Article Nature and Space

ENE: Nature and Space

Everyday resilience, 0(0) 1–23
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in North Jakarta’s kampungs DOI: 10.1177/2514848619853985

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Brittany Betteridge and Sophie Webber

University of Sydney, Australia

Abstract
In the kampungs of North Jakarta, people make their lives in the face of a variety of
transformations. While Jakarta has always experienced flooding from the coast and from its
rivers, flooding is getting worse, and has dramatic effects on kampungs and their residents.
At the same time, flood mitigation efforts by the government of Jakarta involve new
infrastructures, such as sea walls and land reclamation, which interrupt livelihood practices in
the kampungs and have led to violent evictions. Residents of North Jakarta’s kampungs must
negotiate the surprise impacts of both flooding and the government’s attempts to manage
flooding. In this article, we catalogue the social and material practices that support life and
livelihoods in the contexts of these urban environmental transformations, drawing from
fieldwork conducted in three North Jakarta kampungs and from recent critical geographical
research about urban resilience and urban political ecologies. We describe these practices as
everyday acts of resilience, reworking, and resistance. These everyday practices are social and
material, drawing from and remaking social and material relations. Although everyday practices of
resilience, reworking, and resistance require investments in social relations, we also demonstrate
that the dividends filter through existing power structures in the kampungs.

Keywords
Climate change, eviction, flood mitigation, Jakarta, Indonesia, urban resilience

Introduction
In this article we explore how residents of Jakarta’s kampungs make their lives amidst a
variety of environmental and governmental transformations. We show that residents of three
kampungs respond to both flooding and governmental attempts to manage flooding by
practicing resilience, reworking, and resistance. Severe flooding from both rivers and the
Bay is common in Jakarta. Mainstream accounts of the causes of flooding in the city point to
inadequate flood management infrastructure and often blame kampung residents for
polluting the rivers and disrupting flood management. By centring kampung residents’
everyday practices in responses to these disruptions, we complicate ‘received narratives’

Corresponding author:
Sophie Webber, School of Geosciences, University of Sydney, Madsen Building, Camperdown, NSW 2008, Australia.
Email: [email protected]
2 ENE: Nature and Space 0(0)

(Katz, 2017: 597) about kampungs’ resilience, and how resilience ought to be constructed to
flooding. We demonstrate that kampung residents perform social and material practices of
resilience, reworking, and resistance (building on Katz, 2004). These practices are socially
and spatially diverse, sometimes drawing on collective resources and sometimes conflicting
with these resources. Drawing together recent geographical research on Situated Urban
Political Ecologies (SUPEs) and urban resilience, our theoretical contribution is to offer
a critical reformulation of resilience as an everyday practice. Revealing the strategies of
kampung residents also allows us to demonstrate the limits to resilience and show that it
must also be paired with more overtly redistributive or oppositional practices of reworking
and resistance. Although our focus is North Jakarta, the conceptual formulation of
resilience, reworking, and resistance may be relevant to understanding and responding to
conflicts over environmental change, urban infrastructure development, and spaces for the
most vulnerable in contemporary cities.
Jakarta is an illuminative case for understanding urban resilience due to its physical
geography and policy responses to flooding. Jakarta’s vulnerability to flooding has ‘both
human and nonhuman’ makers (Colven, 2017: 254; Padawangi and Douglass, 2015). Jakarta
is projected to be 80% below sea level by 2030 (WitteveenþBos, 2015). In part, this is due to
rapid land subsidence, which averages 7.5 centimetres a year across the city and is especially
pronounced in coastal North Jakarta where it reaches 20 centimetres per year (Abidin et al.,
2011). Factors contributing to subsidence include excessive groundwater extraction and the
compaction and consolidation of alluvial soil amidst rapid urban development (Abidin et al.,
2011; Firman et al., 2011). Projected sea level rise and increased intensity of storm surges due
to climate change multiply these risks (Ward et al., 2011). In addition to coastal floods,
Jakarta experiences floods from its many rivers during monsoonal rains, which are
exacerbated by land use changes upstream, urbanisation, and the channelisation of the
rivers (Padawangi and Douglass, 2015). As a growing amount of research about Jakarta
shows, coastal and riverine flooding is both common and a burden for kampung residents
(e.g. Hellman, 2015). Now, the city is being reconfigured for the socio-ecological project of
‘urban resilience’ to flooding through large urban infrastructures, land reclamation projects,
and forcible eviction of kampungs. Thus, kampung residents must also endure associated
transformations such as eviction, land reclamation, and uneven access to basic and flood
mitigation infrastructure.
The definition and idea of ‘kampung’ is contested in both the scholarly literature and by
government officials, planners, and city residents. The word literally translates as ‘village’.
In Jakarta, we translate kampungs as ‘urban villages’ – popular neighbourhoods between
large developments, open spaces, and high-rise housing throughout the city (see also
McFarlane and Silver, 2017a).1 Kampungs are also defined by their ‘social networks
[that. . .] provide sustenance and livelihood support’ (Leitner and Sheppard, 2018: 440),
including, for instance, communal savings groups. Some kampung are as old as the
colonial era and have been heavily invested in by occupants and governments over time,
while others exist in marginal locations and are sites of extreme poverty. In Jakarta, not all
kampungs are illegal settlements without formal land titles, but these kampung residents are
often engaged in informal sector activities, including employment.
Much of the existing literature about kampungs in North Jakarta analyses flooding in
relation to urban resilience, seeking to evaluate residents’ or neighbourhoods’ differential
abilities to withstand these shock events (e.g. Marfai et al., 2015). In contrast, we advance a
form of ‘critical resilience’, extending recent geographical research about resilience that is
attentive to power, agency, and spatiality, and questions the assumption that resilience is a
normative good to which vulnerable peoples should aspire (Wilson, 2018). We contribute to
Betteridge and Webber 3

