Residents of informal neighbourhoods are seeking the help of lawyers, architects and journalists to save their homes from the bulldozers

On the official spatial planning map of Jakarta, Arti Astati’s neighbourhood on the coast is painted blue. As far as City Hall is concerned, there are no people there. Just the sea.

Astati begs to differ. This informal urban neighbourhood, or kampung, is home to about 1,000 people, many of whom work in the green mussel fishery. But the city did not recognise their existence – and after decades of neglect, it threatened the kampung with forced eviction.

“They say we don’t have any right to live here, that we are usurpers of state lands. But we don’t have anywhere else to go,” said Astati, one of a group of locals who fought the eviction plan.



There have been about 500 volunteers in the past two years. This is massive Gugun Muhammad, Urban Poor Consortium

It’s a familiar story in Jakarta – in 2015-2016, about 13,800 families had their homes bulldozed – but the way this one ended was new: the kampung won their case, and City Hall recognised the neighbourhood as Green Mussel Kampung. It set the precedent for a new model: Jakarta’s urban poor are organising, and they’re getting help.

The last two years have been especially difficult for poor people in Jakarta. The former governor, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama – better known as Ahok – backed the demolitions in the name of development and flood control, and compounded it with insults. Kampung residents have been called thieves, thugs, dirty, diseased and illegal squatters.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gugun Muhammad with his home, Kampung Tongkol, in the background.

Many middle-class Jakartans broadly share that view: that kampungs are dirty and chaotic, an obstacle to the city’s modernisation. There have been heated debates about forced evictions, and the mainstream media in Jakarta has tended to echo Ahok’s opinions. In a 2016 survey, 66% of Jakartans said forced evictions are necessary for the city’s development.



Banding together

Urban poor leaders realised it was the middle class they needed on their side. Organised under the banners of the JRMK (Urban Poor Linkage) and the UPC (Urban Poor Consortium), they reached out to Jakarta’s architects, artists, scholars, lawyers, students and journalists of diverse backgrounds – creating a network of volunteers and organisations.

Together they set out to “eviction-proof” the kampung. The architects map the neighbourhood and suggest improvements; lawyers help draft objections and other matters; academics help articulate the bigger ideas of why the community matters. The journalists – of which I am one – in collaboration with aspiring reporters from the kampung, write the history and stories of the communities, in an initiative called Archiving Urban Kampung (KKM).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Green Mussel Kampung.

“There have been maybe 500 [volunteers] in the past two years,” says the UPC’s Gugun Muhammad. “This is massive.” He notes that so many had come forward that the communities now have the luxury of picking and choosing those who will have the most sustainable impact.

One of them was Herlily, a lecturer in architecture at Universitas Indonesia. When Herlily first arrived at Muhammad’s neighbourhood in 2015, residents were hoping to defend their kampung by arguing its importance to the tourism industry, for its proximity to the old city wall. But Herlily saw the potential in the communities themselves. She proposed that the residents prove to the city that they could keep the rivers clean. Instead of building an “inspection road” along the river for municipal workers, why not make the kampung the guardian of the river?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Arti Astati, one of the residents of Green Mussel Kampung.

The residents embraced the idea. “Now, if you go there, you will hear they are proud not only of the old city wall but of their own kampungs,” she says.

The UPC and JRMK have become political, too. During last year’s local election campaigns, the two organisations made a deal with the candidate for governor, Anies Baswedan. In exchange for respecting their land rights, they would endeavour to give him the 60,000 votes they represented between them. They had tried the same thing five years earlier with Joko Widodo, but when Widodo left to become president and Ahok took over, he showed no intention of honouring his predecessor’s promise and evicted thousands.

Having learned their lesson, the communities made the contract with Baswedan legally binding – and he was voted in. So far, Baswedan seems to be keeping his promise. But the work still has to be done locally, introducing many kampung residents to unfamiliar concepts such as participatory planning and lobbying City Hall.

This is where the volunteers are proving their worth. Kamil Muhammad, an architect, spends his weekends volunteering for several kampungs.

“My weekday clients would want sophisticated 3D rendering, very visual. But here in Kampung Kunir, they need tactile design,” he says. Muhammad explains that his kampung work taught him lessons his education at the University of Melbourne did not: in one case, after talking to residents about their need for a shelter, he helped them build a model made of cardboard boxes.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fahruji, a fishermen from Kampung Akuarium, explains a planning idea to the other residents.

There are legal consultants, too, such as Handika Febrian, who like Kamil Muhammad has a weekday practice but on weekends runs a clinic in the kampung, helping to draft legal documents.

‘They’re making something different’

This sort of collaboration is unprecedented. There have been volunteers before – UPC has worked in Jakarta since 1997 and JRMK since 2008 – but never this many, never this diverse, and never this joined up.

“JRMK and UPC were once stuck. Their stories were ones of disappointments,” says Amalinda Savirani, a political scientist at Gadjah Mada University. “But they’re making something different because these new people are more diverse.”

The sheer variety of professions is attracting residents who might previously have been uninterested in getting involved. Archiving Urban Kampung gives aspiring journalists a place to write; several visual artists have held short programmes in the kampungs, another hit with younger people.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Some young residents who contribute to the Archiving Urban Kampung programme.

“The volunteers are not old-fashioned activists whose strategy is limited to protesting on the streets,” explains Savirani.

Many of the volunteers say the collaboration helps them challenge how the city is seen – to break the walls dividing the classes and pioneer new ways of development that do not require forced evictions. But part of the reason they spend their weekends here also tends to be more personal.

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Nur Lintang Muhammad finds more his work with the kampung more meaningful than his job as a news journalist. “When I do the volunteer work, my spirits are lifted. I like the real interactions and I’m happy to become the mentor of the young kampung journalists,” he said. “I feel like I have done something.”

The kampung communities feel that connection, too. “They have boosted our spirit,” said Marsha Chairudin of Kampung Kunir. “We say to ourselves, ‘Look, those people from outside our kampung show high spirit. We should do the same.’”

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