative visions, or visionary urban planning options on city’s spaces and issues in interactive public spaces.
However, not all the news are good news. Menteng, Jakarta’s examples (as well as in other cities such as the case with Solo’s Vastenberg) also show that public spaces are not given, but must be fought for. And, with the declining population in city center (in Jakarta, for sure), or even when upper class population is quickly replacing lower middle class in it, will there be sufficiently intense urbanity for urban citizens to pull together urban integration?
The skrinking intervention of the state, the expanding presumptuousness of the private sectors, and the invasive aggression of sectarianism, leave a precarious space for civil society. Continuous works and practices are inevitably a key to affirm the civil space.
15 April 2009
Sustainability: Sustainable Change Towards Sustainability
Marco Kusumawijaya
Even without climate change, sustainability is already an issue in Indonesian cities, in social, economic and ecological terms. Ten years after the reform, very few cities have moved away from Orde Baru’s developmentalism: rude urban expansions based on infrastructure outlaying, suburbanisations, low density developments, dependence on car with too little investments on public transport, etc., while natural resources are carelessly exploited without long-term view.
Several organisations including NGOs, government agencies, coalitions, research institutes, are working on the issues. There is also a rise in civil society activism, indicated at least by growth in civil society voluntary groups. However, much change is required and need to be sustained.
Without high economic growth, it is impossible to create wealth among the current poor. With high economic growth, it is not certain that gaps will be narrowed to create justice.
Upstream and downstream integration in spatial planning is still far from reality. Upstream destruction and downstream indulgence, under different jurisdictions, despite the new law that allows for joint spatial plans between different jurisdictions, are hard to coordinate within the context of decentralisation and autonomy.
There are opportunities for politicians to mobilise and direct public sentiments (irked by ecological disasters) towards regional spatial integration.
Citizens’ initiatives towards green living are growing, but need to be first recognised, and then facilitated to create critical mass of change. This is a very big challenge.
New infrastructures and other public investments have not really been seriously chosen based on the goal to achieve sustainability. There is a need for a comprehensive framework on urban sustainability to guide all urban projects. The framework requires political will and tenacity in implementation.
10 April 2009
Kontak Kami
Send us your email to ecosoc@cbn.net.id
or here is our ground address:
The Institute for Ecosoc Rights
Jl. Tebet Timur Dalam VI-C No.17
Jakarta 12820, Indonesia
Try this phone: 62-21-8304153
If available, you may use also below form.
31 March 2009
Informal Settlement and Evictions: Informality
Marco Kusumawijaya
Below are notes for discussion
that you may find it interesting to think over. There are other two notes to come. We borrow the image from masaguz.com [ed.]
The story of Menteng (see in the earlier posting) shows there is much informality also in the use of space among the upper class and the government’s agencies. The ease with which public domains are informally occupied or used may have been caused by an ignorance about what is “public”, but is certainly encouraged by the lack of law enforcement, and triggered by economic situations. There is also a lot of issues with regards to land law or administration.
It becomes an issue of justice, when informality of the poor is targeted for forced eviction, without handling also the informality of the others. The poor takes little, the rich takes more.
In recent years there have been examples of successful solutions to informal settlements, with or without relocations, such as at Surabaya’s Kali Stren canal bank settlement, river bank relocation project in Solo of C. Java, yet in Cirebon of W. Java or Pekalongan, C. Java.
Bangkok’s Ban Mankong scheme has also been introduced to the Governor.
But, Jakarta refuses to learn, reasoning that the risk in the “ibu kota” is higher (ibu kota is the Indonesian word for ‘capital’). There is also pressure to build high-rise subsidised low cost appartment buildings, reasoning that this typology save land.
The Ministry of Housing is probably the weakest in history, making very few strategic decisions and doing as little.
Hope lies at the decentralised democracy, based on the fact that some good mayors and governors did get elected and did good job in recent years; but it may take time before a critical mass of more enlightened public officials are elected through the new democratic process.*
27 March 2009
The Plight and Plea of Menteng: an Epitome of Jakarta’s Future?
Marco Kusumawijaya, Jakarta
Menteng is no longer a conservation area. This is not a statement from legal point of view, of course, but from the reality in the field. The irony is exactly that legally it is. The conservationist perspective has so long prevented it from being looked at its real, basic problem: How to maintain a comfortable living in the city’s centre. What is happening there is first of all not a destruction of a shared colonial heritage, but simply a destruction of a good quality residential neighbourhood. It is an epitome of what is happening to the whole Jakarta, as it is being turned into a gigantc machine to earn a living, with little left for living itself.
The Jakarta Post has recently timely reported increasing conversion of residences into business establishments, with all the vices and complaints it has generated, in two most interesting residential neighbourhoods in Jakarta—Kebayoran Baru and Menteng—despite the fact that they are legally protected as residential areas and conservation sites of significant heritage values.
