Behind the Post-Suharto City - book review

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Behind the Post-Suharto City

Book Review: The Appearances of Memory, Mnemonic Practices of Architecture and Urban Form in Indonesia In his latest book, writer Abidin Kusno explores the relationship between the built environment and political consciousness in Indonesia during the colonial and postcolonial eras. Roy Voragen reviews the Indonesian architectural historian’s ideas.

Text and photography by Roy Voragen Book cover courtesy of Duke University Press

Jakarta—for Indonesians: the city of cities— functions like a magnet. Many Indonesians make the big leap to this megacity; much to the dismay of the city’s authorities, and from time to time Governor Fauzi Bowo promises raids to expel those who do not have Jakarta identity cards. Still, people come to the city to try their luck. People move to Jakarta not only because they hope to take part in its economic prowess, people also move to this city because it plays such an important part in Indonesia’s imagination—the city of independence, the city of development, the city of luminous spectacles.

Bandung along the railway tracks.

Flyover in Bandung.

Bandung Neighbourhood.

Taman Anggrek complex in Jakarta.

Cities, like Jakarta, are created by interacting individuals, the spaces and places we construct over time, and the stories we tell and are being told about these spaces and places. A city is no longer a city if devoid of people, people who tell and are told stories about their city. It is thus a mistake to think that the discipline of architecture is merely technical and aesthetic in nature. Architects work within an economic and socio-political context in which they perform their roles. Moreover, their designs give power a form and, in turn, shape power.

Spaces and places frame life; the ways we use these spaces and places are framed by the ways we talk about them: technically, aesthetically, morally, politically, economically, etc. Indonesian academic Abdin Kusno, Associate Professor at the University

of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, writes about the interplay between architecture, power, and memory. In 2000, he published Behind the Postcolonial, Architecture, Urban Space and Political Cultures in Indonesia on this interplay during Sukarno’s Guided Democracy and Suharto’s New Order regimes. And in 2010, he published The Appearances of Memory, Mnemonic Practices of Architecture and Urban Form in Indonesia (“mnemonic” is a device to aid the memory but in Abidin Kusno’s usage, it is related to the power of memory).

In all his writings, Abidin Kusno goes back and forth between the past and present to write a history of the present. The present is put into question by tracing the presence of the past in the present. One of his major contributions to urban sociology and related fields is to show that the colonial and postcolonial states are not separate entities that happen to have a territory in common, but rather, are locked-up in different times.

Abidin Kusno’s aim is to trace the persistence of the colonial in the postcolonial time. For example, how national subjectivities are created and surveillance techniques are used through urbanism, architectural forms, and discussions on aesthetics and ethics.

His second major contribution is to show how architects, intellectuals with particular middleclass backgrounds, stand within society. It was in the late president Suharto’s benefit, for example,

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If we learn to recognise how power is spatialised in different times, then we can empower ourselves to become again agents of social change, and as actors we can make new histories and civic spaces.

that architects see their discipline as neutral.

Abidin Kusno is right to claim that architecture is not merely about aesthetic forms, but forms through which power is expressed and shaped.

Aesthetic forms have an ethical component, aesthetic forms can be seen as expressing norms: whose norms are then materialised in what forms?

Since Kusno completed his first book, a lot has changed in Indonesia. The economic crisis of 1997 and the political turmoil of 1998 inaugurated an anxious decade of change, which is reflected in an “architecture of fear”: gated communities, flyovers, and super-blocks comprising malls and apartments are all used to avoid the chaotic city. These symbolise social status, the craving for security, and a distrust of strangers, but ironically do not provide real safety, which causes, in turn, even more anxiety.

Democratisation is often coupled to the issue of transitional justice: what to do with the injustices committed by a past authoritarian regime? While a great many monuments in Indonesian cities visualise the independence struggle, the violence committed during the New Order has been repressed from public visual memory. The focus was, and still is, on the economic development and not on the visualisation of past horrors (let alone restitution), such as the raping of Chinese Indonesian women and the burning alive of urban poor trapped in malls. The rebuilt malls in Glodok, West Jakarta, make no reference to 1998; the only visual scars are burned down and abandoned shophouses.

General Sutiyoso became Jakarta’s governor in 1997, and after 1998 he quickly realised he had to change governance style; “nationalist urbanism,” according to Abidin Kusno, had withered due to a loosening of the centre. Still, Sutiyoso’s aim was to visualise the restoration of order by fencing the Parliament and the National Monument park (better known as Monas), redeveloping the Hotel Indonesia area and the TransJakarta busway. The busway was implemented as “shock therapy” to induce a new social behaviour.

