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race Pamungkas, an architect with social justice ideals, got fed up working for the government when called on to research public housing and restoration projects, and prepare budgets.

“When the money was allocated we got only 30 to 50 percent to do the job,” she said. “The rest went elsewhere – who knows?”

“I realized I wasn’t suited to working for government departments. I wanted to make a difference, and it was clear that many public servants were not servants of the public. They were just concerned with money. It was time to move on.”

This wasn’t her only bad experience with the bureaucracy. The next lesson was about cultural imperialism and it didn’t come from a textbook.

After graduating in architecture from the University of Indonesia, she went to Flores with a contingent of the university’s staff. Her job was to assist planning the rehousing of people who had lost their homes in the 1992 tsunami, triggered by a 7.8 magnitude offshore earthquake. The army was responsible for providing temporary housing, which inevitably became permanent. But many homes were left unoccupied.

“The planners were from Java and looked at the project as though the homeless were farmers,” Pamungkas said. “But these were fishermen, people of the sea, and the houses provided were not suitable. The locals weren’t consulted, or if they were their views weren’t heard.”

When in Jakarta she took to walking to work and rapidly discovered a world invisible from the tinted windows of executive vehicles. Urban poverty-stricken families are not as obvious as those in the villages — often, they live in kampung burrows, packed into unsanitary, low-roofed, flimsy-walled rooms; or they squat in old industrial buildings abandoned by their owners. The gap between the wong kecil, the ordinary folk, and the rich is far wider than the multilane freeways that separates their homes.

“I was concerned about public housing for the poor,” she said. “I came across the gemstone workers who live alongside the railway tracks in Jakarta and learned about their lives in a very historical area. It was just a coincidence.”

“The rich can pay to build what they want where they want. But
the poor have to wait for government housing and this isn’t a good standard.”

But not all the rich are indifferent to history. With noted historian and Jesuit priest Adolf Heuken, who she met at a seminar, Pamungkas was commissioned by Jakarta businesswoman Susilawati to research Galangan Kapal Batavia (Batavia Shipyard).

This was the 300-year old Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC – the United East India Company) shipyard on the banks of the Kali Besar River.

Like many Dutch-era buildings it had been used as a warehouse.
Despite a sturdy construction, its
ill-maintained timbers had rotted and the brickwork had fretted.

The building has now been renovated to become the VOC – the Very Old Café. Father Adolf and Pamungkas have their work published as a book, complete with quaint and ancient drawings of a busy waterway full of swans alongside wide paddocks with prancing horses — areas now densely packed with houses and markets.

The pair then started to work on another project, focussing on buildings in the swish suburb of Menteng.

As the child of a Dutch-Reformed- church pastor helping build schools for the needy, Pamungkas, 39, had the benefit of living in many parts of the archipelago — and the disadvantage of having nowhere to call home.

Though born in Bandung, she spent only three years there before moving to Riau. She then moved to Sulawesi, Sumatra again and back to Java. She chose to study architecture because it offered practical opportunities, but she found her natural talents in research, and moved to Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. Alongside improving her English, she is investigating floating eco-houses, an idea pioneered in the Netherlands to cope with flooding.

Next year she hopes to take up a scholarship so that she can study the preservation and conservation of old buildings. To fund her studies she and her husband Enrico Halim, a graphic artist, sold their house in Jakarta.

Her thesis, which is still under review, will look at the way the Dutch imposed their building styles and town planning on Jakarta. When the walled city proved unsuitable, the colonialists had to reset their attitudes to suit the tropics, borrowing from local wisdom.

She will compare the situation in her homeland with the way British colonial forces took their architecture to the rugged, earthquake-prone Wellington, which is reputed to be the world’s windiest city. They had to rapidly modify their attitudes, learning from the Maori who built to survive a harsh climate, and rely on hard-set ideas imported from another continent.

“When I get back to Indonesia, hopefully with a Western education, I plan to teach the importance of saving our past,” she said. “The new generation doesn’t harbor hatred against the Dutch and are more inclined to respect historical buildings.”

“History education in Indonesian schools has just been a memorizing of dates and places. Studying history has meant meeting an obligation to fill marks. Sadly it’s not part of our culture now to respect our ancestors, though I suspect it was different in the past — look at the way we demolished the house where [first president] Sukarno read the proclamation on Indonesian independence. Elsewhere in the world, that would be held as an important landmark of national heritage.

“Jakarta is a coastal city but we don’t care for our rivers and the sea. They’re just used as trash bins and bad places for poor people to live. I want to see a return to our respect for water, as we had in the past, to resurrect the beliefs of
our ancestors… If we could preserve and renovate some of the old buildings in Kota we could sell our city to the world, maybe rivalling Singapore in attracting visitors. What happened in the past is valuable for our future.”