Undoing ruination in Jakarta: the gendered remaking of life on a wasted landscape

Abstract

This intervention shares images and stories from the women evictees in Jakarta who collectively give voice to the psychic, physical, and material injuries inflicted by state dispossession in the city. Engaging Ann Laura Stoler's (2013) language to expose the politics of ruination and preservation, we illustrate the gendered nature of the remaking of life on the most wasted of urban landscapes. The focus of this piece is Kampung Akuarium, a neighborhood violently evicted in April 2016 as part of a broader evictions regime in Jakarta under the governorship of Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, popularly known as Ahok. In the aftermath, Kampung Akuarium became the most restive of Jakarta's landscapes as residents returned to make claims for justice and compensation, and to remake their lives directly on the rubble of their old homes in defiance of the city government. Flanked by the preserved warehouses of the VOC, the ruined neighbourhood ultimately became a site where colonial histories, state- and capital-inflicted expropriation and ruination, and gendered forms of injury and struggle all found material modes of expression alongside one another.

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International Feminist Journal of Politics
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Undoing ruination in Jakarta: the gendered
remaking of life on a wasted landscape
Lisa Tilley, Juanita Elias & Lena Rethel
To cite this article: Lisa Tilley, Juanita Elias & Lena Rethel (2017): Undoing ruination in Jakarta:
the gendered remaking of life on a wasted landscape, International Feminist Journal of Politics,
DOI: 10.1080/14616742.2017.1364907
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Published online: 06 Sep 2017.
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CONVERSATIONS
Undoing ruination in Jakarta: the gendered remaking of
life on a wasted landscape
Lisa Tilley, Juanita Elias and Lena Rethel
Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
ABSTRACT
This intervention shares images and stories from the women evictees in Jakarta who
collectively give voice to the psychic, physical, and material injuries inflicted by state
dispossession in the city. Engaging Ann Laura Stoler’s (2013) language to expose the
politics of ruination and preservation, we illustrate the gendered nature of the
remaking of life on the most wasted of urban landscapes. The focus of this piece is
Kampung Akuarium, a neighborhood violently evicted in April 2016 as part of a
broader evictions regime in Jakarta under the governorship of Basuki Tjahaja
Purnama, popularly known as Ahok. In the aftermath, Kampung Akuarium became
the most restive of Jakarta’s landscapes as residents returned to make claims for
justice and compensation, and to remake their lives directly on the rubble of their
old homes in defiance of the city government. Flanked by the preserved
warehouses of the VOC, the ruined neighbourhood ultimately became a site where
colonial histories, state- and capital-inflicted expropriation and ruination, and
gendered forms of injury and struggle all found material modes of expression
alongside one another.
KEYWORDS Jakarta; Indonesia; forced evictions; ruination; Kampung Akuarium; Ahok; VOC; occupation;
dispossession; gender
[T]he nominative work of a “ruin”does less work than “to ruin”as an ongoing process. Ruins can
represent both something more and less than the sum of the sensibilities of the people who live in
them. Instead we might turn to ruins as epicentres of renewed collective claims, as history in a
spirited voice, as sites that animate both despair and new possibilities, bids for entitlement, and
unexpected collaborative political projects. (Stoler 2013, 14, emphasis added)
Jakarta’s most restive landscapes have stories to tell, and their narratives reference both
the present and the historical, the local and the global. In the context of a localized evic-
tions regime, as in many similar contexts of urban ruin and resistance across the globe,
Jakarta’s ruined neighborhoods become places where claims are made, places of unex-
pected –and gendered –political projects, and places where history “in a spirited voice”
becomes particularly audible. Our intervention shares images and stories collected in
2016 from women occupying the resistant site of Kampung Akuarium, where colonial
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
CONTACT Lisa Tilley Lisa.Tilley@warwick.ac.uk Department of Politics and International Studies, Uni-
versity of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK; Juanita Elias Juanita.Elias@warwick.ac.uk Department of Politics
and International Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK; Lena Rethel L.Rethel@warwick.ac.uk
Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK
INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS, 2017
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histories, state- and capital-inflicted expropriation and ruination, and gendered forms of
injury and defiance all find material modes of expression in the present.
