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Public Space and the Right to the City Roy Voragen*
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CITY is no longer a city if devoid of people. And if one wants to know a city it is not enough to roam its streets, it requires talking to its people. Cities in general and Jakarta in particular are, after all, creations of individuals interacting with each other. And it is all the more fortunate that Indonesians have a penchant for the conversational, so leave your iPod at home and go around by angkot (minibus). There are no blueprints available for how to improve everyday urban life and thus a city like Jakarta; and even if such a blueprint existed, it would be a folie de grandeur to implement it from the top down for cities are too complex. Therefore, it is important to learn from everyday experiences, as well as from different cities around the globe, and allow the involvement of the actual users of the city to change the city. Cities, unlike villages, are composed of strangers; we urbanites live among strangers. And strangers meet in public. It is in public space of the city that we appear to others, where others appear to us. In public space strangers are proximate without the intimacy that defines private space. Public space is understood here as political—or to be more precise: democratic—space. Moreover, I make two more qualifications. Firstly, political thought is myopic and it is still captured by nostalgia for bygone times. It longs for what was present in the ancient Greek city-states. This is problematic, not only because the number of people living in ancient Athens was small, but also because most were excluded: women, foreigners (including Aristotle) and slaves (in Indonesian cities, today, women, urban poor, Chinese, Ahmadis and homosexuals are often, practically, excluded). This nostalgia also says more about the present than about the past. We crave for order, stability, unity and oneness; and this craving is symbolized by the ancient Greek agora, and this brings me to my second point. Secondly, we should not see public space as merely a specific designated geographic location designed by experts. Instead, public space should be defi ned by modes of action, behavior, responses, desires, etc, at certain places and times. A fenced park—for example, the National Monument (Monas) park in Jakarta—sanitizes, beautifies the city; we are told how to and how not to behave, and who is and who is not allowed to enter. A park is thus not necessarily a public space with political significance. The same goes for Jakarta’s ubiquitous shopping malls, where behavior is restricted to consuming, even if it is just a life style (window shopping) because the goods on display are actually too expensive to purchase. Public space defi ned as modes of action means that a certain location in the city can be public at certain times— for example by occupying and using that particular space for a demonstration—and not at other times; the Hotel Indonesia roundabout is a good example, which is a favorite location for demonstrators of very different colors. The meaning of public space is necessarily fleeting, because
we produce it by using our cities in multifarious ways. A healthy—democratic—city is a city where different people for different reasons, and often at the same time, use its streets. The meetings between strangers, with all of our particularities and differences, defi ne public space in today’s metropolises. Democratic public space, while it should be defi ned by inclusiveness (which should not mean that others have to become like ‘us’), is inherently unstable because of its openness to differences. Too often democracy is defi ned as a search for consensus by emphasizing the unity of the people, which hides conflicts by brushing aside the question of who defines the ‘we.’ The struggle over what is and what is not public space is much needed to create a city where matters of political importance can be discussed so that inevitable uncertainty and anxiety do not lead to violence against the ‘stranger,’ against what is ‘alien,’ against what is ‘ugly,’ against what is ‘crazy’ (architecture of fear as agoraphobia). The French urban sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre claims that festivals can create opportunities to (re-)claim the streets of our cities. Festivals—understood from a political perspective, thus not merely as entertainment to be consumed for commercial ends—can turn the world upside down, joyous moments of spontaneity, of intoxication (at least as seen from the perspective of normal times). The topsy-turvy world of Lefebvre’s festivals can be connected to his notion of the right to the city. Henri Lefebvre writes that “the right to the city is like a cry and a demand. […] The right to the city […] can only be formulated as a transformed and renewed right to urban life.” Lefebvre’s right to urban life is a call for creativity as a virtue: “the need for information, symbolism, the imaginary and play.” The right to the city is not merely the right to enter and use a city; it also means that we urbanites have the right to change our urban environment. As the urban geographer David Harvey comments: “We need to make sure we can live with our own creations […].” Ultimately we have to ask ourselves the moral question how we want to shape our lives, which includes the built form. And this moral question is in turn a political question: how do we want to live together in our city, in a city like Jakarta? The right to the city is a form of spatial justice. The right to the city assures that political rights do not remain formal, but that all of us actually gain the ability to do and to be certain things (this is called the capabilities approach, as adopted by UNDP) by changing the built form and by being involved in these changes. The right to the city radicalizes democracy, because it spatializes democracy: space is never neutral, space is always political, and politics is always spatial. *The writer has lived in Indonesia since 2003 and can be contacted at fatumbrutum.blogspot.com JULY 5, 2011 TEMPO|49