Jakarta's informality aides the poor

By Marco Kusumawijaya

JAKARTA (JP): You may laugh at this, but it is true: Jakartans are forbidden by law to play in any public spaces except for those determined by the governor.

So far, strangely enough, no one has inquired about the list of approved public spaces. Mind you, also forbidden is a habit that Indonesians have become so accustomed too, namely, collecting donations from among colleagues in an office for someone who is getting married or has a relative that just died, unless, that is, the governor's approval has been obtained.

It is also a must, by law, for Jakartans to walk only on the sidewalks where streets have been provided with these. When you have a traditional massage in your office, you must not forget to ask if the masseur has a permit from the governor, because it is expressly forbidden to practice any form of traditional medicine without it.

These bizarre rulings are all contained in the amusing Jakarta Bylaw No. 11 of 1988 on public order. This is the same law that forbids street vendors from plying their wares and becak (pedicabs) from operating on our streets. It consists of 33 articles of which 22 start with "It is forbidden to...". It is this law that provides the basis for the annual "operation" by the city's public order department to evict street vendors, so that for years they have been unable to organize themselves for lack of certainty about their continued existence.

This, in turn, has led to them having a bad image, and being accused of messing up the city and disturbing public order. This is the law that provides the legal basis for the "maintenance of public order" budget that has recently been the subject of claim and counterclaim by the police and the city's public order department. What a shame!

For Wardah Hafiz's Urban Poor Consortium and dozens of organizations representing street vendors, it has been the cause of a perpetual struggle with the city's public order department.

But the law does not only concern the poor. For one, by a reasonable estimate at least 70 percent of office workers along Jl. Thamrin and Jl. Sudirman depend on the vendors for their lunches.

For another, looking at the articles it contains, the law is in fact a totalitarian, unilateral condemnation of all informal activity in the city. It is born out of a twisted idea about "urban development" and "modern" urban life.

Behind the scenes

The year 1988 marked the height of the repressive New Order regime. It marked the launch of economic liberalization. The mission of the then-governor Wiyogo Atmodarminto, a former Indonesian ambassador to Tokyo, was to attract investors. Jakarta, therefore, had to look "clean" and "formal". Everything "informal" was deemed untidy and had to be erased. But, as we frequently see today, it has only increased the number of conflicts because it represents nothing more than a mindless effort to impossibly sterilize the appearance of the city. It attempted to place every aspect of public life under the control of the local authority.

In this time of crisis, more conflicts may be expected to occur. For, obviously, the number of self-employed, entrepreneurial street vendors will rise in direct proportion to the (formal) unemployment rate. So, there will also be more preman (street thugs), hooligans, and desperate low-paid civil servants.

With political uncertainty and little hope in the economic arena for at least the next five to 10 years ahead, informality can be turned into an asset and enable many poor Jakartans and Indonesians in other cities to survive. Jakarta and its surrounding districts are, for example, witnessing the growth of healthy urban agriculture all over the place.

By contrast, however, the new Jakarta master plan governing the capital's development up to 2010 has reduced the 'formal' allocation of land for urban agriculture to less than 200 hectares located in one location only -- near the airport -- as compared to thousands of similar places in the old master plan.

This is despite the fact that urban agriculture is saving thousands of poor families from going hungry and forging collaboration between different socioeconomic classes -- middle- income owners of vacant urban plots and low-income urban kampong dwellers.

Urban agriculture also provides Jakarta with reasonable quality food without costly and polluting, long-distance motorized transport. It also improves microclimates and the soil structure of the vacant land. Agricultural areas at the urban fringes can be designed as greenbelts to avoid uncontrolled urban sprawl. It can be combined with recreational as well as some nature conservation functions such as water retention and flood buffer zones.

Mixed land use increases infrastructure efficiency, while also providing the cheapest mode of combining productive and housing activities for the urban poor (and, actually, for everybody else), as long as environmental health is heeded.

Historically, this is how cities have always been. That's how it should be. It is the twisted idea of the "modern", radical separation of working and living that has ruined the concept. It is now a good time to shift the paradigm because of today's additional conditionality: the need to survive the crisis.

This indeed provides a good reason -- a better one than the lobbying of some land-hungry businessmen -- to propose a revision of the spatial plan.

Rejection of informality has been the enemy of the urban poor for the last 30 years. An international workshop titled Coping with Informality and Illegality in Human Settlements in Developing Cities was held from May 23 to May 26, 2001, in Leuven, Belgium, as a milestone marking the end of the old paradigm and the start of one that sees informality as a space for accommodating the complexity of a sustainable popular economy, and as a necessary source of healthy plurality in urban life.

For three decades the previous paradigm has failed, and produced an ever-increasing frequency of conflict, which is becoming too expensive and unbearable for Indonesia.

Anticipating more difficult times to come ahead, it is very reasonable, and actually urgent, for Indonesian cities to consider policies which are more inclusive of informality.

Revisions of urban development plans, including land-use plans, need, at the very least, to be effected. This must be coupled with a more pro-poor mass transport system. The United Nations Covenant on Social Economic Rights -- unfortunately not yet ratified by Indonesia -- demands that housing be located where access to employment is easy.

For the poor and their informal economy, it also very obvious that their survival depends on proximity to the more formal economies of the middle and upper classes. Therefore, isolating them from the latter will deal the deathblow to them. Malls and white-collar workplaces need to provide space to accommodate them.

Middle- and upper-income housing estates are also the natural sources of employment and livelihood for them. Proximity and access as between the different income groups should be designed to make symbiosis possible.

Simultaneously, the local authority might, perhaps, turn its attention to other forms of informality that proliferate among the rich. If public order officers were to just look around, they would quickly spot kitchens and front porches extended beyond the allowed building lines, or driveways extending out into public rights-of-way, houses being illegally used for all sort of businesses, garbage being dumped in public spaces, including toll-road tickets discarded five meters after the exit gate.

After all, can we really say that the notorious practices of corruption, collusion and nepotism are not the product of an "informal" attitude among the members of the elite in managing public affairs?

--The writer is an architect and urbanist based in Jakarta