Louis Plottel – "They treated us like animals! Even when you move a chicken or a dog, you set up a temporary cage first," exclaimed Hasan as he watched his home, along with the homes and workspaces of dozens of others, be razed to the ground in North Jakarta's Sunter Agung neighbourhood in 2019.
Setiyo, a neighbour, shook his head, recalling the days of authoritarian rule: "People said we are in a time of reformasi, but it feels just like Suharto's era. They [the government's forces] came with arms and weapons like they wanted to go to war." The previous day had seen violent clashes as residents scrambled to shield their homes and workplaces from demolition by government authorities.
The North Jakarta Deputy Mayor said the demolition was needed to restore the waterway's flow, prevent flooding, and make way for a jogging track to create a more "friendly and healthy" environment. An offer of relocation to public housing in Marunda, a neighbourhood two hours away by public transport, was rejected by many residents, who feared the move would cost them their communities and livelihoods as used goods sellers. With nowhere else to go, some evicted residents constructed makeshift shelters just across the street.
Just a few kilometres away, however, the story unfolded differently. Families across Muara Angke's kampung – self-built settlements of low-income residents, often without secure land or infrastructure but bound by strong social ties – still live with broken drains and under constant threat of eviction. By contrast, residents of Kampung Akuarium, demolished in 2016, fought successfully to have their neighbourhood rebuilt as a state-backed, community-designed vertical kampung.
The contrasting fates of these communities are not anomalies, but the rule. Jakarta's informal settlements have been built on unstable political ground throughout Indonesia's history, from independence through the authoritarian New Order regime, and into post-reformasi democracy. Government responses consistently swing between eviction and embrace of informal residents, swayed by a complex interplay of interests, power, and narratives. I call this pattern "discretionary urbanism": a way of governing the city through selective enforcement and shifting application of rules. This ambiguity is less about weak institutions than political strategy. Urban development in Jakarta works not despite such inconsistency but because of it, allowing informality to persist while giving elites room to pursue power, profit, or prestige.
But in the democratic era, another force is coming into play. The opening of political opportunities has led to a rise in grassroots activism, allowing communities to adopt what urban scholar Faranak Miraftab calls "insurgent planning" – bottom-up interventions that bypass and contest state-led development by creating alternative infrastructures and governance models. Their tactics include forging political contracts with gubernatorial candidates, forming cooperatives to secure land, and even rebuilding their own neighbourhoods with self-managed systems for waste disposal, sanitation, and environmental protection. Through insurgent planning tactics like these, Jakarta's marginalised citizens are no longer merely surviving the system but reshaping the city from the ground up, proving that when they are united, their communities are far from powerless.
My doctoral research explored why and how Jakarta's discretionary urbanism shapes the fate of informal settlements. Prevailing theories often assume a uniform logic of global capitalist expansion, elite capture, or colonial legacies that inevitably displace the poor. Jakarta's reality is far more contradictory, swinging between coercion, neglect, and care. To unravel this puzzle, I combined historical analysis, ethnography, and comparisons across regimes, leaderships, and neighbourhoods. I conducted fourteen months of archival research, fieldwork in five kampung, interviews, and media analysis. I found that the outcomes are shaped as much by leaders' political interests, the power of community organising, and competing public narratives as by structural pressures. Rather than passive spaces of exclusion, informal settlements emerge as arenas where authority is contested, and urban futures are actively negotiated.
Informality as a reality
Jakarta's informal settlements are living examples of the complexities of urbanisation sweeping across Southeast Asia. As cities like Bangkok, Manila and Jakarta continue to expand, millions of people are funnelled into informal neighbourhoods that lack essential services yet power the urban economy. In Indonesia, nearly a third of the urban population – about 30.4 percent in 2018 – live in slums, informal settlements, or inadequate housing, with around three million residents in Greater Jakarta lacking basic infrastructure. Despite their vital contributions to the labour force and city life, these communities confront evictions and neglect, impacted by arbitrary government responses.
Informality is positioned in contrast to the "formal", particularly in relation to state regulations and bureaucratic systems. Hernando de Soto argued that the informal economy represents the people's spontaneous and creative response to the government's failure to meet their basic needs. But government actions also shape the emergence of informal settlements – and in many cases, informality is partly by design.
