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Chapter 4: Improvements
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72 Surabaya, 1945–2010 72 4 Improvements From Indonesia’s gaining of independence in 1950 to the extirpation of the PKI in 1966, Surabaya’s population almost tripled from an estimated 700,000 to almost 2 million. From 1966 to 1970, however , the clearance of squatter settlements and crackdown on itinerants reduced the population by an estimated 500,000, the first population decline since the exodus to the hinterland during the Battle of Surabaya (SSO, 1990: III-20; Dick, 2003: 123). The decline did not last. Between 1970 and 1985 Surabaya’s population resumed its steady increase, placing great stress on housing and infrastructure, especially in inner urban kampungs. In Dinoyo’s sub-district of Tegalsari, population increased by around 60,000, so that the number of people per square kilometre rose by around 50 per cent (SDA, 1984–5: 21; SSO, 1990: III-20). The municipality addressed this problem through the much-publicised Kampung Improvement Programme (KIP).1 The idea of kampung improvement was promoted by Johan Silas, an urban planner whose house, as it happened, backed onto Dinoyo. Silas was able to win over Lieutenant Colonel Sukotjo, whom he had met in the early 1960s while volunteering for a civil guard unit that was overseen by Sukotjo’s Surabaya district command. When they met again during the purges, Sukotjo told Silas, “what 1 A predecessor of this programme was the kampung improvement (kampongverbetering ) projects undertaken in Surabaya by the Dutch colonial administration. Beginning in 1925, these projects had by the end of 1939 achieved improvements to water and sanitation in just under half of Surabaya’s kampungs (Silas, 1982a: 9–11; Dick, 2003: 184–92). Improvements 73 I need is an urban plan”. Yet, the experts most able to devise such a plan were suspected communists and now either dead, jailed or sacked from their posts in the city’s government and university departments. With events moving fast in the later months of 1965, Sukotjo asked Silas to bring together a team of planners to draft a Surabaya Master Plan. Announced in December 1965, the plan became the basis for absorbing a denser population into the city’s kampungs (Surabaya Post, 9 Dec. 1965). Motivated by the idea of kampung preservation rather than eradication, and using Jakarta as his counter-model, Silas exhorted with the phrase “hands off our kampungs” and aimed to conserve three times as many kampungs as Jakarta by directing development funds into the repair and widening of alleyways rather than roads and by securing rights of tenure for kampung residents.2 In 1967, Silas won his first and most significant victory when he convinced Sukotjo not to relocate the informal settlement at Table 4.1 Population estimates for Surabaya Municipality, 1944–70 Year Population 1944 579,860 1946 208,889 1948 424,332 1950 714,898 1952 921,035 1954 926,471 1956 926,471 1958 1,135,288 1960 1,318,930 1962 1,461,881 1964 1,760,161 1966 1,895,056 1968 1,933,202 1970 1,518,352 Source: SSO (1990): III-20. 2 In contrast, Jakarta’s mayor from 1966 to 1977, Ali Sadikin, attempted to enforce a ‘closed city’ and directed most of his city’s kampung improvement efforts into the building and maintenance of roads rather than kampung alleyways and sanitation (Jellinek, 1991: 63; Murray, 1991: 14, 22). [18.232.188.122] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:59 GMT) 74 Surabaya, 1945–2010 Banyu Urip from the Chinese graveyard. Silas challenged Sukotjo with the pointed question: “Do you want to remove the living or the dead?” The logic was clear to Sukotjo, and, by what Silas called “the stroke of a pen” rather than the barrel of a gun, a decree was signed to relocate the graveyard and secure the land tenure of its squatters. With the decree signed and the graveyard moved, Silas had set an example for how to manage Surabaya’s low-income settlements (Silas, 1988a; MGS, 1993: 62).3 The Banyu Urip example of preservation rather than eradication did not immediately lead to any change of policy elsewhere in the city. Throughout the second half of the 1960s, the clearance of ‘disruptive ’ kampungs was the main element in urban development strategy , as Silas (1982a: 15) explained: By the middle of the 1960s the situation of the low-income population had become critical … This could be seen in the appearance of various squatter settlements along both large and small canals...