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span class="caption" style="width: 398px;">Courtesy of Daliana SuryawinataThe young woman who once detested the alienating nature of Jakarta and aspired to be an artist is now an ambitious architect with ideas to make the flood-ridden and congested city a better place.  

Daliana Suryawinata chuckled when she recalled why she chose the University of Tarumanagara in West Jakarta to study at and obtain her bachelor’s degree in architecture.  

“To be honest, I only began to have an interest in architecture during the third year of my studies. I was interested [in the campus] because it was close to TA [Taman Anggrek Mall] and I could ice skate [at the mall],” she said.  

Daliana is now playing multiple roles in the world of architecture and planning, ranging from being the curator of the recent “Green Dreams & Visionary Cities” exhibition in Jakarta and the chief European Union officer for the Indonesian Institute of Architects.

However, as a fresh high school graduate, her dream was not to use her hands to design spaces and buildings but for drawing comic books. “Since high school I have always loved to draw, I wanted to be a cartoonist and comic writer but was not sure if I was talented enough,” Daliana recalled.  

It was only roughly halfway through her studies that her interest in architecture really grew due to a “very good teacher” of the subject that she came across at Tarumanagara.

Her newly discovered passion led to her exploring how far she could contribute to the city, with which she has a love-hate relationship.  

“I am Jakarta born and bred … Since childhood up to studying at university I always felt that Jakarta was a city [in which] you have to stay in a bubble. You enter a car, gated community, into university … you never get what it means to live in a city,” Daliana said.  

She did move away from Jakarta a year after she graduated to study at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam.  

Daliana has been living in the Netherlands since then, and has worked in several organizations there such as the Office for Metropolitan Authorities (OMA) and the MRDV design firm before founding her own architecture office, SHAU, with partners Tobias Hoffman and Florian Hienzelmann.

But her desire to improve Jakarta and other cities in Indonesia kept her coming back to her hometown time and time again. Many of her projects use Jakarta as a background.

“I escaped [Jakarta] because of the urbanism and I came back for urbanism,” she said, laughing.

She is currently juggling several roles. Aside from her work at SHAU, Daliana is also working on her Ph.D at the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft).  

She is involved in TU Delft’s The Why Factory, which produces models for future cities. Occasionally, she engages in architecture-related events as a curator or jury member. On top of all that she is also a mother.  

Several of her collective projects, including the “social mall” and “superkampung” were displayed at the recent Jakarta Biennale at the National Gallery in Central Jakarta.  

“I always work in collaboration, with other people who always have better ideas than me,” Daliana said, playing the humble card.  

The “social mall” project, a collaboration between SHAU and Indonesian architecture firm Andramatin, offered designs in which public spaces such as libraries and playgrounds could be incorporated into malls, which have become a somewhat inseparable phenomenon within Jakarta’s reality.  

Meanwhile, the “superkampung” project conducted by The Why Factory, the Berlage Institute and Tarumanagara University aimed to empower kampung pockets, which currently are also part and parcel of Jakarta.  

The project sees potential in areas such as Bantargebang, Bekasi, known to be the city’s last garbage dumping ground and inhabited by scavengers as well as others living out of the waste, and Penjaringan, a flood-ridden area of North Jakarta.  

“Superkampung” envisioned Bantargebang as a well-managed recycling center equipped with a “green leisure destination”, and Penjaringan as a lucrative “fish kampung”.  

While some might consider those ideas as too good to be true, Daliana believes that embracing kampung pockets is better than tearing them down to build housing.  

A lover of cutting edge designs and ideas some might consider radical, her Ph.D-by-design project, Austeria, proposes a self-sustaining city with minimal consumption. So minimal, in fact, that a house can be as small as 4 square meters.  

“The way we are living now is very wasteful. We can reduce that,” Daliana said.

Daliana’s latest visit to Jakarta to curate the “Green Dreams & Visionary Cities” exhibition had been one of her numerous activities at architecture–related events. She is on the jury for the Indonesian Institute of Architects Awards, and was also the curator for OpenCity Jakarta in 2010.

“[Being the curator for the Architecture Biennale] was a big step in my career to curate and develop how urbanism in Jakarta could be,” she said.  

Being an architect is time consuming, let alone one with such multiple roles like Daliana. However, her faith in her profession partly fuels her spirit.

“I think architects are not to be seen as heroes, but they can initiate propositions. This has to be in collaboration with more people, the community, the government and investors,” she said.  

Daliana’s activities oblige her to come to Jakarta at least three to four times a year, and she tries to synchronize her several roles related to the country according to her visits.   

Her relationship with the city, apparently, is still a demanding one. “Jakarta seems to be a ‘maximum city’ in terms of its faults. If it’s bad, why not throw it away? It seems hard to discard a city, especially a city named Jakarta. And discarding it won’t solve the problems…” went her passionate foreword for the Jakarta Biennale.  

According to Daliana, the two most striking problems regarding Jakarta are the lack of public space due to priorities given to the private sector for the sake of money, speculation and other reasons, and also the problem of poverty.  

“I love Jakarta in a way … [it grew] from hate to love when I really understood what the problems were,” she said.