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Jakarta Post

Communities tackle local issues through urban design

Massive urban development has come at the cost of public space, with the shrinking space diminishing opportunities for person-to-person interaction — an issue that youth in South Tangerang, Banten, are trying to tackle

Sausan Atika (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Wed, November 13, 2019

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Communities tackle local issues through urban design

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span>Massive urban development has come at the cost of public space, with the shrinking space diminishing opportunities for person-to-person interaction — an issue that youth in South Tangerang, Banten, are trying to tackle.

Members of Karang Taruna Ikatan Remaja Griya Asri (Ikagiri), the official youth organization of community unit (RW) 07 in Jelupang subdistrict, North Serpong, South Tangerang, are racking their brains to find a way to deal with the situation in their area.

The residents of RW 07 had long been using its largest public space, a 26.4-meter-long and 14-meter-wide outdoor area that consisted of a volleyball court and a badminton court, before half of it was swiftly transformed into a parking lot five years ago. 

Ikagiri member Juliansyah Putra, 25, said that the youth group had taken the initiative to repeatedly request that car owners not park their vehicles during specific times when they played volleyball.

Most of the time, however, the request fell on deaf ears. 

Ikagiri member Reza Dwiputra, 22, chimed in, saying that they even let the air out of the tires of some cars.

The youths finally arrived at a temporary solution when two “collaborators” from Fraktal City offered their assistance.

South Tangerang-based architecture consultancy LabTanya, Unconditional Design and use.less.space held from September to October the Fraktal City program, which aimed to explore the untapped potentials of five local communities.

Fraktal City invited the communities of Karang Taruna Ikagiri, Remaja Arinda 2 in Pondok Aren, Karang Taruna Kebon Kopi in Pondok Aren, Menjangan Wahid in East Ciputat and Karang Taruna Buaran in Serpong to collaborate in the program.

LabTanya founder Ignatius Susiadi “Adhie” Wibowo said the program, themed “Materials Connect”, aimed to encourage communities, with the assistance of collaborators, to explore all possible use of tangible and intangible materials within their environment to connect with their daily lives. 

“There are aspects of urban planning that cannot be carried out well if we only rely on bureaucrats. It is important
to actively involve the community,” he told 
The Jakarta Post recently.

Adhie said that a community sometimes only came up with physical elements when asked what was lacking in their environment. This was when a collaborator was called on to help them engage in systematic design thinking to dig deeper into and address the underlying problem.

Ikagiri members and their collaborators met regularly to apply the design thinking process to identify the problem and arrive at a solution: a portable, multiplayer board game like Monopoly that was open to all ages and played in the narrow space between the rows of parked cars.

The players are divided into two teams, each of which must complete at least one round. Large pieces of colored paper form the squares of the board, and a player must answer a question related to their community before advancing to the next square.

The questions include “What is the full name of the head of neighborhood unit [RT] 32?” and “What is the name of the canteen at the entrance gate of RW 07?”. 

The children who were playing the inaugural game on Sunday, when it was introduced to the community, approached a local woman for the answers.

“With a game like this, they can learn more about their neighborhood as well,” said Humaira Adlina, one of the Fraktal City collaborators for Ikagiri.

The four other communities followed a similar process.

For instance, the Karang Taruna Kebon Kopi community in Bintaro found a way to “reconnect” the residents of Kampung Kebon Kopi, who became geographically divided after the Jakarta-Serpong toll road was completed in 2004, by creating the “Kebon Kopi Nimbrung” mobile gathering space. 

The members of the community made portable furniture like tables and chairs from whatever materials they could find, and Kebon Kopi Nimbrung would tour selected locations in the area to host community activities like handcraft workshops.

South Tangerang Development Planning Board (Bappeda) acting head M. Taher Rochmadi said the program could be a pilot project for connecting the city’s stakeholders, including the municipal administration, local communities and society as a whole. 

“Empowerment programs like this could be a broad movement to connect relevant stakeholders if it succeeds,” he told the Post.

Taher added that the Fraktal City program had also helped the South Tangerang Bappeda to learn about design thinking.

“This [program] is the first step for us all to adopt the design thinking process to result in better quality output for city development,” he said.

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