JOKO WIDODO: (JP/Blontank Poer)
When Joko Widodo was elected as the Surakarta mayor in 2005, many doubted the antiques and garden furniture trader was capable of fulfilling the role successfully.
However, it was from his 19 years of experience traveling around the globe as a furniture trader that he got the inspiration to develop Surakarta, or Solo.
“I liked to spend my spare time enjoying natural beauty,” Joko Widodo, or Jokowi as he is more popularly known, told The Jakarta Post after hosting a welcome dinner for some 450 delegates of the World Heritage Cities Conference and Expo at Balekambang Park on Sunday.
“When business was done, I loved to wander the streets of the cities I visited ... watch an opera or visit an exhibition of both commercial and art products,” said the man who was born on June 21, 1961.
The experience led the first-ever elected Surakarta mayor to present a policy on municipal development with his renowned motto “Solo’s future is Solo’s past”.
With this motto, Jokowi believed that although Surakarta had limited natural resources, it could gain future glory by reviving its cultural richness and heritage to distinguish it from other cities in the country.
“Surakarta is rich in arts and culture that are marketable to an international audience. There are many cities in Europe that are frequented by visitors due to their rich cultures,” he said.
With such richness, he added, Surakarta could equal some of the world’s unique cities, such as Zagreb (Croatia), Budapest (Hungary) and other European and Asian cities.
It is not surprising, therefore, that within two years of being elected as the city’s mayor Jokowi succeeded in making Surakarta a member of the Organization of World Heritage Cities (OWHC) and United Cities of Local Government.
In 2006, Jokowi began to take stock of the city’s cultural potential and discovered that Surakarta was home to 440 performing-arts workshops, comprising traditional dance, music and theater.
Additionally, it also had two vocational art schools and a higher education art institution — the Indonesian Arts Institute Surakarta — which offered programs with majors in various traditional arts, including karawitan (gamelan orchestra) and wayang (Javanese shadow puppetry).
“It is true that the uniqueness and superiority of Surakarta lays in its richness in performing arts. This is different from Yogyakarta, which is very strong in fine arts,” said Jokowi, referring to Solo’s neighboring city.
Realizing this artistic richness, Jokowi said he was motivated to start planning the establishment of an opera house of international standard in Surakarta so the city could periodically host international performing arts festivals.
He said he also planned to build a convention and exhibition center in the city in his bid to make Surakarta a destination site for MICE (meetings, incentive travel, conventions and exhibitions), which would make it a third destination after Jakarta and Bali in Indonesia.
“I hope the convention and exhibition center will be here within two years. I have the location in mind and have also met with possible strategic investors,” he said.
Jokowi successfully relocated more than 1,000 street vendors in Banjarsari to the prepared location in his bid to make the face of Surakarta much friendlier to visitors.
He built permanent buildings for some of them, gave them credit facilities to develop their businesses and provided simpler procedures for them to obtain business licenses. Others were given either shelters or carriages for them to store and sell their merchandise.
“As long as they are well managed and empowered, street vendors can also contribute a great deal to the city’s economy. That’s why we never consider them as enemies but partners of development instead,” Jokowi said.
His efforts eventually bore fruit: After two years of lobbying the Euro-Asia OWHC, following its inclusion as a member city, Jokowi finally convinced the organization that Surakarta could host the organization’s 2008 conference and expo.
After making a presentation bid to the organization’s 39-member countries, Surakarta was chosen as host over Andong City, South Korea.
Jokowi is known for his support for grassroots communities as well as big-scale investors. He issued licenses for the construction of seven star-rated hotels and luxurious apartments in the city, but required the investors to build in locations that would spread economic activities across the city, thus giving a multiplier effect to the surrounding communities.
He reportedly turned down project proposals for the establishment of malls and hypermarkets because the investors refused to build them in the northern part of the city.
Instead, he decided to renovate traditional markets to give Surakarta a cleaner and spatially well-managed appearance.
Five traditional markets have been renovated thus far, with 34 others to go.
To encourage people to shop in traditional markets, Jokowi has planned a coupon system with prizes on offer for shoppers.
“The prizes are provided by the city administration and the budget is taken from retribution funds,” Jokowi said.
He also introduced a re-greening program throughout the city, which has seen Surakarta become greener with spacious sidewalks provided along the city’s main street of Jl. Slamet Riyadi. Benches and free Internet hotspots have also been provided.
Balekambang Park, where the dinner reception was held Sunday, was previously an infamous slum area. Thanks to the Jokowi’s re-greening program, it has been turned into a new tourist resort resembling the Bogor Botanical Gardens in West Java, but on a much smaller scale.
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