Welcome dinner uclg aspac fauzi bowo 2

WELCOME DINNER AT THE THE 4th UCLG ASPAC CONGRESS 2012 “Resilient Cities: Rethink, Rebuild, Revitalize”

By: FAUZI BOWO Governor of Jakarta

JAKARTA CAPITAL CITY GOVERNMENT TUESDAY, 2 OCTOBER 2012 Pages: 4

1 Mayors, Governors, Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome tonight to Fatahillah Museum.

Today two very important sessions have been conducted. One, concerning the readiness of cities to change in order to anticipate the future, focused on the willingness of people themselves to change.

The other was on infrastructure, innovations, and the building of roads for the future.

Tonight, however, I will not be speaking about Resilient Cities of the future. Instead, for just a few brief moments, allow me to talk about a Resilient City of the Past, that is, Batavia, which is now called Jakarta. We are tonight having dinner in the Old Town of Jakarta, the location where the city of Jakarta was first established. This building in which we are having dinner is where the former City Hall was situated.

Before becoming the City Hall, this building was originally called the Stadhuis, and was the administrative headquarters of the Dutch East India Company and the Dutch trading company, and later the office of the Dutch Government. The building was constructed in 1710 by Governor General van Riebeeck. It is located in front of a

2 public square, which in the past was known as Stadhuisplein or the City Hall Square. Many of you would have walked across this square in order to get to the building where we are having dinner tonight.

This building has been a witness to some of the most important parts of Indonesian history. As they say, if only these walls could talk and tell what they have seen, we would probably be hearing a fascinating part of Indonesia’s story. For example, the building, which is underneath the building where we are having dinner, was a famous prison. Any Indonesians, and for that matter Dutch people, who rebelled against Dutch colonial rule, were imprisoned here. One very famous historical figure was the Indonesian freedom fighter Prince Diponegoro, who was arrested in Central Java and imprisoned here in 1830, before being banished to Manado in North Sulawesi.

Despite this role, the place was also an important source of life not only because the port of Sunda Kelapa, which was the center of trade for Batavia and the surrounding areas, was just a stone’s throw away but because in the center of the

3 square, just in front of this building, there was a fountain, which served as the water supply for the colonial capital, Batavia. This place was the center of life for Old Jakarta for hundreds of years.

Today this building is a museum. It has been temporarily closed since July 2011 for conservation work to be carried out on the badly damaged complex but it is expected to reopen in 2014.

Jakarta or Batavia, as the city was first referred to in historical records in the 4th century, was originally a Hindu settlement and a port. Ever since, the city has been variously claimed by the Indianized kingdom of Tarumanegara, the Hindu Kingdom of Sunda, the Muslim Sultanate of Banten, the Dutch East Indies government, the Empire of Japan, and finally Indonesia.

Today Jakarta is 485 years old. The fact that this place is still functioning as a city is proof that Jakarta is a resilient city and that somehow, during its journey of hundreds of years, it has managed to “Rethink, rebuild and revitalize�.

4 I often ask myself what has enabled this city to survive for so long, while in the process managing to adapt to major cultural and political changes and to flourish? In my humble opinion it’s the people who have lived here. Not just the people of Batavia but the different people from different parts of Indonesia who have come here and made this place what it is today, creating here one of the richest centers of culture in the country.

In fact, I could almost say that Jakarta has been “Little Indonesia� for hundreds of years.

Thank you. Please enjoy your dinner tonight.