Jakarta – In a slum of West Java's Kiaracondong district, hundreds of families live on the border of death. With their shacks just an arm's length from the railroad tracks, husbands, wives and children are at risk each time a train rumbles through.

Accidents happen, after all, and there is no telling when the next derailment – which could lead to a train ramming straight into the houses – will be, or when a child will stray onto the tracks and into the path of an oncoming train.

But as more and more rural migrants flock to cities across the country, impoverished urban communities are rising up in places that offer only the most precarious of living conditions.

According to the Urban Poor Consortium (UPC), slumdwellers now make up 39 percent of the population of Jakarta. In Bandung, the figure is 52 percent. Fernandez, a worker with the UPC, says these numbers alone should prompt the government to make room for the urban poor in its development plans. "Gone is the practice of displacing poor people," she says. "They should be included in the development process."

So far, however, officials have not done anything to ease the housing crunch. In the meantime, Indonesian slumdwellers are trying to make the most out of almost nothing.

The 1997 regional economic crisis, which forced tens of thousands of Indonesians out of work, has swelled the ranks of the unemployed and worsened the conditions of the urban poor. And although Asia has generally recovered from the slump, the recovery has been uneven, with Indonesia lagging behind, says the Asian Development Bank.

At the Kiaracondong railway community, families live in houses that total about 12 square meters each. They buy 50-liter cans of potable water for 200 rupiahs (two cents) and keep clean at the public MCKs – bathing, washing and toilet facilities – that all have a manual water pump. Three of the 20 MCKs were set up the local government while the rest were built by the residents themselves.

For electricity, the houses are hooked up to the legal connections of nearby well-to-do homes. Railway residents say each of the better-off homes can "serve" seven to 10 slum households at a time, charging about 5,000 rupiah (70 cents) each a month.

The land occupied by the slumdwellers is actually owned by the state train company. No one knows for sure if the company is charging the people living there, but residents say they do pay "occupation" fees. Ahyar, 41, who says he inherited the house he is living in from his parents, remarks: "All I know is that I have to pay some money to our village head every year. They said it was for the space I used."

To cover all these expenses, most of the families in this community have at least one member driving a pedicab. According to Sahdi, a 43-year-old father of four, they hire the pedicabs from local businessmen. After forking over the "hire fee," he says, a pedicab driver can still manage to take home about 5,000 to 10,000 rupiah (70 cents to $1.40) a day.

Sahdi sounds unconcerned when asked about the safety of his children, especially his two boys aged 7 and 5, who spend most of the day playing by the side of the tracks. He says: "My children and other children here know when the train will come. Nobody has been hit by a passing train."

Aman, a longtime resident of the nearby Sukapura village, says there was once a wire security fence running parallel to the tracks that kept people out. But as more people came in the area, the wide empty space between the fence and the tracks soon found itself hosting huts of families. As years passed, the fence itself disappeared.

Verania, a researcher at the AKATIGA Center for Social Analysis, says two factors made it possible for such an unsafe public space to be "converted" into a residential community. "For one," she says, "the state train company is understaffed so it doesn't have people to control the huge empty spaces along the tracks in Java. For another, local authorities let the slums in because they got money from the residents."

She says riverbanks in cities that are supposed to be open public spaces are seeing the same thing happening. These spaces are under the jurisdiction of a local water authority. Houses in the riverside communities, however, are designed to be "portable," so that families can easily relocate them when the river overflows during the rainy season.

Says Aisyah, a 46-year-old riverside resident: "Whenever floods come, we just take our things, dismantle this house and move to higher places. When the water subsides, we return and set up the house again." Unlike those living beside railway tracks, riverside residents do not have MCKs to use. Instead, the river itself is their toilet and laundry.

Verania says that cemeteries in the cities have yet to be overrun by living occupants. But she adds that it may only be a matter of time before that happens. As it is, there are already cemeteries that have shacks on the fringes. "The process is a bit similar," she says. "At the first stage, they occupy margins of the cemetery compounds. In time, they will move forward to the center."