If, as recently as March of 2016, you had taken a walk through Pasar Ikan (Fish Market)
to the neighborhood of Kampung Akuarium you would have passed by a neat row of
unique small shops. The kendang drum manufacturer with its deep rooms of hand-
made drums stacked in tall, colorful towers often caught the attention of passers-by,
while the outstretched fishing nets at the front of repair shops made reference to the
area’s intimate connection to the maritime industries. Pasar Ikan itself is positioned
against the curve of the sea wall, beyond which lies the historic port of Sunda Kelapa,
where wooden Makassar schooners
1
still line up to be loaded and unloaded by hand.
Continuing onward, you would have found your way to an old and established neigh-
borhood of two- and three-story houses, many of these with little shops and workshops
integrated within them. You might have lost yourself here in the kampung’s maze of
narrow, winding streets, but you would have registered the life of a vibrant community,
at once integral to the wider Jakarta economy, yet at the same time productive of its
own complex forms of social organization.
All of this is now gone. Kampung Akuarium, at the time of writing, lies in ruins,
deprived of its social life and razed to the ground by the Jakarta city government.
The kampung’s destruction left behind a landscape of detritus, an open desert plain
made up of fragments of formerly solid homes; metal and masonry crunches under
the feet of those who now walk over the crumbled walls that once provided them
with privacy and shelter.
This rubble has acquired a political life of its own, however, and the wasted landscape
of Kampung Akuarium is now also the site of an extensive occupation in which women
have been particularly visible as organizers and spokespeople. Evicted residents
returned to live, at first in tents pitched on the debris of their former homes. Later,
Figure 1. Kampung Akuarium collective life remade on the rubble of the ruined neighborhood. Authors’
photograph.
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more solid structures began to appear, until a shattered neighborhood was partly
remade out of the waste (Figure 1). Kampung Akuarium eventually took on the political
aesthetics of the camp –becoming part camp of refuge, part protest camp. Akuarium
became a place where the most basic shelters were created out of destroyed homes,
but also a place where renewed and resistant subjectivities began to be produced,
and where claims for justice were formulated and voiced.
Running alongside the rubble desert of Kampung Akuarium –as if to make an explicit
statement about the politics of ruination and preservation –are the conserved old
storage warehouses of the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compag-
nie or VOC). These are privileged ruins, preserved and repurposed for the melancholic
tourist in search of imperial remains (Figure 2). The Company warehouses and the
nearby restored Dutch fort make for a tangible, material reminder of the early seven-
teenth century when, by claiming a defendable territorial site, the VOC began to conso-
lidate its status as monopoly merchant across what would later become the Dutch East
Indies. The settlement formerly known as Jayakarta –meaning “the victorious and pros-
perous”(Abeyasekere 1989,6)–had been variously Hindu-Javanese- and Muslim-gov-
erned. However, the domination of the territory by the Company in 1619 marked the
first time the port settlement would be entirely destroyed and then remade to
embody and project European power. Then, the wholesale ruination of Jayakarta
made way for a Europeanized imperial center: Batavia, a town built around a neat,
rationalized grid system with canalized rivers and straight rows of Dutch-style buildings.
The Dutch even imposed a ban on Javanese street stalls, lest mobile enterprises with an
Eastern aesthetic interrupt the embodiment of European power in Batavia’s urban
material. As the remains of Batavia attest, empire in the East Indies was born out of a
thorough act of ruination.
Figure 2. Preserved Dutch East India Company warehouses provide the backdrop to the ruins of the demolished
neighborhood of Kampung Akuarium. Authors’photograph.
