Cities must acknowledge contribution of the poor

Evictions are beginning to become the order of the day again while a similar picture is happening in other cities in the country. The Jakarta Post's Ati Nurbaiti talked to sociologist Wardah Hafidz who coordinates the Urban Poor Consortium. The following is an excerpt of the interview:

Question: How do you see the current trend of evictions?

Answer: In big cities we see that when the economy gets better it has a negative correlation with the residential rights of the poor. With an economic boom and more investments, modern facilities like malls are built while the poor, who often occupy strategically located land, are evicted.

Now we also fear political motives ahead of next year's elections -- to raise the image that things are so bad so that frustration would be widely felt; this would make it easier (for election contestants) to engage in "money politics" and it would be easier to pit people against each other.

The likelihood is also given the fact that poor settlements are lucrative business areas for drug trafficking, with the illicit support (beking) of local authorities, including the police, and unemployed and/or drug-using youths can easily be mobilized with a promise of a few thousand rupiah.

Evictions are now also related to natural disasters such as floods. The 2002 flood in Jakarta was declared a national disaster, so rivers are subject to normalisasi; river banks are being cleared and are planted with grass and trees.

But evictions are also related to economic projects; both sides of the banks in certain areas will have sports facilities and other public facilities. The whole project will affect some 2 million households in 13 subdistricts from Cipinang Besar Selatan in East Jakarta to Marunda in North Jakarta.

The construction of such facilities within this program will be the first phase of other evictions planned later ahead of the construction of the waterfront city.

So evictions in Jakarta are related with the Eastern Flood Canal which will remove legal settlements apart from squatters; the use of previously idle land for (private) property projects and the planned waterfront city.

Similar patterns are seen in Lampung and Palembang (in southern Sumatra) and Makassar (South Sulawesi) where slums are being removed for profitable projects.

Aren't a number of evictions based on a Jakarta regulations that squatters get no compensation for land that is to be used "for the public interest"?

Regardless of rules, where are all these people going to go to? There are no jobs in their kampongs (villages/communities). And how can the flood control program of "normalizing" rivers and removing slums from the banks work while the upstream areas are not dealt with, such as the building of villas in Puncak (the water catchment area and mountain resort in Bogor).

What solution do you propose?

One is land consolidation. This proposal is based on available practices such as in Batam (in Riau province), Solo (Central Java) and in Yogyakarta, where houses can be erected even one meter away from the river bank as long as the necessary conditions are met (such as constructing a cement wall along the bank).

In any approach the basic paradigm should be "pro poor". The poor are mostly in the informal sector and in a "mutual symbiotic" relationship with the well-to-do. The city also needs the poor who engage in the small scale informal sector in the planned waterfront city.

How do you see the role of the Jakarta administration? Wasn't it the governor's letter that led to the prolonged stay of the slum dwellers; he said squatters could stay on land belonging to the state run housing firm Perumnas in Cengkareng, West Jakarta, because it was still idle.

The administration does not care about the poor; Jakarta wants to remove all slums. The United Nations indeed aims for "a city without slums" but of course not like this. The governor's letter to allow people occupying the idle Perumnas land was issued five years ago and the administration has done nothing in anticipation ahead of the likely possibility that the land will be used again.

Are there other ways out of the problem?

Apart from land consolidation there is also land sharing, though this would take time for preparations. On a plot for a mall of 9,000 square meters, for instance, the owner could arrange to rent out some 1,000 meters to the poor. We find this in, for instance, Bangkok. There are all these ways but the Jakarta administration will not look into them; it's only thinking of adding to its revenue. You mentioned the problem of corruption which worsens the issue; what is the estimated scale of corruption involved?

I don't have exact figures but each new business requires permits and other things. Under the toll road in Rawa Bebek, North Jakarta there was a two-kilometer long space used by residents who were told to move on the grounds that it was dangerous to live on the land. But then the administration began preparing the space for a market or for a parking lot .... As the land belongs to the toll road firm Jasa Marga the transactions involving the city would be illicit.

Business space under the railway in Karanganyar has been removed also under the pretext that it is dangerous but then the city started to build shophouses. Again we see the sole interest of the Jakarta administration to rake in potential revenue.

This is also driven by regional autonomy in which each region is encouraged to seek its own funds; apart from taxes the city is seeking to make the best use of public land. What is the difference in terms of empowerment of the poor today compared to the days under the New Order?

There are more people who don't easily surrender to fate. They know of other ways like going straight to the legislative bodies or the National Commission for Human Rights although this has yet contributed to solutions.