Surabaya Kampung and Distorted Communication

In 2002, kampung communities on the Kali Wonokromo riverbank were forcibly evicted and their kampungs cleared on the declared grounds of flood mitigation. The clearance, however, coincided with a programme of re-imagining the city as a green and waterfront global city. These events led other riverbank kampungs into a new (and "un-Indonesian") form of coalition of resistance which, moreover, adopted its own strategies of re-imagining. There was, in effect, a "distortion" of communication on both sides of the conflict. The subsequent events have thrown some light on aspects of Jürgen Habermas's notions of manipulation and distorted communication.