Bogor to issue buildings bylaw

Theresia Sufa ,  The Jakarta Post ,  Bogor, West Java   |  Sat, 06/27/2009 11:13 AM  |  City

As Bogor continues to lose ever more historical buildings, the municipal culture and tourism agency says it will propose a bylaw on cultural heritage to help implement special efforts to prevent the situation from deteriorating.

Agency head Shahlan Rasyidi said the new bylaw was designed to urge Bogor residents to support the administration's efforts to conserve cultural heritage buildings in the city.

"The bylaw will for instance provide residents committed to maintaining their *heritage* buildings an incentive in land and building taxes," he said last week.

Shahlan added the bylaw would not interfere with the 1992 cultural heritage law, since the bylaw would only give the administration legal basis to run additional technical policies.

Bogor once boasted 500 cultural heritage buildings. Among the surviving ones are the Regina Pacis Chapel and the Bogor Cathedral, built in neo-Gothic architectural style.

However, with more and more owners of old buildings giving up on maintaining their inherited property, many heritage buildings are being torn down or converted for various purposes.

The National Archeology Research and Development Center estimates the city has lost a quarter of its cultural heritage buildings.

Adolf Heuken, a priest and heritage building expert, criticized the agency for not having adopted policies to conserve the buildings.

"The agency just sees the conservation *of cultural heritage buildings* as a way to increase tourist numbers. They have to change this mind-set because the most important thing is to preserve the history and identity of the city," he said.

In the 19th century, Bogor was the capital of Indonesia during the British occupation under Sir Stamford Raffles. It was then used as the seasonal capital of the Dutch administration, which dubbed the city Buitenzorg, meaning "beyond worry".

The city boasts a presidential palace, a deer park and a botanical garden at its heart. It is also home to the Bogor Institute of Agriculture, one of the country's biggest and oldest universities. (hwa)

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Siswasudarma (not verified) — Sun, 06/28/2009 - 10:09am

The real problem of preserving the "cultural and heritage" buildings is not only depending on the release of bylaws. That's just one of the formal effort to protect our heritage. I think we should look into the depth of main causes why people ignore the 'sense of having' toward the old cultural and historical buildings in many places.

I have no doubt that people are willing to keep the historical buildings stand as part of history. The problem is that the city government itself in some sense has no historical sensitize. Quite a lot we find out that the heritage building neglected and properly untreated. The root of the problem firstly to be improved is the conscience and the will of the government body in putting the mindset on the heritage buildings as part of the civilization of our society. If the government still has a historical trauma toward the symbol of Colonial heritage so far, as part of 'colonized mentality', the fate of historical and cultural buildings in the coming years it would just an illusion.

The plan of Bogor City government to release the buildings bylaw is good but not enough. The preservation of heritage building must be accompanied by not only incentive on land taxes, but how the City government have an holistic development plan in today's context which is relevant to the recent condition and the development of society themselves.

for me, the historical buildings are telling our history and the development of Indonesian society civilization. The historical building could speak a lot about our past beside our historical amnesia mostly we got.

Siswasudarma
Yogyakarta

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