Jakarta's informality aides the poor

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