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Outlaws no more: Jakarta to include kampung in planning
The Jakarta administration has vowed to consider urban kampung in city planning, aiming to “improve” the quality of life in slum areas
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span>The Jakarta administration has vowed to consider urban kampung in city planning, aiming to “improve” the quality of life in slum areas.
According to the Statistics Indonesia's Jakarta Office (BPS Jakarta), the capital has 445 community units (RW) that are categorized as slums. The figure comprises 15 RWs categorized as heavy, 99 moderate, 205 light and 126 very light.
A majority are located in Central Jakarta, followed by South Jakarta, West Jakarta and North Jakarta.
Meanwhile, according to the Agrarian and Spatial Planning Ministry and National Land Agency, 118 out of 267 subdistricts in Jakarta have slums.
To improve the quality of life in slum areas, Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan introduced a series of arrangement program, including the Community Action Plan, the Collaborative Implementation Program and the Monitoring Evaluation Program, to give residents the opportunity to confer with the administration in finding solutions to their housing issues.
Anies has instructed the Jakarta Housing and Settlement Agency to focus on the arrangement of 200 RWs and 21 kampung from 2018 until 2021.
The agency’s technical planning head, Rommel Pasaribu, told The Jakarta Post after a seminar titled Reviving Urban Commons as part of the 2019 Jakarta Urban Kampung Conference held at City Hall on Monday that the program’s major obstacle was the legality of the land on which the slums stand.
“The 200 RWs are dealing with poor quality of life, but the problem for kampung arrangement is that many slums don’t have a legal claim over the areas they occupy,” he said.
With the recent establishment of an agrarian reform task force, as stipulated in the 2019 Gubernatorial Decree No. 574, Rommel expressed hope that such issues could be solved.
The task force sets out to address problems in the agrarian sector to provide certainty over land rights and clarify the ownership, authority and utilization of land.
“We are partnering with the city’s spatial planning agency and national land agency,” he said.
In addition, the Jakarta Spatial Planning Agency’s head of spatial plan and use, Heru Sunawan, said the administration was currently reviewing the city’s 2020 detailed spatial planning and zoning regulations.
Heru suggested that the administration only change its zoning regulation, without elaborating further.
Anies added that the spatial planning revision would capture the real conditions in the field.
“The draft of detailed spatial planning has accommodated many kampung,” he told reporters on Monday, citing an example of a spacious industrial area partly turned into a kampung or a plot of land that had been occupied by kampung dwellers since before the area was developed.
Anies, sworn in as the Jakarta governor in 2017, made political agreements with the Urban Poor Network (JRMK) to protect the rights of the poor in the city.
He also pledged to eliminate slums without evicting people from kampung, although the Jakarta Legal Aid Institute recorded 79 evictions throughout Anies’ first year in office, affecting 277 families and 864 areas where residents ran small businesses.
Kiyoko Kanki, a professor at the Architecture and Architectural Engineering Department at Kyoto University in Japan, said collaboration with the local government was paramount to improving the quality of life of kampung dwellers. The collaboration can begin with the establishment of an inhabitant council system as a medium for dialogue, she said.
“The very important thing is the [establishment of] an inhabitant council system for community development to encourage a collaborative relationship between local government and kampung dwellers,” she said, pointing out that there were no standardized rules regarding the council as each community had its own “nature” in decision-making processes.
She also suggested the administration involve higher educational institutions in designing the arrangement program as she believed many academics had conducted research on kampung life that would benefit stakeholders.
Rommel said the agency had considered involving academics to gain an “additional perspective” for the corrective action plan program by next year.
Urbanist Elisa Sutanudjaja from the Rujak Center for Urban Studies cited during her opening speech for the event 35 scientific papers on Kampung Akuarium in Penjaringan, North Jakarta, one of 21 kampung on the administration’s list, that had been made available for citation for three years, saying that kampung are a “source of knowledge for many people”.