(Abidin Kusno is obviously not claiming that Jakarta does not need an improved public transportation system.) However, shock therapy is set to fail when legitimacy has eroded; legitimacy and trust can leave with a bang but are difficult to (re)gain.

According to Abidin Kusno, the war-on-terror rhetoric after the 2002 Bali bomb made the loosening of the centre ephemeral because intelligence and defence agencies scrambled to reclaim their power.

But this is questionable, and if so, his book would have been all the more richer if he had focused less on Jakarta and had made comparisons between different cities. While the law on decentralisation has been implemented half-heartedly, it has led to greater differences between cities. And similar spatial designs and aesthetic discussions have had very different results and uses.

Kim Dovey writes: “It is people who oppress people, not forms or places. But because buildings and places frame life, they become available at certain moments as the tools and media of oppression, and of emancipation.”3 We should be careful not to read too much into buildings and cities, in other words, they do not have an essential meaning by nature.

When the stories we tell and are being told about our cities gain a sense of inevitability, they become oppressing. There always are—and should be— alternative ways of looking at our cities. When we forget that, we will not have the power to change our cities. This can be seen in the development of the Occupy movement, which seems to have lost steam.

Moreover, if Indonesian cities as the writer’s object of research change, it should have consequences for a researcher’s theoretical toolkit. Abidin Kusno, however, still seems to give Michel Foucault’s metaphor of the “panopticon” an important role.

This metaphor sees disciplinary power as centralised and the ordering of behaviour possible through spatial design surveillance. This metaphor had its merits but it might be outdated. Zygmunt Bauman proposes the “synopticon” instead: “Spectacles take the place of surveillance without losing any of its disciplinary power of their predecessor. [This works] through enticement and seduction rather than by coercion . . .”1 And even if Michel Foucault’s metaphor could still be considered valid, everyday urban life in Indonesian cities is far more “liquid” than what the “panopticon” image can possibly capture.

Furthermore, it is for three unfortunate reasons that Abidin Kusno did not add a concluding chapter. Firstly, the second half of the book is largely historical, which could have gained in focus and relevance when brought back to the present.

Secondly, he could have used this additional chapter to make clearer where he stands; Gavin Kitching writes: “it is important [for an intellectual] not just to know what you are doing . . . but to be clear both that you are doing it and about why you are doing it.”2 Now, one has to read in between the lines to detect Kusno’s own critical stance.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, in relation to space he mentions empowerment a few times, but he mainly discusses power, for which he uses terms like “subjectivities,” “urban pedagogy,” “disciplinary space,” and “spectacle of discipline.”

Book cover.

This, then, could be seen as the book’s political implication: If we learn to recognise how power is spatialised in different times, then we can empower ourselves to become again agents of social change, and as actors we can make new histories and civic spaces. And perhaps, we can then spatialise democracy by recognising that space is never neutral. Instead, we should acknowledge the fact that space is always political and politics is always spatial. The right to the city, as this approach to urban space is called, is not merely the right to enter and use a city; it also means that we have the right to change our urban environment. Ultimately we have to ask ourselves the moral question of 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 a city like Jakarta?4 However, Kusno is right to point at the fact that a concept like the right to the city can easily be used as a marketing strategy—a political strategy disguised as apolitical: the claim that there is no alternative to the privatisation of public space.

The Appearances of Memory, Mnemonic Practices of Architecture and Urban Form in Indonesia by Abidin Kusno is published by Duke University Press and available on Amazon.com and at all good bookstores.

1. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Malden: Polity Press, 2006), 86. Readers might wonder why Kusno uses postmodern authors and why I make use of them to discuss Kusno, but it is safe to claim that Indonesians practiced hybridity long before it was theorised as postmodernism. Therefore, postmodern theories can be useful in analysing a “liquid city” like Jakarta.

2. Gavin Kitching, “Marxism and Reflexivity,” in Marx and Wittgenstein, Knowledge, Morality and Politics, eds.

Gavin Kitching and Nigel Pleasants (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 248–249. Kitching is obviously not claiming that all writing should celebrate subjectivity, a narcissism that is not only all too often uninteresting to read but also ends up being apolitical. As with architecture, writing can have political significance, all Kitching claims is to make one’s position clear.

3. Kim Dovey, Framing Places, Mediating Power in Built Form (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 86. Italics added. Kim Dovey can be considered as one of the intellectual fathers of Kusno.

4. In Indonesia, there are many involved in this urban struggle; to name a few: the Jakarta-based artists collective ruangrupa (i.e. space of forms; http:// ruangrupa.org); the think tank founded by architect and urbanist Marco Kusumawijaya rujak (http://rujak.org); the NGO Urban Poor Consortium; and the Yogyakarta-based artists collective Taring Padi (http://taringpadi.com).