Description

Three groups of students (from anthropology, geography and planning) who participated in a PLA 1150, a recently completed field studies course based in Bandung, Indonesia will briefly present their research focusing on dynamic change in urban Indonesia. The course, which was sponsored by the Asian Institute, the David Chu Scholarships, the Department of Anthropology and the Friends of Planning, was conducted during three weeks in May 2008. It involved travel as well to Yogyakarta, one of Indonesia’s most important cultural centres, and a number of meeting and research activities with Indonesian bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, academics and urban activists.

The topics to be presented and discussed include creative city policy, housing provision and cultural consumption.

Presentation 1: Public Space for Sale: Contested Practices of Consumption and Street Life in Bandung by Sabrina Conrad, Brittany Cryder, Sharon Kelly, Katherine Mitchell and Behzad Sarmadi As commercial developments proliferate in Bandung and the city is further branded as a shopping locale, it is necessary to examine the relationship between these spaces of consumption, each of which is marked by a different history, clientele and function. Each space of consumption isolates a certain element of Bandung public life, and their claim to public space and street life is defined in differing ways. This group examines four dramatically different sites and focus on three themes which resonate with each site: the creation of boundaries, the maintenance of security, and the facilitation of social interaction.

Public space in Bandung is increasingly scarce, and there is an ongoing negotiation between government, private enterprises, and citizens at all levels of society for the right to use that space. In the context of this scarcity, the sites we examined have attempted to emulate, replace, or illegally inhabit public spaces with varying degrees of success. As more and more of the “public” spaces left in Bandung are becoming privately owned, the understood definitions of public space and the ways in which people are permitted to use it are being contested.

Presentation 2: The Bandung Creative City Movement: An Exploration of the Social and Spatial Implications of Policy Transfer by Kristen Anderson, Dan Cohen, Alexis Kane Speer, Michael Noble, Morgan Skowronski The city government of Bandung has recently fashioning a policy focused on Bandung becoming a Creative City and has recently gone as far as changing its English motto to “home of creative minds.” This new policy is indirectly inspired by the “creative city” discourse, as termed by economic geographer and planner Richard Florida (2002), which was developed within a Western context. Wildly embraced by some, the Creative City discourse has also been scrutinized as an elitist view of the city by many scholars (Peck, 2005). This exploratory study asks how the “creative city” discourse travelled to Bandung and the implications of transferring such ideas to a developing nation.

Presentation 3: Poor Communities in Bandung by Erica Duque, Francisco Obando, Jennifer Simons and Cassandra Vink.
This project examines forms of assistance, competing needs, community solidarity and capacity building in impoverished areas. This project applies van Horen’s (2004) analysis of poverty alleviation programs to several slum communities within Bandung with a focus on informal housing. Given the widespread prevalence of informal housing in Indonesia, the importance of relevant and effective poverty programs cannot be overstated. The research presents some basic, yet crucial, insights into Indonesia’s squatter settlements and the more formal arrangements that the government hopes to replace them with.