Eviction a primitive move

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?