Flammable Cities: Urban Conflagration and the Making of the Modern World

18. Fires, Urban Environments, and Politics in Contemporary Jakarta

18 Fires, Urban Environments, and Politics in Contemporary Jakarta J T Destroying the city’s neighborhoods in violent ways, sometimes putting thousands of people on the street, fires have been part of the common urban landscape of Jakarta since colonial times.1 Their unchallenged strength makes them part of the everyday life of the metropolis, suggesting that Jakarta is doomed to experience them repeatedly. They reveal not only the transformations of the urban landscape but also the manner in which the city has developed as a whole. This essay questions the relationships between fires and governance in the city. Fires afford a vantage point from which to view the transformations of the structures of city planning and management over time. They expose how urban environments are controlled, both from a physical angle and with respect to their more political and social aspects. As they are complex phenomena, whose causes and reasons can range from mere accidents to arson, they involve different types of actors and practices (formal, informal, and occult) in the urban arena. Focusing on the fires that have taken place during the period of great transformation of the Indonesia’s capital city—since the mid-1960s up to the twenty-first century—this essay seeks to address the links between the evolving physical urban environment and the political means of governing a metropolis.2 372 It will first analyze the extent of fires in the city in connection with the modernization of the city, then the chronology of neighborhood fires since the 1970s; this will then lead to an assessment of the proposed solutions and reconstruction schemes. Finally, I will show that fires point to an elaborate management of the city, involving not only government officials, but also political parties, the civil society, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and the population. Combining formal and informal practices, the story of uncontrolled fires in Jakarta exposes evolving power struggles in a changing metropolis, from the conflicting views on what a city and its society should be (including its poorer segments of the population) to the more or less informal means to achieve such goals. Fires and Modernity Throughout the history of Jakarta, fires have been a steadily increasing phenomenon. From 150 recorded fires in 1966 (with more than half hitting residential developments and houses), they rose to 500 a year in the 1970s. Since then, there were an average of 700 to 800 fires a year, except in some particularly hot years like 1982, when 1,082 fires occurred in Jakarta, and 1997 with 1,175 outbreaks.3 During the 1960s, they displaced an average of 7,000 people a year, with peaks due to large fires in 1967 (24,617 people lost their homes), in 1971 (20,969 people), or in 1972 (19,000 displaced persons).4 In the 1980s, the figures fell to an average of about 10,000 displaced people a year in Jakarta, but since the 1990s the numbers have risen again well above 20,000 and even 30,000 (34,854 in 1994 and 37,705 in 1997). In the meantime, the population within the city limits went from 2.9 million in the 1961 census, to 4.6 million in 1971, then to 6.5 million in 1980, 8.26 million in 1990, and 9.66 million in 2010, while the metropolitan region (the Jabotabek) numbered more than 25 million inhabitants.5 Fires tend to follow two basic patterns: huge blazes that burn down entire neighborhoods and smaller fires that hit the city regularly. Their most frequent cause is poor electrical connections, in highly flammable environments (53 percent of the fires in 2005, for instance). Next come oil stoves (11 percent), cigarettes (5 percent), and oil lamps (4 percent). These figures, which hint at the pattern of energy supply in Jakarta households, also suggest a certain evolution. For instance, in 1971, oil utensils (stoves and lamps) accounted for 29 percent of fires, whereas electricity was responsible for 28 percent of the blazes. Such percentages remained stable throughout the 1970s, and it was only in the 1980s that the stove- and lamp-related fires declined, whereas electrically induced fires increased. These figures point to a shift not only in the types of fires, but Fires, Urban Environments, and Politics in Contemporary Jakarta 373 also in the overall equipment of Jakarta’s poorer neighborhoods, with the spread of electrical service. The physical environment of Jakarta...