Decentring and Diversifying Southeast Asian Studies: Perspectives from the Region

11 Architecture, Indonesia and Making Sense of the New Order: Notes and Reflections from My Student Years

11 Architecture, indonesiA And MAking sense of the new order notes and reflections from My student Years Abidin Kusno More than twenty years ago, discussing the culture of Indonesian research in North America, Benedict Anderson pointed out that scholars are not only experts in their fields, but they are also members of their particular societies.1 Anderson indicates the importance of the institutional contexts and sociohistorical conditions within which knowledge is produced. Today, Anderson’s point applies as much to American scholars as to us, students of Indonesia who are situated (to a certain degree) in the West, and yet are still part of the cultural order of the place we come from. Indonesia is a product of both my experience as its national subject and my understanding of it through engaging with knowledge and ideas obtained largely from the Western academy. Yet Indonesia is also a place where we encounter the limits both of our concept and our subjectivity. In this sense, the country is not merely an object of analysis for scientific or theoretical inquiry, but also a place to engage with the question of how we have become who we are. For such an orientation, premises and theories are tools to be used, modified, and transformed. They are important in so far as they help us to engage with the place. Architecture, Indonesia and Making Sense of the New Order 261 In the end, regardless of where we are from and currently at, through our work, we are involved in the appropriation of theories and the construction of ourselves and the places within which we are (or were once) located. In this mutual framing of knowledge, power, and subjectivity, few experiences are as difficult and as rewarding to reflect on as those from our student years. For it is then that we encountered the material place, the interdisciplinary field, and the institutions that, in my own case, shaped both my subjectivity and Indonesia. to enter: JAkArtA I was born in Medan the same year Soeharto came into power.2 My family moved to Surabaya when I was sixteen. After completing high school I entered an architecture school and, soon after graduation in 1989, went to work in the capital city as a junior designer for a major Japanese construction firm in Jakarta. For a youngster, a starting career in one of the most important Japanese construction companies was a glorious invitation to become a perfect middle-class citizen of the New Order. It gave a feeling that the city and the nation were doing just fine, on the way to fulfilling its aspiration to become a developed country. The proliferation of new buildings, highways, and new towns in the capital city could confirm nothing other than the achievement of “development”.3 In the early 1990s, the march of “development” was already undeniably clear in Jakarta. The daily commute from my parents’ house at the corner of northwest Jakarta to the office in the Golden Triangle of Central Jakarta offered a daily rite of confirmation that the city was rapidly moving upward and outward. There were many mega-constructions in the city of Jakarta. Several new towns had already grown rather uncontrollably, and shopping malls continued to pop up along the main streets and flyovers of the city. The several projects I encountered on my office’s drawing board further confirmed a bright future for the city — if “development” is measured conveniently by the spectacular appearances of more and more skyscrapers of international stature. In every respect, Jakarta was new to me. Perhaps this is what has made the city appear at once hopeful and terrifying, alienating and inspiring. I had never seen or experienced the effects of such a scale of development, the incredible volume of motor vehicles and new tall buildings, and the very visible sight of poverty in the city. This was a city that was clearly far more disorienting, and also far richer, as well as poorer, than Surabaya and Medan. The drawings in my office and the development of the cityscape outside the 262 Abidin Kusno window were all absorbing, but the existence of police, thugs, vendors, and squatter settlements everywhere was also undeniably clear. Like thousands of others, I was a new migrant trying to find a place in the city without the capacity to make sense of it. Furthermore, I had inexplicable fears of the tension that existed in...