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Do you think that these gentrification projects mainly only benefit upper-middle class people? Have there been any significant government-initiated housing projects for low-income residents that been a success? I have heard there have been some, but they have failed in some ways: (“the 1000 Apartment Towers pro- gram, new town residential areas)?
A: If we think of gentrification as a class formation, then it cer- tainly benefits upper-middle class people. The KIP which I men- tioned earlier is a form of gentrification for after the upgrading
of kampung, the land price of the neighborhood went up. Land certification is a form of gentrification for it eliminates informal land market which has allowed the poor to inexpensively make space for themselves. The future property owners would be less inclined to lower their rents because they are now carrying formal titles of ownership and they have to follow the city’s property rules. The provision of low cost housing is also a form of gentrifi- cation because they are not many so when they are available they become valuable and can easily be turned into a property of the middle class. This has happened before and is happening with the 1000 towers – the construction has been halted, right? So if you ask if there is any successful state-initiated housing project, the answer is yes if success means creating property-home own- ers. If you look at reports, you will see a lot of complaints about “wrong target” or that state housing sector really is not intended for workers from the informal sectors. I am wondering myself why the state housing project is largely based on the paradigm of home ownership?
Do you think that the way that gentrification has happened in many cities in Indonesia is “anti-kampung life” i.e. it represents an explicit rejection of traditional Indonesian lifestyles?
A: If gentrification takes the form of high-rise apartments or sub- urban housing complex at the outskirt of the city, we can say that it is “anti-kampung life.”Kampung often survives on the bases
of its capacity to register sociality. This sociality is important because kampung often stands on limited legal power. The kam- pung community therefore would have to rely on each other and stay together to substantialize their presence and legitimacy. The kampung life style could be said as developing out of the strategy to minimize potential eviction. Authority knows that it is very dif- ficult if not impossible to evict a kampung neighborhood that has “culture” and memory. Developers also normally avoid confron- tation with kampung with thick layers of temporality. It is just too costly (financially and socially) to evict and clear kampung land for gentrification. Until today, we still see remarkable pockets of kampung “stuck” between clusters of formal development areas. On the other hand, it is generally true that there is a feeling among policy makers and the middle class that kampung repre- sents “under-development.” That is why kampung has often been seen as a space of transition which therefore can be ignored for in the end it will give way to formal(ize) housing. There is a general marginalization of kampung for different reasons at different mo- ment in Indonesian history, but the kampung while marginalized in the developmentalist mind, it is seen as carrying the values of Indonesians. It is the space of common people (the rakyat) who (independently and communally) create space for themselves
and it is acknowledged by the authority. This can be seen in the dualism of Indonesian land policy which gives legality to the lands occupied by kampung dwellers. As mentioned earlier, there was
the Kampung Improvement project which sought to keep kampung in the city. One could argue that kampung stays because it sustains the economic life of the city and it exter- nalizes the cost of providing housing for the lower income population. So there is this instrumentalist (or exploitative) idea behind the existence of that co-exists with the romantic one.
We should of course be aware that kampung in Jakarta is different from kampung in Surabaya or Yogyakarta due to different history or different perception of power. In Sura- baya, kampung is the embodiment of “arek Suroboyo” (the anti-colonial “revolutionary” folks of Surabaya; in Yogyakar- ta, it is associated with the power of Sultan who is capable of maintaining kawula-gusti relation; in Jakarta it carries differ- ent associations from a mixed neighborhood to a concentra- tion of an ethnic group, a place of thugs or opportunists, and so on. But who makes the impression is an important matter. Have you heard about ideas being put forward to current governor of Jakarta that a gentrification with kampung life- style is actually possible? I heard that the governor likes it.
What do you think the way gentrified neighbourhoods look suggests about the way ‘modernity’ is idealized in contem- porary Indonesia? How do you think it represents a striving towards modernity?
A: If we take the Kampung Improvement Project (KIP) as an example of what you call “gentrified neighborhood,” then KIP represents one kind of state-initiated gentrification but it tends to be physical and infrastructural such as pathway paving, drainage provision, communal washroom, etc. but
I guess you are asking about neighborhood gentrified by kampung community themselves (without state assistance)? One of the main features of kampung neighborhood is that individual households keep “gentrify” their houses and envi- ronment even though they are short of many infrastructural things. I think I have mentioned earlier how this could be related to politics of place-making but kampung (unlike real- estate housing complex) is a never complete neighborhood. It grows from time to time to accommodate needs. If we look at the building materials used for individual upgrading, we see an effort to emulate the middle class. The material cul- tures too are those one can find on TV, but what a kampung doesn’t have and couldn’t have is a street that can accom- modate an automobile. And they don’t have much space, so the outdoor often accommodates indoor activities, so private and public spaces overlap. There are also efforts (often as- sisted by pro-kampung activists and NGOs) to follow green initiative by planting and composting. The aim is to make a better environment and to show that culture and modernity exist in kampung and that it shouldn’t just be demolished. This kind of modernity is different from those developed in the real estate housing complex which tends to be based on zoning and more homogeneous in the appearance though this too often change over time. Many real estate housing after a period of occupation changed appearances as occu- pants added rooms, altered facades and paved their gardens all of which have made the neighborhood looks like kampung with wider street even though the housing design of the real estate design is based on the idea of leaving behind the image of kampung.