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Since Indonesia’s independence from Dutch colonial rule in the mid-twentieth
century, pockets of the city now renamed Jakarta have been produced and reproduced
to reflect the vision of successive regimes. Neighborhoods have been evicted, razed and
then remade to project nationalist power through monumental architecture or, later, to
project the preferred form of international capital, which might be vertical, commercial
buildings known as “superbloks,”or sanitized and securitized areas of leisure for the
wealthy. Recent decades have seen both nationalist and internationalist urbanism
work in parallel to reproduce multiple areas of Jakarta at the expense of the urban
poor. The ruination of Kampung Akuarium was brought about under the governorship
of Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, popularly known as Ahok. Governor Ahok presided over a
two-year intensified evictions regime (Wilson 2016) that resulted in thousands of
families losing their homes and businesses. According to the Jakarta Legal Aid Institute,
in 2015 alone, 8,145 families were evicted from their homes while 6,283 businesses were
also removed (Anya 2017).
In the context of this evictions regime, the stories from shattered neighborhoods
across the city follow a familiar sequence. They begin by recounting patterns that
might be viewed as triumphs of individual agency in the face of adversity, as evidence
of individual and household progress in spite of structural constraints. Ibu Irma,
2
for
instance, moved to Jakarta from rural Java and married a man from Sulawesi. They
rented for a while in the city, then in the 1990s bought a plot of land in Kampung Akuar-
ium for three million rupiah (equivalent to US$1,300 in 1995 or US$200 in January 2017).
They gradually built their own house close to maritime economic activities and schools
for their children. Astri and Rika have a similar story: they are sisters, descendants of a
Bugis family from Sulawesi, who put down roots in the capital four decades ago.
Their parents met originally in Kuningan, West Java, and lived on a boat for a while
before renting a house in Jakarta, finally buying a plot of land in Kampung Akuarium
and building their own home. Ibu Dita, another recent evictee, had lived in a six-
room house built for a three-generation family of nine. Dita had built up a small business
in the kampung with a consistent shop income of around 100,000 rupiah (US$7.50 at
2017 exchange rates) per day prior to her eviction. Now, with her stall re-pitched on
the rubble of her old shop, she earns only half that. The stories of incremental develop-
ment and progress in Jakarta’s ruined neighborhoods all end in a similar way –with evic-
tion, dispossession and impoverishment. These evictions amount to acts of mass
expropriation. Residents who understood themselves to be owners of the land on
which they lived, and who even paid annual land and buildings tax, are suddenly,
and often violently, dispossessed. Their home and shelter is destroyed overnight,
often along with the economic space within the home that had enabled their means
of income.
It is also overwhelmingly apparent that these renewed forms of repetitive primitive
accumulation in present-day urban settings are explicitly gendered. Men’s economic
activity in the maritime trades, transportation, the building sector and other industries
often continues after eviction, interrupted and notably inconvenienced but nonetheless
ongoing. In contrast, women’s productive activity –and especially their informal econ-
omic activity through which they earn an income that in turn facilitates their indepen-
dence –is much more likely to be centered on the home and therefore destroyed along
with neighborhood demolitions. This is, in part, because women’s unpaid social repro-
duction activities –such as housework, childcare and the care of elderly relatives –are
largely anchored to the home domain. As such, many women find that running small
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businesses from home allows them to combine their productive activity with their
socially reproductive roles. These small business activities are embedded within loca-
lized markets and are also dependent on the spatial and material composition of the
home and kampung (Tilley 2017). As such, evictions, dispossessions and demolitions
amount to a disproportionate attack on women’s wealth and income levels, simul-
taneously increasing their poverty as well as their dependency on male household
members.
