Space Syntax Analysis: A Morphological Study of Bandung

Space Syntax Analysis:

A Morphological Study of Bandung

by Sandro Armanda 2020 KU Leuven Space Syntax Lab | Tutor: Martine De Maeseneer The city that is surrounded by mountains It was at the end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century that the Dutch East Indies established plantations in the highlands of West Java, Indonesia.

At that time, the highlands were known as Preanger, or Parahyangan in Sanskrit, or Priangan in Sundanese. ca. 1925

The plantations were a huge success that a need for a better road to deliver supplies to the capital, Batavia, was needed. Napoleon Bonaparte who conquered Europe at that time, including the Netherlands, ordered Dutch East Indies governor, H.W. Daendels to improve the defensive systems of Java to protect against the British in India.

Daendels then started the notorious 1000-km road project called De Grote Postweg (The Great Post Road, now Jalan Asia Afrika) spanning from the west coast to the east coast of Java Island, passing through this particular area surrounded by the highlands which later named Bandoeng. The city later was founded in 1810.

ca. 1935

ca. 1920

2016

Spatial integration study using Space Syntax analysis

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1926

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In 1880, first railroad between Batavia and Bandoeng was completed, this boosted light industry in the city, as many people started to flock into the city, especially the Chinese people who helped run the facilities, services, and as vendors around the train station. The area around the train station is now recognisable as the old Chinatown.

The area around De Grote Postweg would remain as the most integrated area as the city evolved gradually until present day as we will see in the analyses below.

However, despite its historical importance and high integration level on paper, the street is no longer as important as it was today. Especially after the city’s rezoning in the late 1980s that had given a huge impact in the change of the city’s dynamics.

1950

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1990

2020 Bandoeng, 1905 In 1906, Bandoeng was given the status of gemeente (municipality), and then twenty years later became stadsgemeente (city municipality). This probably explains the lack of official map before this year. The red lines in the axial map (right) above indicate that the most integrated streets in the municipality, and were also the first main streets of the city. The horizontal one in the middle is De Grote Postweg, the first street where all of the city’s main activities concentrated. The city later started to expand from this area.

Bandoeng, 1926 This is the time when Bandoeng was given the status of stadsgemeente (city municipality). We can see from the city map (left) that new infrastructures were planned to build by focusing the development of the northern part of the city. In the northeastern part, on the other hand, the administration area where the Gouvernments Bedrijven (now Gedung Sate, the West Java’s governor’s office) was just completed six years earlier (it was the most expensive building at that time). The building complex was being planned to be used and further developed as the new Dutch East Indies government’s office, as they planned to move the Dutch East Indies’ capital from Batavia to Bandoeng. However, this plan was cut short by the World War II, and the Dutch weren’t able to reestablish their colony due to Indonesia’s declaration of independence in 1945 Bandung, 1950 This is the first map after the independence of Indonesia. The significant change in the map is visible by how it started using Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian language) instead of Dutch. Indonesian spelling ‘Bandung’ is now used instead of the Dutch spelling ‘Bandoeng’. From this map we can see how the city’s-

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-development was now focused on the southern part area, where they were planning to build a second ring road. A small development plan is also visible in the northern part of the city.

Greater Bandung, 1990 In 1987 the city expanded its borders, becoming Bandung Raya (Greater Bandung) accompanied with some relocations of higher concentration development zones outside the city as an attempt to dilute the population density in the old city. During this period, the city core was often uprooted, a lot of old buildings were torn down, land sizes were regrouped and rezoned, residential areas were changed to commercial areas with a lot of supermarkets, malls, banks, and upscale developments.

Greater Bandung, 2020 At this stage, the city has expanded so much to its greater area. Residential buildings have grown really fast over the last three decades in the suburban area, they began sprawling to the mountains. In the city center, a lot of huge shopping centers have erected in the past three decades and thus changed the whole dynamics of the city significantly. Some areas have changed their functions completely. Areas that used to be very vital such as the area around De Grote Postweg (now Jalan Asia Afrika) still remains as the most integrated area as shown in the axial map (horizontal red line in the middle), however that doesn’t necessarily mean that the area is still as important as it used to be, in fact it now has become obsolete, it still has its charm as an old part of the city but that’s all there is. The most vibrant areas now are Sukajadi, Dago, and the area around Gedung Sate which indicated by the amount of new businesses (i.e. restaurants, cafes, bars, stores, etc.) and public places (i.e. green spaces, public parks) that have emerged rapidly in the past years. This perhaps shows that urban network integration doesn’t really determine the city’s life. However, further studies are needed to affirm this.

