Surabaya, 1945-2010: Neighbourhood, State and Economy in Indonesia's City of Struggle

Chapter 5: Factory to Mall

Factory to Mall 97 97 5 Factory to Mall In the early 1970s the factories of Ngagel Industrial Estate lined the opposite side of the river from Dinoyo. They included the British American Tobacco (BAT) factory, the Unilever toiletries factory, the Bintang Brewery, the Philips-Ralin light globe factory, the Barata machinery factory, the Karet Ngagel rubber factory, the ACCU car battery factory, the Iglas bottle factory, the Bisma diesel generator factory and the Karung sack factory. As a magazine article colourfully depicted in 1970: For the length of the Kali Mas, which forms the western border of this area, all day long the thunderous sounds of gigantic machines roar behind a tall wall [that hides] heavy machinery factories, like … the British American Tobacco factory (BAT), the Unilever soap factory, Ralin and others … It could be said that this industrial area has become the soul of urban Surabaya (LN, 1970: 21). The political importance of the industrial estate had been apparent during the purges of five years earlier, when Lieutenant Colonel Sukotjo performed a thorough ‘retooling’ of the bordering Ngagel kampung, removing communist sympathisers from the posts of ward and neighbourhood representative, replacing them with military personnel and relocating the population of entire wards. In Ngagel’s southeast, the army razed an entire ward, relocating its residents to Dukuh Kupang in Surabaya’s west and replacing them with residents from the ‘red’ kampungs of Joyoboyo and Gubeng Kertajaya, which were levelled to make way for a bus terminal and inner-city commercial buildings (LN, 1970). 98 Surabaya, 1945–2010 After the relocations, the Ngagel area consisted of 124,000 residents spread across 38 wards, each with approximately five neighbourhoods presided over by military officers. As neighbourhood heads, the military officers kept tight control over the thousands of workers who lived in their midst as well as the 100 political prisoners who were relocated to Ngagel after their release from prison in 1970. Before settling in, these ex-prisoners lined up at the offices of their ward representative to pledge allegiance to the Five Principles (Pancasila ) of the nation state and to the obligations of residence in the Ngagel area (LN, 1970: 21–2). The obligations included participation in neighbourhood cleanups and public sporting competitions, such as those staged during the Independence Day celebrations of 1970. Ngagel’s neighbourhood heads then rallied their residents to show off a new-found sense of community consensus and signal an end to the distrust over the feared sackings of workers and the kidnapping of bosses that in the 1960s had driven a wedge between the area’s workers and managers. Over the 1970s, the foreign-funded rehabilitation of the Bintang Brewery and the BAT, Barata, Unilever, PhilipsRalin and Bisma factories gave Ngagel’s residents the sense that they were set for a secure and less troublesome industrial future than had prevailed over the previous decade. Yet, just as these rehabilitations were taking place, the initial Surabaya Master Plan (1972) was finalised, setting out new zoning regulations that would relocate heavy and polluting industries to the urban fringe and marking the beginning of the end of Ngagel Industrial Estate (Dick, 2003: 314, 316). By the mid-1980s, as Dinoyo’s homes and alleyways were being improved, the factories across the river were being pulled down. For the next 20 years, there would be the dismal sight of large vacant lots and abandoned factories. The old industrial working class was gone. In its place, salesgirls, checkout clerks, cleaners and waitresses formed the area’s new workforce as hotels, apartment buildings and malls gradually filled the old industrial estate to meet the demands for conspicuous middle-class consumption. The closure of factories and the opening of multi-storey malls and hotels ended the spectre of working-class militancy, but raised a new spectre of an underworld of drugs and prostitution within the city’s karaoke bars, nightclubs and hotels. Towards the end of the New Order, a violent battle for control of this underworld involved state-sponsored youth groups, soldiers and police, damaging the credibility of the state and unravelling its authority. Factory to Mall 99 The De-industrialisation of Ngagel During the 1970s, industry had expanded most rapidly on the urban fringe as industrialists rushed to take advantage of cheap land around the urban corridor stretching south towards Sidoarjo (Dick, 2003: 305). In 1975, the Surabaya Industrial Estate Rungkut (SIER) was...