Jakarta Gotong Royong design competition winners

The International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR) 2009, in collaboration with Ikatan Arsitek Indonesia (Indonesian Institute of Architects Jakarta chapter), has announced the winners of the 'gotong royong city' competition, which asked for individuals to submit ideas on envisioning the future of Jakarta, Indonesia. See article on designboom here.

Some of these ideas are quite mind-blowing!!! My favorite are the watershed stuff (of course)




















and the pangkalan ojek/motorbike pods.















The entries raised many critical issues in a city whose quality of life is impoverished by a dire lack of safe public spaces and green amenities, frustrating and unproductive traffic jams, yearly floods that go up to the waist, and a stark contrast and segregation between the opulent gated communities with golf courses, club houses, and swimming pools mostly for Chinese people and expats and the kampung/urban village communities where the mostly working class inhabitants sometimes live without basic infrastructure (sanitation, drinking water, electricity, garbage collection, etc). I applaud the competition organizers and design entries for activating discussions around these issues of inequity, planning, and sustainability.



















However, I have to say that the designs generally seem quite superficial. I wonder if they represent the perspective of the expatriate romantic idea of "gotong royong" (roughly equivalent to "pitching in," "working together," or even, in planning-speak, "community engagement"). The voices I hear are very real, but I think from the perspective of people who have lived in other countries and seen what is possible and what Jakarta could really be. But I don't hear the voices of the motorcyclist who has to breathe down the diesel soot as he is stuck in a jam behind a public bus on the way to work.

Although citywide intervention is necessary, I think the scale of change needs to be much smaller to genuinely engage with everyday problems that people face, that people probably have a LOT to tell the planners about, that - dare I say - people themselves can be empowered to do something about. These designs make me wonder if the appropriate approach would be a more modular one which allows for some real "gotong royong" in coming up with specific solutions to specific areas. No doubt that this raises larger, more structural questions about institutional capacity, governance, and education systems that are probably way beyond this competition.

Thanks, Liz @pleatfarmer for sharing on Twitter!