recent debates about the utility of the idea of urban resilience, in particular demonstrating
the continued urgency of the question: resilience for whom? (Davoudi, 2012; Meerow and
Newell, 2016). To do this, we catalogue the way that residents get by in the face of
environmental and governmental threats, using practices that we categorise as acts of
everyday resilience, reworking, and resistance (following Katz, 2004). As Simone (2014:
214) argues in his study of Jakarta, kampungs should not only be defined or analysed as
a ‘by-product of [the] politics’ of colonialism and capitalist urbanisation; kampungs are
instead the ‘precondition for politics’ in the city. As a result, cataloguing social and
material practices and relations in kampungs may, in Simone’s (2014: 214) words,
uncover the ‘potentialities of radical political change’. Or, adapting Katz (2017: 599) and
her ‘minor theory’, ‘indexing the ways these [environmental and governmental] problems are
encountered and lived, refused and reimagined in different forms, places and scales. . . might
open new means to respond to them’.
In building this critical version of resilience, we draw on the contributions of SUPE
(Lawhon et al., 2014, 2016) and its emphasis on the politics of social and material
relations (McFarlane and Silver, 2017a). In particular, we borrow from SUPE the optic
of everyday practices as formative of city-making and being attentive to the distributed
and diffuse power relations of cities of the Global South2 (Lawhon et al., 2014). This
focus on everyday practices illuminates how processes of neoliberalisation, resilience
building, and environmental governance at the urban scale are experienced, negotiated,
and rejected in kampungs.
This argument draws from research in North Jakarta which shows the disjunctures
between elite visions for urban resilience and the everyday practices of kampung residents.
The methodological approach centred on collecting personal narrations from kampung
residents of their everyday experiences (rather than aggregate assessments of socio-
economic status or a suburban scale plan for community adaptation). The research was
conducted over a seven-week period in June and July 2017. During this time, 25 semi-
structured interviews were undertaken in three kampungs in North Jakarta: Kampung
Kerang Ijo, Kampung Tembok Bolong, and Kampung Akuarium (see Figure 1). Local
NGOs and community leaders introduced us to the communities and research
participants, and also provided suggestions about potential interviewees that would
capture diverse livelihood experiences within the kampungs. The interviews were
conducted in Bahasa Indonesia (by one of the authors), and then translated to English
and coded according to the types of responses to environmental and environmental
governance threats. These interviews were supplemented with participant observation and
nongkrong (hanging out) to gain further insights into the politics and use of community
places and infrastructure. Nongkrong loosely translates from the verb ‘to squat’, referring to
the stance of Indonesian men engaging in the practice. While ‘hanging out’ sounds casual,
nongkrong serves an important role in building social relationships, and is ubiquitous in
Jakarta streetscapes. It was also an important practice in gaining trust as a visitor to the
kampungs. This was further strengthened through connections with NGOs who work
alongside the kampung residents in their struggles against eviction.

Reorienting urban resilience

Much of the literature on resilience and policy responses to flooding in Jakarta focuses on
relative vulnerability to flooding, conducting comparison at the city scale (or large suburban
scale) of physical exposure, governance institutions or demographic characteristics (e.g.
Akmalah and Griggs, 2011; Caljouw et al., 2005; Dickson et al., 2012; Firman et al., 2011;
4 ENE: Nature and Space 0(0)

Figure 1. Map of the three kampungs in North Jakarta.

Renald et al., 2016; Sunarharum et al., 2014). These studies have found the physically
vulnerable areas in the city, such as North Jakarta, and demonstrated the multiplying
effects of subsidence and climate change on flooding. But they tell us less about how
neighbourhoods and individuals get by in the face of multiple threats to their livelihoods
and communities. In contrast, Hellman (2015) uses ethnographic research methods to
assess responses to flooding in kampungs along the banks of the Ciliwung River, finding
that local leaders and local social practices are important for resilience. Similarly, van
Voorst (2015, 2016) shows that there are multiple ways within kampungs that people
prepare for and adapt to disaster. These different modes of responding – labelled ‘risk
styles’ – are influenced by self-determination, patronage, and lobbying. Common across
this research is an emphasis on increasing urban and disaster resilience so that kampung
residents can reduce their vulnerabilities to floods and other uncertainties and rebound
after they have occurred. Resilience, in other words, is apolitically framed as a normative
state towards which kampungs and their residents should progress (except see Padawangi and
Douglass, 2015). This focus overlooks the impact of urban resilience projects themselves in
creating new vulnerabilities in kampungs.
Urban resilience has recently been subject to critique from a number of scholars. Meerow
et al. (2016) synthesise that urban resilience is ‘the ability of an urban system . . . to maintain
Betteridge and Webber 5

