Academic Round-table Discussion Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta/ Disappearing Water: Disrupted Socio-ecological Narratives of Poor Communities in Jakarta

Description

Abstract
This paper comprises preliminary analyses of my on-going research that empirically seeks to reveal the problems of water infrastructure development in Jakarta (access to clean water, water sanitation and environmental health). Discerning the incongruences of development strategies at the neighbourhood scale, I aim to understand how flooding, commodified water services and lack of environmental sanitation affect poor communities. Their everyday narratives about household needs disappear, drowned among development discourses attached to mega projects of water infrastructure. ‘Normalisasi sungai’ or literally translated ‘river normalisation’ is one example of mega projects to focus on. The government believes that rivers need space for the banjir (floods) to flow fast to the sea and hence, river banks need to be cleaned from slum communities.

The modernity logic of development circulates abundantly in portraying the rivers ‘normal’ and in linking the normalisasi with relokasi (relocations), forcing the evicted communities to live in rumah susun sederhana sewa, abbreviated as rusunawa, or higher-rise rental housing blocks with modern sanitary facilities. While the communities are under pressure to pay for water pumped into the multi-storey buildings, development investments are flushed towards glossy parts of the city pampering the privileged class. And the poor remain juggling among their survival worlds, the desire to improve, politicians’ promises and cumulative impacts of large-scale infrastructure projects.

One among many locations affected by the Normalisasi was Kampung Bukit Duri in South Jakarta Municipality. This paper aims to disentangle the highly contested water narratives around disparate yet intermingling urban governance practices in Jakarta through the cases of Kampung Bukit Duri and Rusunawa Rawa Bebek, to which the whole evicted households in that area supposed to be relocated. From the total 526 households evicted in January and September 2016, 93 households rejected the relocation and instead sued the government asking for compensations. Through the court, the narratives of evicted communities are also contested.

Period	24 May 2017
Held at	Universitas Gadjah Mada, Research Centre for Politics and Government, Department of Politics and Government, Faculty of Social and Politics Science, Indonesia