After the New Order: Space, Politics, and Jakarta

Chapter 5. The Coast and the Last Frontier

97 Chapter 5 The Coast and the Last Frontier We are all seaman here, we have sailed the seven seas with astronomical maps. What will Sukab gain by staring a thousand times at the twilight and moon? . . . Sukab is crazy! He has been crazy since whenever! In this kampung, there has never been a house on stilts facing the coast. Never before and never now and never should there be such thing in the future. Everyone in this kampung is bounded by tradition. Look, all the houses on stilts here turn their back on the coast. They face the streets instead. Why suddenly should there be a house facing the coast? —Seno Gumira Ajidarma, Sepotong Senja untuk Pacarku, 62, 65 The theme of the previous chapter was Jakarta’s expansion into the periurban fringe, which served at least three functions: to attract industry and laborers, to control the population and provide security for the capital city, and to create a new citizenry. Through the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the development zone was made available for private investors to invest and to develop into series of privately organized, and thus secured, new towns for industries and residences. Based on the principle of large public-private partnership in urban land development and management, this new space at the fringe absorbed the burden of population growth in Jakarta. While the technocrats’ mission, the developers’ interest, and the state’s vision might have differed, their views on matters of national development meshed well. For instance, the first major consortium, Bumi Serpong Damai (BSD), consisted of ten real estate companies and was formed “to establish a selfcontained new town” about thirty kilometers southwest of Jakarta. Jo Santoso, 98 after the new order one of the BSD’s senior planners described the rationale behind the project in 1988: One of the most important results of the modernization process is the increasing urban population, especially the genesis of the middle- and lowincome classes. These groups of people are basically looking for a new living environment which conforms more to their new lifestyles. The BSD’s new city project can be seen as an attempt to realize the dream of creating a new living environment that is able to accommodate the new middle class’s prerequisites for a higher standard of life.1 However, such aspirations did not last long. In less than ten years, the inland expansion in the form of periurbanization had reached its limit. Traffic gridlock, transport crises, the disappearance of green spaces, shortage of land and infrastructure provision, and neglect of housing for low-income residents were all signs of the failure of the periurban project to sustain national development . There seems to be no remedy to these problems; indeed, as if in an effort to forget their existence, President Suharto issued Presidential Instruction No. 52/1995 to create Jakarta anew. The hitherto neglected coastal area of Jakarta was brought back to life to represent this ambitious national undertaking. Although the periurban expansion was falling out of favor, the forces that brought it into being hardly disappeared; they were instead rechannelled toward a once abandoned area to create a new waterfront city. This chapter continues the theme of spatial expansion but focuses on the late 1990s and the early 2000s to show the incorporation of the once neglected coastal area, which became seen as the last frontier for the exploitation of urban resources in the discourses of city- and national-building. It also outlines how such a project triggered popular protests around the idea of environment that eventually became a central component of political struggle in the post-Suharto era, a development that is also taken up by the next chapter. The Coast In Indonesia, the word “coast” (pantai) has various meanings and associations , including mythical aspirations for connection, integration, and expansion . It recalls the pre-national “oceanic feeling” of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Rim and a time when the maritime polity united all the islands and waters in the region.2 Coastal cities are often also associated with the diaspora, with migrants and trading communities that have been instrumental in integrating various port cities in the region with the tanah sebrang (overseas) from the coast and the last frontier 99 where they have come and to where they might (never) return.3 In Arus Balik (The Reversed Current), an epic novel by Pramoedya Ananta Toer...