or rapidly return to desired functions in the face of a disturbance, to adapt to change, and to
quickly transform systems that limit current or future adaptive capacity’ (39). The idea and
practice of urban resilience is criticised for being too vague, or even contradictory – for
instance whether its focus is on ‘bouncing back’ to previous states or adapting into new ones
(Davoudi, 2012). Many social scientists also dispute using a concept originally formulated
for ecosystems to describe, and intervene in, cities or other social systems (Brown, 2013;
MacKinnon and Derickson, 2012). Accordingly, the metaphor of resilience naturalises
crises, and thereby asks cities and their citizens to endure existing conditions rather than
seek political and ecological alternatives (Evans and Reid, 2013). For MacKinnon and
Derickson (2012), urban resilience implies community and individual responsibility, and
brackets out political economic processes, institutions, and actors. And as Kaika (2017)
evocatively describes, urban resilience is used to ‘vaccinate citizens and environments . . ..
against larger doses of inequality and degradation in the future’ (89). As a result, scholars
suggest that a more just politics of urban resilience asks: for whom are we building this urban
resilience?
In building our understanding of urban resilience, we contribute to recent geographical
reformulations of the term that are more attentive to power and agency, and spatiality (e.g.
Brown, 2013; Wilson, 2018). For instance, rather than consider it a normative goal, Harris
et al. (2018) suggest that resilience is a negotiated process. Their concept of ‘negotiated
resilience’ recognises that resilience is not a given, rather it must be negotiated across time
and space, by different actors and institutions. Resilience, in other words, is an ‘emergent
process through which ideals, policies and agendas are sought’ (Harris et al., 2018: 198).
A focus on the processes and procedures through which resilience is negotiated responds to
Anderson’s (2015) demand that scholars ‘think again about the politics of resilience by
making the connections between resilience and specific economic-political apparatuses,
including neoliberalism, into a question to be explored rather than a presumption from
which analysis begins’ (60). Indeed, several scholars have suggested that resilience is no
synonym for neoliberalism, and resilient practices can become foundations for more
transformative political actions (e.g. DeVerteuil and Golubchikov, 2016; Nelson, 2014),
especially if it is focused on justice (Ziervogel et al., 2017).
Our contribution is to reorient the understanding of responses to (and policies and
practices to improve responses to) flooding and other associated urban interventions in
three ways. First, we propose that our understanding of resilience to flooding must
analytically and empirically foreground the everyday lived experiences of the communities
and individuals called to be the ‘sites’ of resilience activities, as situated in ‘local
environments, histories and metabolisms’ (Wakefield, 2018: 9). The idea of everyday
practices situated in specific urban contexts draws from the insights of SUPE – that
considering everyday practices can create more diverse understandings of urban
environmental challenges and processes and highlights the ‘ordinary practices of city-
making’ that might be generative of ‘radical’ changes (Lawhon et al., 2014; Pieterse, 2008;
see also Anderson, 2017 for a defence of the potential of the micropolitical). For McFarlane
and Silver (2017a), the idea of the everyday considers ‘how people cope, work together, deal
with threats and develop opportunities and invest their energies in the making of urban life’
(458). Using the optic of everyday experiences of practicing resilience, expands upon, and
responds to, McFarlane and Silver’s (2017a) demand that ‘we develop a better
understanding of how people make their lives in the city’ (458). In addition, the concept
of ‘everyday resilience’ highlights ‘specific grounded urban contexts’ and takes into account
‘locally situated processes, knowledges and norms’ as Ziervogel et al. (2017) suggest is
necessary.
6 ENE: Nature and Space 0(0)

Second, our concept of everyday resilience recognises a diversity of practices emerging

from uneven urban environments, following the theorising of Cindi Katz. In her study of
globalisation and development in rural Sudan and New York City, Katz (2004) focuses on
how people ‘stay afloat and even reformulate the conditions and possibilities of their
everyday lives’ (x). Across the uneven, changing circumstances of globalisation and
development, there were a range of responses; Katz labels these resilience, reworking, and
resistance. Katz (2004) defines resilience as those ‘small acts . . . which fostered ways to get by
each day’ (245). Social and material practices of resilience do not explicitly undermine the
expansion of capitalist development – or neoliberalism (Slater, 2014; Walker and Cooper,
2011). But, in their emphasis on caring and neighbouring, these practices enable survival,
and sometimes dignity. In turn, reworking highlights those practices that ‘alter the
conditions of people’s existence to enable more workable lives’ (Katz, 2004: 247). Where
resilience is focused on maintenance, reworking is more purposeful in its attempts to
redistribute social relations and resources. Resistance is much rarer, requiring not only
the repurposing of resources through ‘tactics’ that encroach or recuperate, but positive
visions of what could be (cf. Bayat, 1997; Scott, 1987). For Katz, resilience and reworking
are not always acts of resistance because the latter requires oppositional, and collective,
consciousness.
Using Katz’s formulation, it is clear that there are shortfalls to focusing exclusively on
resilience as the salve for urban environmental transformations in Jakarta. Resilience
remains an inherently conservative practice, as it emphasises maintaining existing (or
prior) conditions. Yet, reworking and resistance often require, or spring from, practices of
resilience. When resilience is paired with reworking and resistance, it can illuminate the
diversity of social and material practices of getting by.
The third key component of reorienting resilience is to highlight the importance of social
and material relations. Within the SUPE literature, these social and material relations –
often called social and material ‘infrastructure’ (see McFarlane and Silver, 2017a; Simone,
2004) – are shown to be formative of the flows, and blockages, of urban goods and services –
including, but not limited to water, sewerage, and energy (Kooy et al., 2018; Loftus, 2012;
McFarlane and Silver, 2017b; Silver, 2015; Swyngedouw, 2004). Indeed, the multiple
connections between people and their environments, McFarlane and Silver (2017a)
suggest, are essential to ‘sustain[ing] urban life’ (463). But, these social and material
relations are not static (nor are they measures of economic potential, as per social
capital); they require maintenance, and people work them to differing degrees. In other
words, the social and material relations that are essential to resilience, reworking, and
resistance are uneven, socially and spatially. Below, by foregrounding the everyday, we
demonstrate the ways that residents of North Jakarta’s kampungs practice everyday
resilience, reworking, and resistance by working material and social relations. We show,
also, that these practices and relations are unevenly distributed and differentially
mobilised throughout the kampungs.

