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Introduction 1 1 1 Introduction: City and Country Outside the Surabaya zoo, a few kilometres south of the central business district, stands a statue of the city’s coat of arms, a shark and crocodile locked in battle. Symbolising bravery against danger, the statue addresses everyone coming from the south on entry to the city’s main thoroughfare, Darmo Boulevard.1 Behind the street-front mansions of this broad tree-lined boulevard and housing around 10,000 people, the low-income settlement (kampung) of Dinoyo lies hidden, a narrow alleyway providing the only point of entry. Dinoyo is hemmed in to the west by Darmo Boulevard, to the east by Surabaya ’s main river, the Kali Mas,2 and to the north and south by the garden suburbs built after the levelling of surrounding kampungs in the 1920s. Hemmed in and subdued by the street, Dinoyo struggles for recognition amidst a metropolis seemingly dominated by traffic. 1 There are several hypotheses about the meaning of this symbol (see Frederick, 1978: 22n). In 1975, the above explanation was made official through a municipal government decree (No. 64/WK/75) issued by the mayor after consultation with a team of local historians (DPRD, 2011). The historians determined 31 May 1293 as the day a Javanese army defeated a Mongol invasion near Surabaya and that this event should mark the “birth date” of Surabaya and explain the symbol’s connotations of combat, bravery and danger. In linguistic terms, suro in the Javanese language can mean “brave” or can refer to a mythical shark-like fish. The word boyo means “crocodile”, while the similar-sounding Indonesian/Malay word bahaya means “danger”. With these meanings, “Surabaya” can mean “brave in the face of danger” (berani menghadapi bahaya). 2 Translating literally as “Golden River”, the Kali Mas is a brown and muddy tributary that feeds into the sea from East Java’s major river, the Brantas. 2 Surabaya, 1945–2010 A crowded city bus plies the Darmo Boulevard route past Dinoyo for Rp2,500 (US$0.25) per journey. As the bus hurtles past Dinoyo, the conductor yells out the next stops, beggars stand reading poems about their poverty in exchange for a spare coin, and passengers cling silently to seats and handrails. Four kilometres farther north the bus passes Tunjungan Plaza, where the road forks into two, forcing northward-bound passengers to alight and continue on foot around the century-old Hotel Majapahit. Photos decorate the hotel’s interior, preserving the symbolic beginning of the Battle of Independence on 18 September 1945, when people hailing from adjacent kampungs crowded the street while a few of them climbed the rooftop flagpole and tore off the blue colour from its Dutch flag, leaving the Indonesian red and white. Yet, in ironic contrast with this heroic narrative, kampung people are now barred from the hotel by security guards and the prohibitive cost of a night’s stay, which starts at US$120 — the equivalent of a month’s minimum wages in the city. From the hotel, the road continues north to the most iconic monument of struggle — the Heroes’ Monument (Tugu Pahlawan), honouring the thousands of people who died fighting against the invasion of the city by occupying British-Indian troops in November 1945. A modernist monolith, the monument towers triumphantly over a streetscape that now almost conforms to the order of highmodern design. Only the occasional stall on the surrounding footpaths disrupts this sense of order. Mobile and easy to dismantle, the rickety stall befits a city where police sledgehammers and eviction notices clear the footpaths of street traders. West of the Heroes’ Monument is a more recent and unintended monument formed by the burned-out ruins of what was once eastern Indonesia’s largest traditional market, Pasar Turi. Once known for its bustle, Pasar Turi succumbed to an arson attack in mid-2007. The market is now a quiet place, attracting the odd curious visitor seeking a glimpse of the few stubborn traders refusing to abandon the ruins to developers by relocating to a new mall that stands in the background. The alleyway and boulevard, beggar and exclusive hotel, flimsy street stall and towering monument, burned-out market and new mall invite a reading of the city as a place of contrasts. These contrasts form a narrative in which a submerged experience of the city struggles for recognition in the shadows of an endorsed official version . As the city’s coat of...

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