Bandung’s growth and De Grote Postweg’s obsolescence 1905

1926

1950 Important zones 1905 1. Offices, markets, town square, town mosque, Chinese church, elite societies 2. Train company office 3. State railways & workshops 4. Factories

3 km

1990

1926 1. Offices, markets, town square, town mosque, churches, elite societies 2. State railways & workshops 3. Resident’s office 4. Colleges 5. Army 6. Hospital & health insitute 7. New Dutch East Indies Governor’s office complex 8. Racing ground 9. Technical College 1950 1. Offices, old & new markets, town square, town mosque, churches, elite societies 2. Governor’s office 3. City council 4. High school 5. Gedung Sate (later became West Java governor’s office) 6. Government’s offices 7. Faculty buildings of Technical College 8. Balubur market (new) 9. Hospital & health institute 10. Hospital (new) 11. Technical College 12. Public sports field

2020

1990 1. Old hotels 2. New commercial zones (malls, factory outlets, boutiques, stores) 3. Airport 4. Bandung Institute of Technology 5. Government’s offices 6. New middle class residential complexes 7. Public sports fields 8. Train station 9. Bus stations 10. New leisure area (hotels, villas, golf fields) 2020 1. Government’s offices and universities 2. Old town 3. Commercial zones (malls, factory outlets, boutiques, stores) 4. Airport 5. Army 6. Factories 7. Mixed residential areas (middle and low classes’ houses, schools, stores) 8. High-class residential areas 9. Train station

De Grote Postweg: The beginning of the city that slowly fades away De Grote Postweg is the raison d’être of the city of Bandung. It was that particular street that made the city into existence almost two hundred years ago. The city started from a linear composition of variety of functions along that street then later expanded to the northern and the southern sides of it towards the mountains, making the gap less and less between the urban life and the highlands. I remember at the very beginning of the Space Syntax course, our professor Martine de Maeseneer made us play with small rectangular pieces of paper and asked each of us to arrange them on the table. Her question was very simple, ‘How do you think a city started?’ and thus we started arranging the paper pieces in front of us in a way to make them represent an embryonic phase of a city. I arranged them linearly as if they were buildings arrayed on both sides of a street. I got the answer wrong according to her, because she said a city never starts from a street. I remember asking her later if that’s applicable for all of the cities in the world, and she said yes. I had a doubt, but to be fair, her answer was fairly reasoned as it was referenced to a research of hundreds of cities that neither the title of the research nor the researchers I can really recall now. As the semester progressed I kept thinking of that question and the possibility of having different answers about the beginning of a city. My insistence on this has a very simple reason: I don’t remember if the city that I grew up in has the characteristics of that ‘universal’ beginning that she had explained during that first class.

At the end of the semester, I ended up with my own hypothesis that perhaps colonial cities, at least in Java, Indonesia, were formed differently. Because most of them started to exist not as destinations, but only as places of transit between point A and point B. The city of Bandung was made because of the urgency to have several checkpoints for the Dutch to transport goods from the plantations to the port-

-in Batavia (now Jakarta). And I believe this should be applicable for some cities in Java as well for similar reasons. They are cities that don’t have history long enough to have this ‘universal’ beginning, they were built fairly recent in the 18th and 19th century. They were urban projects that were being approached with a colonial tabula rasa sort of mindset, so to speak.

From the spatial integration analysis that has been shown in the previous page, we can see how the area around De Grote Postweg somewhat stays being the most integrated area in the city, along with the other areas around the old streets as well. However, as I have already mentioned before, its importance slowly fades away within the last a hundred years. This gradual fade was caused by the expansion of the city and its division into several kecamatan (sub-districts) in the late 1980s has caused a gradual shift of the city center, making the ‘core’ of the city, to some extent, no longer exist. The city’s activities are now divided into these several smaller areas. The area around De Grote Postweg is no longer central in the urban life of Bandung, where all of the urban activities used to be concentrated. These new sub-districts, along with their own new commercial areas, facilitated with shopping centres, stores, factory outlets, restaurants, and cultural buildings are attracting the newer generations more. While in functionality, the existence of a new street, the outer city ring (also red in the 2020 axial map in the previous page) in the southern part of the city might also have contributed to De Grote Postweg’s obsolescence, as it has the same function as De Grote Postweg but works more efficiently for its wider size and connected to the the highways right on the southern border of the city.

Credits: All maps and photos were taken from the KITLV Archive of the University of Leiden except the 2020 map that was taken from Google Earth and the photo of Jalan Asia Afrika in 2016 that was taken from Google Images.