Eviction a primitive move

Marco Kusumawijaya, Architect and Urban Planner, Jakarta

Eviction, if continued, will fail Indonesia on its way to modernizing the economy, the law and urban development. Behind it is the issue of state failure to organize affordable urban housing, which involves many modernization issues: land reform, social cohesion, good governance, poverty reduction. It is counterproductive to our efforts in poverty reduction, as it annuls the only accumulated wealth of the urban poor, so important for them to take part in the creation of added value.

It may also drive social anarchy as thousands of people without shelter do not know where to go. (Some of them are now staying at the offices of the National Commission on Human Rights). This was part of the conclusions made by 15 noted scholars from different fields in a discussion last week.

We are deeply concerned, because urban housing is a modern issue, a reflection of our dealing with capitalist transformation that determines our national success or failure in becoming modern. Eviction is possible only with a government that is ignorant of the fundamental, developmental issues involved.

There is no housing issue in traditional societies. Everybody has a home. In many parts of Indonesia, that is still so. Housing is a collective responsibility. It is unthinkable to let a community member wander without shelter. In the villages of South Belu, a district in Indonesian Timor, where I had personal involvement many years ago, building a house, as well as major repairs, are collective rituals. By modern standards, most of the houses are much better than our urban homes. (Of course, there is no bathroom inside the house, because their way of life does not require one.)

It is therefore not true that housing everybody requires a high level of wealth or average income per capita. There are homeless people in rich countries such as the U.S. and some European countries. There are also success stories among rich countries, such as Singapore and the Netherlands.

Poorer countries have had done well in certain periods of their history, such as Srilanka about two decades ago, or Venezuela in recent years. Does wealth make it easier? I don't think so, because rising income and general wealth of a nation will also raise everything else, including the price of land, which is the most fundamental asset for housing. For every level of wealth, there is an equal level of difficulty.

Among cities in Indonesia, too, there are differences in the respective capacity (or will?) to house people. The richest, Jakarta, is the worst. And it is not true that that is so solely due to population pressure. Jakarta's average annual rate of population growth during the period 1990 to 2000, which was 0.16 percent, was the lowest of the larger cities. In the same period Surabaya grew annually at 0.43 percent, Bandung 0.4 percent and Medan 0.9 percent.

In fact, as Prof. Tommy Firman of the planning school of Bandung Institute of Technology shows in his recent study, the smaller and "poorer" cities are growing at much higher rates. The fact is also that Jakarta's economic growth rate is almost always the highest among other regions, and above the national average.

Housing capacity of a society is, therefore, fundamentally a function of sound and willing policy to direct and redistribute the accumulated wealth. It would be unreasonably naive and lazy just to blame population growth and poverty.

Any sound policy should start by recognizing that urban housing is a modern problem, meaning that it has to do with our handling of capitalist transformation. It became an issue when industrial modernization started in Europe in the late 18th century.

Modernization, in economic terms, means that cities become centers of growth, where creation of added value is most heightened and intensified, and jobs are therefore relatively most available compared with the national average, even if they are not so promising. About 70 percent of migrants to Jakarta quote employment opportunity as their motivation. Migrating to cities is therefore an act of claiming a right to the city. And this right to the city simply means the right to jobs, shelter, and social mobility -- in short, a bite of the added value created by the process of development.

Since housing involves so many other fundamental issues of capitalist transformation -- land, equity, fair distribution, planning, urbanization, etc. -- it does establish itself as a test bed for our national capability in dealing with economic modernization. It has a long-term impact upon many other dimensions of our national life. Prof. Maria Sumardjono, the renowned expert on agrarian law, said that the recent evictions should be used as an entry point to agrarian reform. Studies prepared by the initiators of the meeting also revealed a total inequality with regards to the state's handling of land use, spatial planning and distribution of other resources.

While the urban poor are evicted from tiny areas of state- owned land that they have occupied for more than 20 years (which makes them eligible to request tenure over the land), hundreds of hectares of protected mangrove forest are converted to housing the rich.

Eviction is primitive because it betrays the people that any government should indeed serve with better solutions, and because it does not solve the fundamental, modern issues that require equally intelligent and sophisticated policy that only a modern government can craft. It raises a nagging question: How could we have deserved such a primitive government?