Some houses in Menteng are quitely converted, without any sign of even the names of the establishments, for example a spa and salon on Jalan Situbondo, and a boutique of important brand on Jalan Purworejo, as they know that they are against the regulations that are ironically proclaimed on boards on sidewalks nearby. The thing is that for sure they cater to the real need of the rich and famous in the neighbourhood. So, what to do? Should we live with the hypocrisy of ignoring the breach of regulation? Or should we rationally find compromise to it? The question is how to make a compromise not the first card on a domino effect that will eventually bring the whole Menteng down.
It is no longer about conservation, but simple residential quality of taste.
It is no longer about arguing for conservation—it is too late—but simply for quality environment with tasteful residences, which are increasingly replaced by cheap and disdainful-looking buildings like those in Pluit, such as repulsively overwhelming at Jalan Sawo, for example. Here, the whole idea of Menteng streetscape is gone, with even its sidewalks shamefully privatised.
All possible planning exercises have been made with its physical conservation as their main focus. This good intention seems to have paved its very way towards destruction of its more basic importance: a quality residential site for living. The conservationists have missed its urban planning dimensions. Widening of Kuningan bridge that will bring more traffic into it, and use of its residential streets as “U-turns”, a pretentious park with multilevel parking-garage serving cheap hotel and other more buildings with higher Floor Area Ratio (FAR) on Cokroaminoto Street that will change the street from being a local service area to a city-wide service area, will soon initiate the domino effect to the whole Menteng. And, how can we expect retired pensioners to maintain their houses literally condemned as heritage without any subsidy and tax incentives? The paradox is that the better one up-keeps his or her house in Menteng, the bigger chance it is for the house to be condemned into a higher conservation category. Some houses were therefore left to rot. And when it has rotten enough, permit is “requested” to build a new building on it, most of the time much bigger and uglier that the original.
One arguably successful restored heritage building is the Kunstkring or Gedung Imigrasi. It has been re-purchased and restored with public money, but now lost its publicness completely. It is now a stylish (?) restaurant run by a company that we never know how it was chosen. I am particularly upset by the fact that the plant vendors under the overhead rail tracks at the eastern border of the restaurant have been partly evicted to make space for parking lots.
On the positive side, strangely, there have been emerging new restaurants along Jalan Cikini over the past few years, adapting the old shophouses elegantly. There is a sense of reviving the old street as a high street as it had been meant to be in the colonial time. These new establishments find the art-deco architecture of the shophouses serving their clients quite well. Perhaps, because it conforms to the taste of the upcoming yuppies. In any case, it just happens, luckily for the better. No policy is required, it is the invisible hand of the market working.
We are also witnessing more high-rise towers popping up in Menteng, for example at Jalan Cikditiro. Again, it raises question: how could they have been permitted? On an other side of the neighbourhood, on Jalan Sumenep, the city’s government itself keeps building more permanent structures on canal bank that is supposed to be a green belt. First it was the stores of aquarium fish and decorative plants, then it was a branch office of the city’s agriculture and fishery department, and most recently a mosque. All shamelessly have their ugly backs on the canal, with waste water draining pipes protruding into it, and all visible from the other sde of the canal.
I have just described the misfortune of Menteng. If Menteng, which is supposed to be the core of quality that the capital Jakarta must have and must maintain, is heading towards the wrong direction, what can we expect happening to other parts of Jakarta, or to the whole of Jakarta for that matter? Is it going to compete in vain with the suburbs, some of which are indeed superbly upkept, even if one may not like its fake urbanity?
The fact is that the population of Kecamatan (subdistrict) Menteng from 2001 to 2006 shows a decreasing trend, after a brief surge in 2002, when the population is the highest at 98,123, up from 73,546 in 2001. From 2004 (80.404) the population decreased consistently to 79.430 in 2005, and 77,835 in 2006. Graphically the trend is parallel with overall night-time population of Jakarta, which is also consistently decreasing from 8,374,005 in 2001, to 7,554,761 in 2006, after a brief surge in 2004 (election year!) at 9,341,866. All together, the population of South and Central Jakarta is also decreasing in absolute terms, while the that in Jakarta’s surrounding peripheral suburbs and districts is increasing dramatically. The traffic jam in South and Central Jakarta is caused, therefore, not by the increasing population inside Jakarta, but exactly by the increasing population in its surrounding suburbs and districts, that swarm into Jakarta in the morning and leave it in the early evening as commuters.
Will the whole Jakarta’s population decrease, making the “black hole” expanding from South and Central Jakarta to eventually engulf the whole Jakarta? The emerging high-rise appartment buildings may help a bit, but only really for the upper class, which is never known for their contribution to real urban life on the ground floors of any city.**
Following this article we will see some of Marco's thoughts for further discussion.
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