TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Envisaging a `mutually beneficial' kind of Jakarta
Visions of a city: Entries in the Envisaging Jakarta competition examined utopian ideas
Change Size
Visions of a city: Entries in the Envisaging Jakarta competition examined utopian ideas. JP/Anissa S. Febrina
If you were a developer, your magic incantation would be "location, location, location," but if you don the architect or urban designer's hat you would probably be shouting "vision, vision, vision!"
The three winning project proposals for the "Envisioning the Future of Jakarta" competition held in line with the upcoming 4th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam are shouting those words exactly. More than three times.
One envisages Jakarta's kampungs rising vertically behind the billboards of central business districts, another dreams of the capital as a city of intertwining high-rises and platforms of green open spaces. Most of the others simply envisage a utopian urban space where people of all walks of life live together happily ever after.
A total of 87 entries into the competition were judged in April by a panel comprised of Winy Maas from international architect firm MVRDV, Vedran Mimica from Rotterdam's Berlage Institute, Andrea Peresthu from TU Delft, and the three curators for the exhibition, which is mostly based in the Netherlands.
With a vast space reserved at the biennale, which adopts the theme "Open City", the Indonesian capital is supposed to show the world its local Asian value of gotong royong. This term, which means working together for the benefit of all, is more narrowly translated into the event's subtheme of "reciprocity."
And perhaps that was why most of the proposals busied themselves with efforts that would reflect a more mutually beneficial synergy between market-driven urban development and the lives of the masses - especially the poor.
With high-rise buildings and kampungs, malls and street vendor, two very different worlds stand side by side in Jakarta.
The first prize winner NUNC architecten, for example, envisages the concept of commerce for charity.
They dreamed up a vertical trash-picker settlement area, existing behind a billboard and on top of a waste processing machine. "The building expresses the two faces of Jakarta and demonstrates how these two can mutually benefit each other: gotong royong," the architect said.
That this is vision only is not the point, as event sub-curator Stephen Cairn said, "These kinds of ideas and the reality should not be separated. The visions can bring about change."
Then probably the incantation should be: "Change, change, change!"
Ideas such as building vertical settlements for the poor behind commercial billboards are not exactly new. Years ago, urbanist Marco Kusumawijaya mentioned the idea - albeit a bit cynically. And it remained exactly that - an idea.
What is lacking in a vision when years later nothing has been done to make it real?
For a city like Jakarta where formal informality and informal formality rule, it seems that an architectural and urbanist physical intervention is not enough, let alone one that was built not on solid research, but merely on several photographs, aerial maps and playful architectural rendering programs.
From an architectural point of view, the winning proposals have fit well into the criteria of raising relevant urban issues in Jakarta and offering a creative, visionary architectural or urbanist intervention set by the panel of judges.
But perhaps ideas like the "Sponge City" proposed by winner of second prize, architect Adi Sumarmo from mamostudio architectural firm in collaboration with Pelita Harapan researcher David Hutama, will have the chance to become more than just paper proposals.
The less-intervening and more straightforward work proposes a simple mechanism of capturing and reusing the city's water - an essential life resource that is indeed poorly managed in Jakarta.
But why was Jakarta chosen in the first place?
"The value of gotong royong is something that cities outside Asia can actually learn from," said Kees Christiaanse, curator of the event, which aims to mediate between local and global cultures, advocating an international exchange of ideas and encouraging public discussion among stakeholders in urban development.
In such cases, then, probably it is indeed a great challenge to take up such an intangible community value and try to translate it into architectural projects. It is actually a chance for Indonesia to put forward its unique urban liveliness, even if that is in the forms of slums, instead of always being represented by the dark side of such city morphology.
Several other stakeholders that have been invited outside of the competition offer a fresher approach worth mentioning.
The work of NGO MercyCorps in exercising participatory planning for slum dwellers in North Jakarta's Penjaringan shows how the people themselves are the best designers and planners.
A study by Cairns and colleagues from the University of Indonesia on creating a more culturally legible mapping of the city's periphery through interviews with locals can potentially reveal how Jakarta and its inhabitants actually work.
"If we go to the suburban kampung and just watch how the community themselves can create a system that works well for them, we can actually learn a lot," urban researcher Yandi Andri Yatmo said.
For a city that has its own take on how irrelevant top-down planning can be, perhaps that is the best approach. Architects and planners, after all, are neither prophets nor gods. None of us is.