Getting by in North Jakarta’s kampungs

North Jakarta was the centralised site of Dutch occupation, and echoes of this remain in the
decaying colonial infrastructure scattered around the historic port area (Silver, 2008).
Gleaming mega-developments and centres of formal postcolonial economic activity have
subsequently shifted to less environmentally precarious areas in central and southern
Jakarta. But more recently, political and economic elites imagine North Jakarta as the
final frontier for urban development in the city (Kusno, 2013). Its mixture of industrial
Betteridge and Webber 7

zones, maritime industries, marginalised urban settlements, traditional fishing communities

on stilted houses, and pockets of more affluent Chinese-Indonesian residents are now slated
for major infrastructure and other developments by the provincial government of Jakarta, in
part to protect the city and its residents from climate changes and flooding (see Figure 2).3
Eviction of kampungs is an integral component of these infrastructure projects, to reclaim
potential profitable sites but also to ‘[clear] out ‘‘illegal’’ residents, relocating them to
‘‘proper’’ housing . . . to take up ‘‘proper’’ jobs’ (Leitner et al., 2017: 198). These projects
are part of ‘enduring desires to develop Jakarta as a competitive world-class city . . . [for
economic] and political elites’ (Colven, 2017: 258). For kampung residents, these
environmental governance interventions can contribute to vulnerability as much as any
‘natural’ disaster. As we outline below, kampung residents experience the interconnected
shocks of flooding, eviction, and infrastructure developments including land reclamation.
This research was conducted in Kampung Kerang Ijo, Kampung Tembok Bolong, and
Kampung Akuarium, all in North Jakarta (see Figure 1). Kampung Kerang Ijo and
Kampung Tembok Bolong are located close to the Muara Angke port area in Pluit sub-
district, while Kampung Akuarium is located closer to Jakarta’s Old Town in the sub-district
of Penjaringan. Residents of all three kampungs generate income through selling food and
snacks, water and gas bottles, having a warung (small shop), or from plastic scavenging. In
Kampung Kerang Ijo, the main industry is green mussel cultivation and shelling, traditional
fishing, and ship recovery and repair. In Kampung Tembok Bolong, many work nearby as
labourers or fish sellers in the port area. In Kampung Akuarium, many residents used to own
shops in a Fish Market,4 or are fisherman or other sellers. Kampung Akuarium and

Figure 2. North Jakarta fishing infrastructure overshadowed by new apartments and malls. Source: Photo
by Author, July 2017.
8 ENE: Nature and Space 0(0)

Kampung Tembok Bolong are considered ‘illegal’ by the DKI administration. Kampung
Kerang Ijo is considered ‘legal’ (at least tacitly by the Government): residents in Kampung
Kerang Ijo have ‘rights to build’, their dwellings are recognised by their kelurahan (lowest
level of district government) and their houses are not in violation of any standing Public
Order declarations – but this does not guarantee long-term land security under Jakarta’s
spatial plan.
Flooding is both a common and unexpected event in North Jakarta’s kampungs. It can
include daily tidal flooding, overflowing drainage canals, or sudden infrastructure failures
such as coastal dyke collapse or the 2016 collapse of a dam wall around the Muara Angke
port. One kampung resident describes: ‘[small] tidal floods happen every month . . .. [But] one
time, before fasting month last year [May 2016], I was frightened . . . it was like this [indicates
level up to chest] . . .. I told my husband there was a tsunami!’5 Major flooding events are so
prominent, they are colloquially predicted on ‘five year cycles’ (Hellman, 2015). In 2002,
2007, and 2013 major flooding events shut down everyday life in the city. In 2013, the flood
event was exacerbated by the failure of a levy. As a result, 75% of the city was breached by
flood waters, including the more affluent southern areas of the city (Padawangi and
Douglass, 2015). Kampung residents discussed their concerns about flooding during
interviews. Bu Dita,6 who sells steamed rice dishes, discusses that ‘during flooding times,
prices will rise . . . water, gas of course, and vegetables . . .. My income is less during flood, as
buyers cannot enter . . .. Last big flood, I stopped selling rice . . . for five days I was closed’.7
Kampung residents, however, were just as wary of the environmental governance
interventions and infrastructures that purported to address flooding. One prominent
infrastructure development is the speculative Great Garuda Sea Wall (GGSW). The
project involves a combination of dikes to create an offshore retention lake and will
reclaim more than one thousand hectares of land marketed as prime real estate. Political
(national and provincial), economic (property developers), and technical (Dutch engineers)
elites claim that the dredging in Jakarta Bay to create 17 man made islands can both increase
resilience to flooding along the coast, as well as, through the sale of the land, provide
financing for the sea wall itself (Colven, 2017). Because politicians and developers perceive
land in the rest of the city to be too difficult to acquire and agglomerate (Leitner and
Sheppard, 2018), these islands are an attractive commercial opportunity. In addition, the
GGSW, and other infrastructure projects in North Jakarta, are projected by proponents to
be ‘catalysts’ for further private investment and development to ‘revitalise this neglected part
of the city’ (Colven, 2017: 258).
But, for kampung residents, whose livelihoods are centred on maritime industries
including fishing and seafood processing, land reclamation has been felt very differently –
not as a technological innovation or commercial boon, but as a livelihood threat. Residents
reported that land reclamation destroyed the quantity and quality of the fish and mussels.
One fisherman in Kampung Akuarium commented on the more austere catch conditions:
‘since reclamation, instead of four miles, I have to go eight miles [to fish] . . . And of course,
the quality and result is way less than before reclamation – the sea has been disturbed’.8
A green mussel cultivator in Kampung Kerang Ijo explains ‘there’s less meat in the mussels
since reclamation . . .. I get less per bucket [of green mussels]’.9 Land reclamation has
occurred with no compensation for kampung residents, or opportunities to transition
livelihoods away from maritime industries.
Evictions have historically been central to the infrastructural and global-city goals of
Jakarta’s economic and political elites, justified by irregular land titling (see, e.g.
Sheppard, 2006; Silver, 2008). Although many kampungs have been granted some form of
legal recognition over time, national and provincial regulations have the power to designate
Betteridge and Webber 9

