4 - A tale of two powers: conditions and personifications of insurgent planners in Jakarta

Summary

INTRODUCTION

This chapter tells the stories of three young, trained architects working with forcibly evicted communities in Jakarta. More than 300 episodes of forced evictions aided by armed personnel happened in 2015 and 2016, rupturing more than 80,000 homes and small-scale business units in the Indonesian capital city. The evictions cleared space for the city beautification programmes and for upper-class consumption infrastructures, such as waterfront highways and public squares with commercial functions. Nevertheless, the conflicts brought up productive tensions too, following the riots and mass demonstrations against the state violence. Collective action crystallized around the defence of kampungs, or the so-called vernacular, informal settlements. Human rights activists and evicted communities collaborated with critical experts, including our three protagonists. The activist– architect collaboration enacted insurgent practices to pursue alternative community development, including new housing provision.

The three architects undertook their architecture training during the authoritarian military regime of General Suharto's New Order, and later experienced a professional atmosphere within the post-Suharto Reformation era (1999 onwards), with its renewed developmentalism and unmasked neoliberal agenda (Hadiz & Robinson 2005). Today's pro-growth planning and development system inherited from the Suharto era operates in such a way as to neglect community informal livelihoods, as well as their informal cultural and spatial resources. The developmentalist approach to spatial planning necessitates a continuous reproduction of obedient professional troops, produced through hegemonic educational paradigms. The situation provided fertile ground for critical thinking to arise and enable individual reflexive moments to commit to different kinds of professional planning practices. Being critical about conventional professional practices might be a personal decision, but there are necessary conditions for this contingent choice. I have shown and argued elsewhere (Putri 2020) how Freirean traditions in social movements that emerged during the New Order era have transgressed across political regimes in Indonesia. The traditions helped transform covert or underground planning during the authoritarian regime (Beard 2002, 2003) into institutionalized radical planning practices during the Reformation period (Putri 2020). This chapter further depicts the “conditions of possibilities” (Nellhaus 1998: 11) for the role of insurgent planners to endure, and, especially, how the role is differently personified, or played individually, by the three protagonists.