Anak Warakanyaka
Inhabiting the Street as Interior Practice

In Jakarta, the street is not only used as a space for movement. In this city of ten million^[1], 20% live in densely populated urban kampungs that use the street to escape from their crowded living arrangements to do domestic pursuits^[2]. Furthermore, 350.000 others operate as street vendors^[3] and contribute up to £950 million to the city economy per year^[4]. Despite those significances, both central and provincial governments outlaw street activities other for the means of transport. This move has been taken to make way for a modern image of the city. Four different laws condemn the presence of street inhabitations, specifically targeting street vendors, buskers, the homeless, beggars, and car wipers. This criminalisation jeopardises many livelihoods, making them targets of raids and evictions carried out by the Satpol PP, the Jakarta municipal police unit. Those attacks threaten and limit the movement of informal street activities. Furthermore, the inhabitants are also exposed to the corrupt officials who demanded illegal retributions in exchange for protection to operate in the streets. It is estimated that Jakarta’s street vendors alone paid up to £20.5 million per year for illegitimate protection fees^[5].

Most government policies about urban planning are oriented toward modernising Indonesia, which translates into absorbing everything ‘western’. This attitude to urban planning frames street inhabitation, which falls outside the canons of design, as practice with no intellectual preconception, hence having no cultural value nor meaning. This research argues that not only the citizens appropriating the street using interior practice know-how, street inhabitation also has a considerable socio-cultural impact on its surroundings. By organising various street inhabitation into a typology, this research aims to disclose its alternative spatial structures and mechanisms that make it an essential aspect of Jakarta’s urban fabric. Typology of actions is used to understand situation-based space that relies on everyday tactics and has no fixed shape. With the emphasis on actions, this form of convention focuses on grasping the intimate properties of space such as body and objects to device conceptual types of street inhabitation.

Initially, theory exploration of interiorisation is needed in this research to determine the dimensions of the typology. These dimensions are used to classify the cases gathered from digital news outlets and geo-tagged social media posts. Aside from acting as alternatives from a limited number of formal studies and government reports, these underrated resources also reveal the mundane stories and articulate the everyday practices that shape the meaning of the urban environment. Types are also identified from fieldwork to Jakarta. This step is taken to calibrate the types resulting from investigating digital materials and reach a holistic understanding of street inhabitation’s creative agency. Through all these processes, the dimensions continue to develop, resulting in an open-ended definition of types. These types are expected to be instrumental tools that can assist a more sympathetic approach in urban planning that involves Jakarta inhabitants from different backgrounds and financial incomes. Eventually, understanding Jakarta’s alternative stories might richen and broaden the general perspective of how to inhabit the city. The research’s framework is also expected to become applicable in addressing other objectives involving urban informal activities in other places.

Keywords: Jakarta, street inhabitation, interiorisation, typology of action

References

^[1] Statistic Indonesia, Hasil Sensus Penduduk 2020 Provinsi DKI Jakarta (Berita Resmi Statistik No. 5/01/31/Th. XXIII, 22 Januari 2021).

^[2] UN-Habitat, 'Summary of City Case Studies', in Global Report on Human Settlements 2003, The Challenge of Slums (London: Earthscan, 2003), 195-228.

^[3] Ian Douglas Wilson, ‘“The Streets Belong to Who?”: “Governance” and the Urban Informal Sector in Jakarta, Indonesia’, in The Elephant In The Room: Politics And The Development Problem (Perth: Asian Research Centre, Murdoch University, 2010), 113–33.

^[4] Hendrina Pattiradjawane, Marita Schnepf-Orth, and Sergej Stoetzer, Negotiating Informal Urban Spaces. Female Cake Vendors at the Pasar Kue Subuh Senen Night Market in Jakarta, Indonesia (Darmstadt: Technische Universität Darmstadt, 2013).

^[5] (Wilson 2010)