Event to ask everybody to solve Jakarta problems

Housewives, businessmen, developers, street vendors, domestic workers, car salesmen, officials, farmers and street tramps. What do they have in common for Jakarta?

Believe it or not, all these people can actually contribute to a better Jakarta, according to the new urban concept “Reciprocity” that highlights the importance of involving all the city’s stakeholders in finding solutions for problems in the capital.

Urban scholars, city planners and academicians from around the world will gather in an event called Open City Jakarta: Reciprocity as an Urban Strategy.

The event, organized by the Erasmus Huis Dutch cultural center, will showcase 12 innovative pieces of research and design projects from local and foreign urban experts that will offer various scenarios for urban problems in Jakarta.

Exhibition curator Daliana Suryawinata, an Indonesian architect also a lecturer in the Rotterdam Academy of Architecture, says each project reflects how formal and informal elements in the city can take part in establishing reciprocal relationships to help make the city work.

Daliana together with Stephen Cairns, an urban expert at the University of Edinburgh, UK, has selected 12 projects that may offer solutions for Jakarta using mutual relationship between all elements in the city.

Among the projects are Jakarta Bersih! (Clean Jakarta) that will combine informal and formal systems to resolve waste problem in the city. Social Mall is another proposal intended to bridge the gap between the interest of developers in revenues and the public interest in public spaces.

Apart from theoretical approaches, Daliana assured us it was not impossible to implement such projects. “Some are still ideas, we still need to propose them [to the authorities], but some have been implemented,” she said, referring to the Servant Space project already working in a number of home designs in Jakarta. The project is aimed at improving living condition for servants, whose access to urban space is limited.

Contacted separately, the chairman of the Jakarta Resident’s Forum, Azas Tigor Nainggolan, doubted the success of this approach in practice, as the public was not easy to convince on how to create a better city due to people’s low confidence in government.

“People are already disillusioned. They don’t believe in the government, which has frequently disappointed them. So it will not be easy to raise public participation. People have become indifferent,” he said.

Tigor also highlighted that the city administration had become an unreliable institution when it comes to dealing with urban problems.

But people with little optimism or belief they can do something for Jakarta are free to come to take a look at the exhibition opened today at Erasmus Huis in Kuningan, South Jakarta, which will run until Dec. 1.

The event will also cover a photo exhibition by renowned photographer Erik Prasetya and a film festival showing award-winning urban documentaries and dramas.