and redesignate them as legal or illegal based on proximity to water bodies, green spaces,
railroad tracks, bridges, and others (Leitner and Sheppard, 2018). Being designated illegal
has legitimated violent dispossessions. During the administration of Governor Ahok
between 2014 and 2017, evictions intensified, with an estimated displacement of over five
thousand families and five thousand businesses in 2016 alone (Lembaga Bantuan Hukum
Jakarta, 2017). According to political officials, evictions serve to reclaim space for flood
mitigation and green space (Leitner et al., 2017), as well as retain ‘public order’ and control
(Lembaga Bantuan Hukum Jakarta, 2017). In the case of Kampung Akuarium, Governor
Ahok cited the need for flooding infrastructure as well as the economic revitalisation of the
area (Wijaya, 2016). In addition, evictions allow large real estate developments and the
formalisation of kampung life.
For kampung residents, eviction involves the destruction of their social and material
relations. As one Kampung Akuarium resident describes:

I’ve talked with people with concern for urban kampung, . . . with citizens who believe that for
the progress of the city, there must be good infrastructure . . .. [They think] that we are stupid,
not grateful. They agree with the government, according to them we are an enemy . . .. But,
I think they only see the physical they don’t see the social.10

Residents of ‘legal’ kampungs are compensated (generally at below market rates; Leitner and
Sheppard, 2018), but those in ‘illegally’ designated kampungs are often not. Eviction is
financially disruptive, with relocation options – when offered – involving a moving to
rusunawa11 (low-cost rental flats) that are hours from coastal livelihoods. In these new
flats, residents also must pay rent, even while opportunities for them to pursue economic
activities, such as cooking for their warung, are curtailed. The cost of rent, as well as limits in
opportunities for earning, erodes the ability to generate savings that might help when there
are livelihood disruptions.12
In all three of our case study sites, eviction was a threat. Kampung Akuarium was evicted
and bulldozed by army and police personnel on 11 April 2016. Residents were given only 11
days’ notice of the eviction from the Government.13 Many families returned almost
immediately after the eviction. In one resident’s words: ‘if we return . . . we still have rights
here, we can guard here’.14 Some have returned and rebuilt over time or perhaps have sent
one family member for work purposes. As described by Bu Yuli, ‘we stayed in our small boat
behind KA [after eviction]. . .later, we build the house again, my family together, half
working and half resting’.15 Some families have not returned at all. Residents of
Kampung Tembok Bolong had experienced pushback evictions from the port area four
times over the past 15 years, with the name of the kampung changing with each change.
Many residents in this kampung did not possess a KTP-DKI16 (Jakarta Identity Card),
making them especially vulnerable to eviction. One long-term resident of Kampung
Tembok Bolong explains: ‘here, there is a lot of immigration from [rural] kampung to
Jakarta, their documentation is also still for their [rural] area . . . at an absolute minimum,
forty percent [in Tembok Bolong] don’t have DKI documentation’.17 For Kampung Kerang
Ijo eviction was considered a future threat especially given the intensification of evictions
over the last few years, prompting community leaders to seek inclusion in the political
contract alongside other kampung.18
Everyday practices of resilience, reworking, and resistance, therefore, are equally in
response to environmental threats such as flooding, as they are to new infrastructures and
interventions, such as sea walls, land reclamations, and evictions. Kampung residents
calculate how long these shocks will last and how best to manoeuvre their social and
material relations to respond to them. As a result, kampung residents use different and
10 ENE: Nature and Space 0(0)

sometimes conflicting strategies to respond to multi-faceted shocks across and within

kampung.

