Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, v. 295. Leiden: Brill, 2015. xiv, 351 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$148.00, cloth. ISBN 978-90-04-28069-4.
Cars, Conduits, and Kampongs is an important addition to the literature linking colonial institutions to the shaping of post-colonial urban places in Indonesia. It derives (mostly) from a 2006 conference in Leiden entitled “The Decolonization of the Indonesian city in (Asian and African) comparative perspective.” As the editors put it, the collection “deals with people, technologies, and above all place … [in] a growing research interest … broadly referred to as ‘colonial modernity’” (1). Many selections draw upon excellent new research by emerging Indonesian scholars. Recognized topics such as kampong (village) formation and reform, public housing and the development of European residential enclaves, provision of water, sanitary, and transportation infrastructure, and the town planning movement are all given fresh treatments. The evolution of state health care, the unique case of Malang with its two traditional town squares (alun-alun) and a brief but compelling essay on the challenges facing Chinese cemeteries in Surabaya in the 1950s add new spatial and institutional themes.
A key promise of Indonesia’s modernization was addressing needed improvements in the indigenous urban communities. The volume devotes five chapters to this topic, including a comparative assessment of two notable colonial urban leaders, the European Johannes J.G.E. Ruckert, in Semarang, and the moderate Indonesian nationalist, Husni Thamrin, a member of Batavia’s local legislature. As Versnel and Colombijn show, both were central figures in a slow-moving reform movement aimed at addressing the multiple maladies of kampongs. Their tireless advocacy kept kampong concerns on their respective local governmental agendas.
In Yogjakarta (as in several Indonesian cities), the discourse between indigenous settlements and modernization of the city produced another response. The planned exclusive garden city of Kotabaru in Yogjakarta responded to European fears of having to live among the indigenous, what author Fakih refers to as a European “bulwark against indigenization” (152). Following independence, Kotabaru shifted from European to middle-class Indonesian occupancy although some areas descended into a depressed condition. Nonetheless, Fakih contends that Indonesians evidenced agency throughout Kotabaru’s transition from separateness to becoming part of the city.
Another response to the kampong problem was the public housing movement in Semarang in the late colonial period. Wijono depicts this as a success story since the housing built was favoured by the residents who could afford them. It served indigenous peoples with a modern alternative to the kampong. Esteemed Dutch architect/planner Thomas Karsten designed them. Failure in the kampong improvement initiative is the theme in Reerink’s case study of Bandung. Bandung’s problem, like in other large cities, was that kampongs resided outside of the control of municipal government. Given the scale (and cost) of the intervention, Bandung’s leadership opted to ignore kampong problems. The post-colonial period brought kampongs into the city but the massive population in-migration elevated the kampong problem beyond local capacity. Only later, and beyond the period covered by Reerink, did the nationally orchestrated kampong improvement program bring some relief.
Two unique cases, the oil refinery town of Plaju (outside Palembang) and the Uniekampong built adjacent to the Batavia’s Tanjung Priok harbour, introduced modern housing to local workers in the 1930s. In Plaju, this occurred long before the private oil company and its spaces were nationalized under Pertamina, the Indonesian oil conglomerate. The author Tanjung shows that the Indonesianization of the community progressed slowly. Residents resisted being absorbed into the larger Palembang community. In the case of Uniekampong, the intent was to ensure a more stable maritime labour force by providing a higher quality of housing than would have been available without company intervention.
Servicing kampongs was less successful. In the provision of clean water to Jakartans, Kooy and Bakker show that there were differentials in service delivery tied to race and class distinctions in the colonial era, a practice that carried over to the modern era. The processes of infrastructure modernization involving transportation in Surabaya also reflected spatial and social fragmentation given the differing modes of enhancing mobility across the classes. Nonetheless, as Khusyairi and Colombijn argue, the impacts were widely experienced. As they note, lower income people “had fewer opportunities to use modern means of transportation than rich people, but this did not prevent them increasing their mobility and pace of life by recourse to the new means of transportation” (269).
Coordinating modernization at the city scale was the intent of the emerging town planning movement, a process prompted by enhanced local responsibility following the 1905 decentralization act. Roosmalen traces the emerging planning movement from the turn of the century through the drafting of a Town Planning Ordinance in 1938 and its expanded version enacted in 1948, when the Dutch regained temporary control in Indonesia. As Roosmalen notes, “the enactment of the Town Planning Ordinance in 1948 underscores the continuity in town planning practice before and after Indonesian independence” (116).
Providing sufficient health care services to Indonesia’s burgeoning urban populations was another challenge of modernization. Murakami describes the diverging circumstances of medical personnel between the late colonial and early national periods. The new Indonesian state took on responsibility for determining how many health providers were needed and where they would practice. This newly legalized system in 1951 resulted in fewer care providers than before the regulated process.
Basundoro’s fascinating examination of Malang’s two alun-alun offers a cogent case of Indonesian resistance to the power expressed symbolically by Dutch appropriation (and then by the Japanese occupiers) of the traditional core of town life. Here the culturally sensitive Karsten is seen in his role as a colonial planner aiding in creating a place that engendered decades of resistance by the indigenous population, a place where the struggle for independence was conducted in everyday rituals.
The editors’ introductory essay skillfully weaves the observations of its contributors into a compelling critique of conventional interpretation of modernization in Indonesia. But it is much more than just a précis of the enclosed essays. They fashion a collective meaning to the individual contributions, and in the process tease out unifying themes such as the search for order, the various meanings of progress, differing modes of state intervention, the effects of modernization on urban spatial changes and on race and culture, and how colonial institutions weathered the stormy interlude of Japanese occupation between the colonial and post-colonial. The collection, considered as a whole, supports the notion that “integration of imported technical innovation [owing to modernization] often called forth novel social or organizational changes” (2). It is not modernization emanating from its colonial roots per se, but rather the agency of the Indonesians to harness modernization processes in the post-colonial world, that is celebrated in this very important work. This collection will undoubtedly inspire fresh new research on the colonial/post-colonial nexus.
Christopher Silver
University of Florida, Gainesville, USA
pp. 491-193