When rule of law is weak, after all, local leaders like governors or mayors wield wide discretion, often prioritising their vested interests over consistent application of policy. Responses to informal settlements by Indonesian governments reflect this: when settlements align with leaders' priorities they may be tacitly allowed or even encouraged, but when they are seen as obstacles to economic development or modernisation, local authorities may resort to violent evictions.
Informal by design
In the early years of Indonesia's independence, informal settlements emerged not merely as a consequence of urbanisation but as a direct result of government policies. During the transition from Dutch rule to independence after the Second World War, both the central Indonesian government and the Jakarta administration played a crucial role in shaping these settlements.
Initially, the Jakarta government embraced informal land occupation as a form of resistance against colonial rule. During the chaos of the Indonesian Revolution and the subsequent Dutch reoccupation, local authorities encouraged citizens to squat on land to undermine Dutch governance. Jakarta's then mayor, Sudiro (1953-1960), recalled this strategy in his memoir, where he disclosed that the Indonesian leaders themselves "on purpose... incite the people, to occupy empty lands, regardless of who owns the land." A lack of enforcement of property rights further allowed squatters to establish homes on contested lands. My archival research uncovered a letter sent to Sudiro by residents of Central Jakarta's Salemba Tegalan neighbourhood, who explained that they had occupied the land and built houses as a "compulsory act... with the intention of destroying and complicating the development plans of Gemeente Batavia" by the Allied army. Driven by the political turmoil, these actions inadvertently contributed to an informal urban sprawl.
As the Jakarta government grappled with a housing crisis worsened by rapid urban migration, discriminatory and counterproductive housing policies were introduced that further fuelled the expansion of informal settlements. Public housing was primarily allocated to civil servants and the military, while development projects favoured the upper middle class. Affordable housing schemes or land price controls were absent, while kampung were excluded from the supervision of the Housing Affairs Office. As a result, the poor had little option but to construct their own homes on vacant land. The administration's failure to provide adequate housing and its intentional neglect of low-income communities directly contributed to the proliferation of informal settlements throughout the city.
Under Sukarno, prestige projects were prioritised over public welfare. Major modernisation initiatives, such as the construction of Jakarta's landmark National Monument (Monas) and infrastructure for the 1962 Asian Games, led to the widespread displacement of long-term residents in the inner city. Poorly executed relocation strategies pushed residents to occupy informal land, as many chose to remain near the source of their livelihoods rather than relocate far from their communities.
Sukarno claimed that prioritising the poor was equal to opposing broader national interests, illustrating the disconnect between the state's ambitions and the reality of urban poverty. In a 1965 speech to parliament, he scoffed: "There is a leader who says don't demolish illegal huts, we must remember the poor people! What kind of leader is this, they only remember the interests of that person, that group of people!" Here, Sukarno pitted the poor against the national interest, framing evictions as necessary for progress. Thus, what began as a tactic of resistance and state-building laid the groundwork for a city where informality remains both a survival strategy for the poor and a tool of power for elites.
Shifting motives and policies of the New Order
Discretionary urbanism persisted even under the high-ranking military officers appointed to lead Jakarta under the New Order regime (c1967-1998). Some governors combined evictions, neglect, and improvement schemes, their choices shaped primarily by immediate political and economic priorities. In short, local leaders even in an authoritarian regime retained agency in deciding which "hands of the state" they would move.
One of the best-remembered governors of this period, Ali Sadikin (1966-1977), employed an ambidextrous approach by pairing mass evictions with distributive initiatives like the Kampung Improvement Program. Sadikin's dual strategy arose from a vision of Jakarta as a modern international city attractive to investors, while also tackling housing shortages. Kompas reported in September 1969 that thousands of households were cleared during his tenure, even as unprecedented funds were channelled into kampung upgrading.
Sadikin justified this contradiction by invoking fear and hope. In a 1971 interview with Kompas, he warned Jakarta risked becoming "a second Calcutta" if slums were left unchecked, adding it was better to "sacrifice several thousand now" to save millions in the future. In a 1969 speech, he argued that an "orderly and healthy kampung" would make residents more productive. These dual framing legitimised evictions while allowing the government to project a benevolent image through its improvement schemes.
Source: https://www.newmandala.org/insurgent-planning-versus-discretionary-urbanism-in-jakarta