Everyday resilience
Social and material relations that sustain urban life and communal structures of care were
important in all three kampungs environments. As described in interviews, these everyday
acts of care include gotong royong (mutual aid or assistance) such as social support and
assistance for funerals, communal gardening, in-kind sharing of food and cooking materials,
and giving family and relatives small loans. ‘Here, the citizens work together: if there’s a
party, wedding, we help. . .if there is joy, if there is sadness, there is [support], we work
together to help’.19 In the face of shock events, such as flooding, kampung residents draw
on these structures of communal care in order to return, as much as possible, to previous
livelihoods. After flooding events, people describe activities that include cleaning, sweeping,
and repairing homes communally while listening to dangdut (Indonesian folk music),
collectively building bamboo or wooden rafts to be able to navigate through flood waters,
and staying at the homes of friends and relatives. After evictions, residents reported that they
could use their social relations as a way to retain access to employment opportunities, such
as a maritime job, or to access financial assistance to continue pursuing their livelihoods.
The importance of these social relations was obvious when residents discussed how to
recommence their economic activities after the 2016 eviction event in Kampung Akuarium.
Bu Intan has lived in Kampung Akuarium for 40 years and supports her livelihood by selling
gas canisters. After the eviction event, she rebuilt using the rubble of her previous house. Bu
Intan describes the scenario:

We try as normal maybe. Why do we say, ‘normal maybe’? Maybe, her husband [indicates to
other kampung resident] works closer to here and he keeps working, or for example, the
fishermen keep going to sea. . .I must search by myself for a new place to trade, however for
the business capital I may be able to borrow [from other kampung residents or
family]. . .Although if we are in a new place, we haven’t met the people around there yet, we
don’t know who we should ask for help.20

In this quote, Bu Intan describes that she can draw on her social links to the other resident’s
husband who keeps working, or the fisherman that goes out to sea, to borrow money for a loan
to restart her business after a disruption. Moving to a new area would mean not knowing
where to set up shop without causing a conflict, and not having access to financial and
emotional support in establishing again. Bu Intan describes that her one dream was for
Kampung Akuarium ‘to return, maybe the buildings will not be the same as before, but our
life will be like before. . .with community, with gotong royong, with togetherness. . .it is my only
hope’. This illustrates that in addition to the connection to place and feelings of affiliation,
kampung relationships were crucial for being able to maintain livelihoods.
For areas that have already experienced eviction, such as Kampung Akuarium and
Tembok Bolong, the practice was to rebuild the kampung as closely as possible to its
prior state, and thereby maintain social structures. Bu Nunung was a Bu RT21
(community leader). When the kampung was evicted, the formal administrative unit
ended, her role and title were removed and the RT building was destroyed. But, Bu
Nunung saw that her role as Bu RT did not change during the eviction in Kampung
Akuarium. This included her duties to acquire sembako22 (groceries) from outside groups,
distribute the sembako, co-ordinate large social events (Idul Fitri23 or funerals, for example),
and attempt to facilitate access to healthcare and education for other kampung members.
Betteridge and Webber 11

Another key service that had to be negotiated after the eviction in order to get by in
Kampung Akuarium was access to water and electricity. The physical infrastructure for
water and electricity was removed during the eviction event. Once residents moved back
into the kampung, responsibilities were delegated to residents to physically collect water
from the well in nearby Kampung Kerapu. Later, they were able to re-direct water from
Kampung Kerapu using a water pump. Responsibility for rigging an electricity network was
also delegated. There were three people responsible for collecting water, and two for the
electricity connection; these residents were referred to as the caretakers.24 A responsibility
board (see Figure 3) lays out these communal practices of everyday resilience outside the
home of a leader in the community. During our return visits to the kampung, responsibilities
had been revised, as each role was subject to negotiation and change over time. As residents
became too busy, they were replaced.25 Another consideration in the delegation of these
responsibilities was that those with the ‘most understanding of waterflows and blockages’
and ‘how to connect to existing electrical fields and safety against electrical surges’26 should
take on the roles. These everyday social and material practices of resilience demonstrate an
elasticity in order to respond to physical infrastructural challenges.
Respondents generally assumed that these social relations did not exist outside kampungs.
For example, Bu Anita said that in a rusunawa you were more fenced off from each other,
and that made it more difficult to look out for each other.27 Residents often said that less
vibrant social relations were directly related to increased travel times to work (because the
rusunawa is some 20 kilometres from sites of economic activities), increased costs for
housing and other essential services such as water, and livelihood disruptions. At home,
Bu Anita discussed, rather than working and maintaining community, residents only sleep.
Just as collective relations constitute a major component of resilience, the dismantling of

Figure 3. Responsibility board in Kampung Akuarium. Source: Photo by Author, July 2017.
12 ENE: Nature and Space 0(0)

kampung life and livelihoods is considered a threat to practices of everyday resilience in

North Jakarta.

