Driving in Teluk Naga, North Jakarta feels like shiratal al-mustaqim. A long, straight line full of bumpy roads, tidal water filling the hole, and segregation on both sides of the road. I was amazed by a two-meter-tall concrete wall that divides the haves and have-nots, kampung and gated community. Instead of connecting suburbs to existing roads, private developers prefer to build a bridge that conceals the reality underground rather than improving the infrastructure for all.
The straight road to the fishing pond that I went to with my family is called Pipe Street. it is called that as a reference to the Pertamina’s, state-owned oil company, pipeline that exists underneath the road. The landscape along the road was surreal, looking like a post-apocalypse settlement where humans try to feed their family with the already depleted resources in the rough environment full of abandoned houses and litter. Yet just behind the wall that circumambulates the road, it was a paradise. Pantai Indah Kapuk (PIK) that is built on the ruins of an informal settlement is a place where Indonesian upper class can leisure with premium bars and restaurants, live in the ivory towers, and see white beaches without disturbed by ‘unsavoury lower class’.
Two worlds that co-exist in the same area demonstrate Indonesia’s high inequality and its approach to redevelopment. Without looking at statistics, the urban landscape pronounces inequality more clearly yet subtly. It was two different visions of the Indonesian future that I saw. One that is owned by the upper class, who accumulate land, labor, and capital, lives in the private neighborhood. Others that are dispossessed, work for wage, and marginalized survive in the kampung settlement. Both in the suburban and informal settlements, there is no state that plays the role of governance as if anything is delegated to private enterprises and community self-reliance. Or perhaps the government intentionally sided with the private enterprise in informalizing from above? As Roy in Urban Informality (2005) stated, informality is deregulated, rather than unregulated; managed by the state deliberately. When seeing walled development, I think Roy is right that in the neoliberal era, private developers are given free range to kick poor people from the land and produce a segregated urban landscape.
Pipe Street crisscrossed with PIK’s streets in the map, yet it is not connected. Instead, all the road systems in PIK are above the pipe street, bridging the exclusive area with one another without trying to hide who it serves. As if Pipe Street is a relic that can be seen from above and far from the well-off to teach their kids to not end up as the fishermen below. From the pipe street, well-offs are seen as distant observers who intend to wipe out the street. Whenever roads that intersect each other, yet unconnected, exist, it is a mark of segregation that deliberately tries to alienate the poor from the rich.
I learned the tactics of segregation when I was in Tanzania. One time I saw my friend’s house; it was next to the local shacks. But he does not live in the shack; he lives in the mansion (an American dream house with a pool) and a security guard that is ready to take down any burglar or trespasser with guns. The fence is as tall as the eyes can see. It made me think of a theory. Where there is a fence, there is inequality. The taller the fence is, the more unequal the society is. A society with a fence is a society that is insecure, for which the fence separates the haves and have-nots. It is a society that prefers to secure the rich rather than invest in the poor for a better life.
To my surprise, my Tanzanian observation can be seen in Indonesia. It was in PIK, or Teluk Naga, depending on which side you stand, that fences divide the have and have-not. Teluk Naga looks more like a Bantustan on which it is an unfinished patchwork of ‘redevelopment,’ cut and placed discontinuously by PIK. Fence has transformed the fishing village into a segregated informal compound waiting for its removal. While PIK is developed and uninterrupted, it eats Teluk Naga alive.
Ungrateful, private developers let the roads, like Pipe Street, be destroyed and bumpy while isolating it from their own roads. They ironically utilize roads like Pipe streets, which are built by the government, for their heavy-loaded trucks that dominate the landscape, without bearing any responsibility for the streets’ usage. Developers’ trucks that bring construction materials to PIK use Teluk Naga’s road system. Even though PIK has their own slick road system that is connected to highways, they prefer to use kampung roads. PIK streets are for the private users to drive their fast cars, not for construction trucks. Because they deliberately know that construction trucks will wreck their expensive streets, why don’t they then use streets that are not owned by us? Private developers are free from any responsibility while kampung residents bear the prices of destructed roads.
It is an inequality that they constructed, not inclusive development. Redevelopment that only beautifies certain areas while ignoring the rest is doomed to rest on unstable relationships that give rise to a deep resentment on the side of the marginalized. In the future, it could backfire when there is political instability. The 1998 riot has told us something: that once the Pandora’s box has been opened, fires from below will be hard to extinguish. For the sake of beachview, building on the sand is not the wisest deed, as it is prone to the tsunami, literally and figuratively.
