Services
Reviews
Indonesia's city of struggle

Indonesia's city of struggle

Kathleen Azali

Divided into ten thematic and chronological chapters, Peters presents an intimate perspective on the changes and the resistance that occurs in Surabaya by tracing the story of three generations of people living in Dinoyo neighbourhood. After giving some background on Surabaya, the reader is then introduced to Dinoyo. The third chapter, “The Purge”, narrates in details the anti-communist purges 1965 through a combination of newspaper archives and oral histories. He describes how the all-out assault, crackdowns, and raids not only claimed thousands of lives, but also created the foundations for a new “urban rehabilitation” land-use pattern, new symbols, new heroes and experts, and new urban plans, that have considerably paralysed Surabaya's revolutionary capacity for political mobilisation and militancy in subsequent years.

The next chapter discusses how after the purge, Surabaya city population in kampung increased by nearly three-fold, and brought about the Kampung Improvement Project (KIP). The project initially started slow, since there was a prevalent fear of being documented and a shortage of experts (many had been killed, jailed, or sacked from their positions during the purge), but over time had implemented a more "participatory approach" involving citizens in building the neighbourhood. Peters then discusses how the area around Dinoyo and Ngagel, which was originally an industrial area (with many factories) then experienced relocation to fringe areas, particularly after the zoning system had been established. Beginning in the late 1980s, there was a speculative boom in hotel and retail space, and by the mid-1990s, jobs in manufacturing sector and “informal” economy (like hawker sellers, rickshaw drivers) began to dwindle, as workers began to shift towards the service sector that grew with the proliferation of malls, hotels, supermarkets, and mini markets.

However, behind this rapidly growing urban economy where beauty and sleekness become preconditions, Peters describes various power relations and underground economy—the low wage, the police and military backing, the high-level business patronage, the intertwined sales promotion girls (SPG) and sex transactions, and various illicit trade related to established institutions and government apparatus. Peters also delved into various popular practices among kampung residents in dealing with the 1998 economic crisis and inflation—for example, kampung-based gambling activities (through pigeon-racing and soccer), prostitution, sorcery (santet), and mental illness. He also demonstrates how Dinoyo’s residents’ participation in street protest has been constrained.

This book is derived from Peters’ dissertation, based on his ethnographic fieldwork in Surabaya in early 1998, a few months before the Reformasi that would occur in various cities and towns in Indonesia. Through his analysis of the so-called informal or illicit activities that are highly networked and based on trust, Peters shows how residents defy, mould, and subvert strictures of rationality at the formal level through their own norms and practices, as continued dialogues of responses between themselves and the state. They respond in a constant play of uncertainties between rejections and relent to formal regulatory regime. At the same time, these are also organised, even institutionalised part of the system, even if they happen under the shadow of formality. Indonesian political studies researches have mostly focused on the formal organisations and the elites, even at local level, and have neglected to study the micropolitics and governmentality of ordinary people (Aspinall 2014: 247). By dedicating a substantial attention observing and analysing the worldviews, structures, and materials of these “informal” activities that Dinoyo residents are engaged in, Peters offers a small but insightful window to the past and present of everyday micropolitics; the similarities, relations, and intersections with the established institutions, and thus poses a challenge to the boundary between formal and informal, licit and illicit.

There are a number of ethnographic studies on kampung in Indonesia that perhaps do not provide an encompassing view of the larger city or town where it is located, but give in-depth, intricate details of everyday life politics of ordinary people in kampung (e.g. Guinness 1986, 2009; Jelinek 1991). This book is definitely not representative of the whole city of Surabaya—the story would be very different at the rapidly developing part of western Surabaya with its many gated communities. But residents of neighbourhood like Dinoyo still make up a substantial proportion of Surabaya and many other cities in Indonesia. Considering the increased shift towards decentralised cities in Indonesia (and perhaps also other nations of global south), Surabaya offers valuable insights and trends, particularly as the second city and one of the main gateways for the rapidly developing eastern part of Indonesia. After more than 15 years since his first ethnographic work in Surabaya, the issues and questions discussed remain as pertinent as ever, if not even more, as we see even more aggressive changes and policy in Surabaya towards the spectacle of a garden city with large-scale development plan, its largest red-light district purged and rehabilitated into a creative industry complex, and worsening traffic jams as public transport continue to deteriorate.

References

Aspinall, Edward (2014). “Researching Indonesian Politics: Three Generations, Three Approaches, and Three Contexts,” in Eric Tagliacozzo (ed.), Producing Indonesia: The State of the Field of Indonesian Studies. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 237-252.

Guinness, Patrick (1986). Harmony and Hierarchy in a Javanese Kampung. Oxford University Press.

Guinness, Patrick (2009). Kampung, Islam, and the State in Urban Java. Singapore: NUS Press.

Jellinek, Lea (1991). The Wheel of Fortune: THe History of a Poor Community in Jakarta. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

Kathleen Azali, C2O library & collabtive (k.azali@c2o-library.net)

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

Robbie Peters
NIAS Press, 2013
978-87-7694-121-5

This is is a remarkable study of urban society in one of Indonesia's main port cities. It views Surabaya from the experiences of the people who occupy its alleyways, riverbanks and muddy roadsides, a group that has had little say in the making of policy or the writing of Indonesia's history. The setting is a crowded low-income neighbourhood (kampung) that lies between the Surabaya River and the city's main southern boulevard. For those who live along this kampung's narrow alleyways, the city can be a violent landscape of exclusion and social asymmetry. From this perspective, Indonesia's landmark events, from the revolution of 1945 and the destruction of the Communist Party in 1965 to contemporary urban renewal and anti-terrorism campaigns, take on a new complexion. Using rich ethnographic details, Robbie Peters describes how kampung residents have survived in the shadow of Indonesia's tumultuous economic growth and political reform and how they have contested government controls over the movement and settlement of people, limiting the state's ability to construct an urban citizenry that excludes newcomers. The kampung alternative is a 'participative' citizenship that embraces new arrivals and draws them into the everyday life of the alleyways, using simple rituals such as death commemorations to 'counter-map' static official representations of neighbourhood and community. Such local practices underpin kampung residents' claim to the alleyways and surrounding streets, where they struggle to maintain the informal economy that helps sustain their lives.

Buy >