Everyday reworking
Sometimes practising everyday resilience was insufficient in the face of irreversible changes to
livelihoods and homes. Instead, kampung residents had to engage in strategies that we call
‘reworking’, after Katz (2004) – practices that rather than seeking to maintain existing
conditions, reclaim social and material resources, and retool and retrain to take advantage
of new livelihood opportunities. These reworking responses emerged in response to flooding,
land reclamation, and eviction. After successive evictions in Kampung Tembok Bolong, the
community had to be rebuilt. Kampung residents used their environmental knowledge to
select the appropriate new site to rebuild, and ensured they rebuilt at an elevation by using
bamboo slats; these practices sought to avoid the effects of flooding or minimise losses. For
fisherman affected by reclamation, reworking strategies included selling their boats,
transitioning to larger squid fishing ventures, constituting working groups to fundraise to
build a new pier, attempting to reskill in boat repair, or move to a more land-based
livelihood. In cases of eviction, reworking often meant strategies such as communal
scavenging to rebuild housing.
Practices of reworking show the interplay of social relations and physical infrastructures.
In Kampung Akuarium, the municipal government constructed a 5 metre concrete wall
around the seaward side of the kampung after the eviction. The wall splinters access
between residents and their small boats at the back of the kampung. It also isolates the
kampung, limiting access to a small path behind a museum, or by a small wooden punt
across a narrow river that costs 2000 Indonesian Rupiah (0.15 USD). One resident, Bu Yuli,
described that the government demolished her house and her salty-fish snack business
because it was less than 7 metres from the nearby river.28 During the demolition Bu
Yuli’s bamboo benches, used to dry and condition her salty-fish, were destroyed. But,
given the uncertainties of future demolition and new infrastructure, she was unwilling to
rebuild the bamboo benches. Instead, Bu Yuli described herself as being an ‘orang sabar’
(patient person) and also an ‘orang pandai’ (clever person). Instead of investing in new
business materials, Bu Yuli would rework the new barrier wall. Using a net to transport
her fish and shake out the initial dampness, she would salt and place her fish on top of the 5
metre sea wall. Due to the sea breeze, she boasted that she could dry her fish in only half an
hour to an hour. Although Bu Yuli was able to rework the wall for drying, the wall made the
practice of selling more difficult. Bu Yuli was confined to selling her salty fish outside her
home or paying for a boat fare to Kampung Luar Batang where she could sell her fish from a
carrying basket. Bu Yuli’s stand-by approach was common in the face of these uncertainties.
In Kampung Tembok Bolong, walls also proved to be a source of contestations over
space. Here, two walls were constructed by the local government with the justification that
they would prevent tidal flooding. The first, built in December 2016, runs parallel to the
Tembok Bolong settlement. This wall severs access to the Pelelangan port area. The other
wall, built in May 2017, runs parallel to the shoreline, making it difficult to get work
equipment and wares down to the Muara Angke port. Pak Budi, who works as a fish
seller in the port area, states: ‘access to the port now requires using a much
longer route on personal motorbike, meaning a rise in transportation costs. Walking is
more comfortable’.29 Pak Budi described the suddenness of government interventions:
‘They [the government] do not think of the impact of the construction on the community.
They are arrogant and just do it with no prior socialisation [consultation] or discussion with
Betteridge and Webber 13

the community. They just go do it by themselves’. In addition to the surprise of these walls,
according to the kampung residents they do not serve the purpose of protecting from
flooding. The location, in orientation and elevation, was insufficient for this task, and
kampung residents felt that regenerating mangrove forests would be more suitable for
flood protection in this coastal area. Projects promised by the government, such as a
functional bridge for the users of the Muara Angke harbour area, never arrived. The
unpredictable implementation of physical infrastructure makes it difficult to pre-empt or
plan, even for those with more anticipatory livelihood practices.
Given the politics and uncertainties about future infrastructures in the kampungs, the
residents of Tembok Bolong decided to rework their existing physical environment. Pak
Budi declared that they needed to use their ‘own personal initiative’ in responding to the
walls that blocked access to the port area. Further, he felt that this initiative needed ‘to look
out for everyone’s interests to be able to enter the port area’. In particular, he repurposed the
wall by creating a pintu mini (mini-door; Figure 4). He created a hole in the wall near an open
area of the kampung that is usually used for parking or dumping rubbish.
Despite the stated ambition to look out for everyone in the kampung and their need to
access the port area, some residents complained that the door was too small for a cart to use,
and that its location was inconvenient. One resident described that they did not want the
wall to be construed as ‘trouble-making’, given their precarious status of the community.30
But, Pak Budi justified the size and position by appealing to his long-standing area and
environmental knowledge. He stated that he had lived in the Muara Angke area for 21 years,
and therefore knew that the door would not create structural instabilities or create risks of
flooding. The door would not be seen as ‘trouble-making’ either, as it met ‘standard
specifications’. The mini-door was, he felt, strategic for the kampung. Notably, Pak Budi
felt that his social relations supported his actions, and also that these connections reached
out of the kampung in order to be able to justify the action to Maritime officials as necessary.

Figure 4. Mini-door in Kampung Tembok Bolong. Source: Photo by Author, July 2017.
14 ENE: Nature and Space 0(0)

This degree of calculated confidence and knowledge as a practice of reworking is not

available to everyone in the kampung. The benefits of this reworking also accrue unevenly
– principally for those who work in fish auctioneering – because the route is still blocked for
larger vehicles and carts. In both of these cases, residents repurposed government-built
infrastructures, built their own infrastructure where it was lacking, while negotiating
through social relations.