Yet, at the same time, evictions have become an unlikely catalyst for the re-centering
of women’s roles in urban political life. At the time of the Kampung Akuarium evictions,
many of the kampung’s male residents, especially those employed in maritime indus-
tries, were away and unaware of events. Women, dressed in their white prayer robes,
knelt together in a mass worship action while thousands of uniformed troops gathered
to demolish their homes. The action of women made for a spectacle highlighting the
stark contrast between the moral, spiritual and feminine performance of the protestors
and the masculine, unethical and violent state agents of the eviction.
A year on from the evictions, women predominantly define the political life of the
wasted landscape of Kampung Akuarium. It is overwhelmingly the kampung’s women
residents who give voice to the psychic, physical and material injuries inflicted by the
eviction and ruination of the neighborhood. Women are also remaking the social and
commercial life of the area, despite the anguish of having to pitch their existence on
the very rubble of their old homes, and despite the real prospect that even this new
existence will be temporary, ruined again as soon as the developers move in. Household
and collective life has been partly remade where group tents and individual homes have
been erected to provide space for community and family activities, while shops and
food stalls have also been reconstructed, selling sustenance out of sachets and small
plastic bags (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Sachet life: a warung pitched on the rubble selling snacks and drinks. Authors’photograph.
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Dina remade her life on the plot of her old home. She declined so-called social
housing (rusunawa) because the small high-rise studios offered tend to be far away
(up to 18 km), relatively expensive to rent and –with no space to run a home business
–a complete dislocation from her existing way of life. Now, like many of the other
women of the occupation, she has remade life through makeshift means. She uses
her delivered water sparingly, heats food on a stove constructed from masonry and
cement into which she feeds burning logs, and sells fried vegetable snacks and
sachet-based iced drinks, as well as tea and coffee (Figure 4). Maintaining her position
on the plot of land she bought many years ago and keeping her daughter in the nearby
school for as long as possible are her main objectives in the short term.
Figure 4. A mother keen to stay close to her daughter’s school runs a small warung selling meals and snacks inside
the rebuilt family shelter. Authors’photograph.
Figure 5. Musholla al Jihad: A reclaimed prayer space built on the rubble, which bears the name “the struggle.”
Authors’photograph.
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Pasar Ikan, then, leads us back to a landscape that displays present and historical pol-
itical material in stark relief. Against the preserved ruins of the VOC warehouses, the
rubble of the present remains as testament to the ruination of lives that had taken
decades to build. These lives were cleared to make way for new modes of capitalization
and a development that is expected to project the power of capital in the present. Yet
the occupation stands firm on the rubble as testament to refusal, voicing a notably gen-
dered articulation of the injury inflicted by the process of ruination. The women of the
occupation, in particular, remain as a constant reminder of what the city government
has attempted to erase. Their existence as occupiers is fittingly centered on their
mosque (Figure 5), a place of both collective and spiritual life, and one of the first struc-
tures to be remade when the occupiers returned. The building’s corrugated metal roof
and its reclaimed silver ornament shine defiantly in the sunlight over the mosque’s
given name, Musholla al Jihad –the “prayer room of struggle.”Here, on the rubble,
we resist.
Notes
1. A Makassar schooner (also known as pinisi) is a particular type of sailing vessel, usually with two
masts, which is typically made in Sulawesi.
2. All names of women occupiers interviewed for this project have been changed.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Funding
This work was supported by funding from the British Council’s Newton Fund for Institutional Links [Grant
Number 217195589].
Notes on contributors
Lisa Tilley is a Research Fellow at the University of Warwick and will begin a Leverhulme Fellowship in
September 2017. She has published work in relation to debates within political economy, political ontol-
ogy and post/decolonial thought.
Juanita Elias is Reader in International Political Economy at the University of Warwick. Her interests center
on feminist IPE and development. With Lena Rethel, she is co-editor of The Everyday Political Economy of
Southeast Asia (2016).
Lena Rethel is Associate Professor of International Political Economy at the University of Warwick, with a
research focus on Southeast Asia. She is a 2017–18 Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies,
and was a 2016–17 Fung Global Fellow at Princeton University.
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