Everyday resistance
The everyday practices of resilience and reworking allowed the residents of the kampungs to
get by in the face of these shocks. But, with the evictions and land reclamations, kampung
communities practiced what we call resistance (following Katz, 2004) – mobilising
alternative visions of Jakarta in which they and their kampungs had a place. In response
to land reclamation, kampungs across North Jakarta built alliances to protest. The protests
coordinated several kampungs and drew together traditional fishing associations and
fishermen’s wives’ associations across North Jakarta. These protests demanded the
cessation of land reclamation, based on the environmental impact and destruction of
fisherman’s livelihoods. The series of protests, in April, May, and November 2016, took
place in the streets of Jakarta with banners and megaphones on roadways, and rallying in
front of key strategic sites such as the offices of the Ministry of Environment and Forestry (in
Central Jakarta) and the ports through which you could access Pulau G (in Muara Angke).
Land reclamation had negatively affected fishing livelihoods on which many kampung
residents depended. But, this reclaimed land is to serve the city’s elite. Bu Titi, a green mussel
cultivator from Kampung Kerang Ijo, declared: ‘Why do only the rich people get to live at
sea? Why can’t we enter Pulau G?’31 Bu Titi noted that the AMDAL32 (Environmental
Impact Assessment) that greenlighted the Jakarta Bay reclamation was released only one
day before the consultation with the local stakeholders. This left fisherman unaware of the
development and its environmental impact and unprepared to engage with the consultation
process. Bu Titi coordinated and connected with JRMK33 (The Urban Poor Network) in
order to bring people together to protest reclamation. The protests also attracted local media
attention, creating more awareness of the environmental issues in Jakarta Bay. Although
reclamation went ahead,34 through this protest movement kampung residents shifted power
dynamics and intervened in the governance system; with external alliances and protests the
kampung residents practiced everyday resistance. These same alliances are being used to
demand compensation for affected fisherman for their lost livelihoods due to the reclamation
project.
The alliances across kampungs and labour groups against the land reclamation (and
against eviction) also contributed to new political movements in Jakarta. The cross-
kampung alliances, in conjunction with links to NGOs such as the Urban Poor
Consortium (UPC) and JRMK were essential to the political contract negotiated through
the 2017 Gubernatorial campaign that sought to protect the tenure of kampung land. UPC
and JRMK brokered these political contracts with current Governor Anies Baswedan and
Deputy Governor Sandiaga Uno – the Anies-Sandi pair – focused on the legalisation of
kampung lands, affordable housing, and livelihood transitions (Padawangi, 2017). The
alliances extended across all three kampungs considered here, but community leaders
from Kampung Akuarium and Kampung Kerang Ijo in particular worked with the
NGOs to encourage residents to vote for Anies-Sandi. As the pair won the election in
April 2017, the supposedly legally binding contracts will protect 26 kampungs from
eviction. Key actors who engineered the political contract and social movement were
Betteridge and Webber 15

cynical about prospects for their kampungs immediately after the elections (Padawangi,
2017). Nonetheless, the number of forcible evictions has decreased dramatically, and the
three kampungs discussed here have been protected from eviction by the political contract.
However, the Jakarta Legal Aid Institute still recorded 79 cases of eviction between January
and September of 2018 with 75% of these evictions advanced by the DKI Jakarta Provincial
Government for public works and control, concentrated in less socially connected kampungs
and businesses (Lembaga Bantuan Hukum Jakarta, 2018).
During the eviction in Kampung Akuarium, residents resisted and reasserted claims to
their kampung. Residents huddled together and encouraged each other during the
intimidation.35 The residents also assembled a portfolio of claims that supports their
rights to remain in place.36 First, most residents paid monthly building taxes on their
dwellings and had done so for many years. Second, residents of the kampung were all
recognised as KTP-DKI (Jakarta citizens, which is proven with a formal address). Third,
the kampung was served by functioning, and government-recognised RT before the eviction.
And finally, the eviction did not follow government processes, as they were given little notice
of the event and there was a lack of mediation. As described by Bu Intan, during the eviction
event ‘their [resident] rights were emptied under Ahok’.37 In contrast, kampung residents
continually drew from rights-based rhetoric, asserting their rights to physical space but also
to practice kampung social relations and lifestyles. Although returning to Kampung
Akuarium after the eviction is a form of resilience, it is also a form of everyday resistance
in staking a claim for the continued existence of kampungs.
Surviving in the kampung after the eviction leant on extant alliances and networks. The
residents acquired tents from JMP38 (Red and White Network), KSPI39 (Indonesia Trade
Union Confederation), and RSCC (Ratna Sarumpaet Crisis Centre). Basic groceries were also
provided by FPI40 (the Islamic Defenders’ Front) and JMP. Preliminary legal advice and
support was provided by HAPI41 (Indonesian Lawyers-Advocates and Non-Trial Lawyers),
and the residents later worked with LBH42 (Legal Aid Institute). In the aftermath of the
eviction, kampung leaders also put in a report to Komnas HAM43 (National Commission
for Human Rights). Connections with these NGOs and service providers were crucial as
residents searched through the rubble and scavenged from surrounding areas to rebuild
their homes.44 These alliances sustained residents and lay the foundations for the political
contract negotiated with Anies-Sandi. And they also contributed to the growing profile of the
Kampung, and other kampungs that had previously faced violent forced eviction – including
through local Indonesian media and political groups (Mariani, 2016), and international media
(e.g. Kimmelman, 2017; Sherwell, 2016).
As these examples suggests, it was often those who maintained social relations who were
able to consider more transformative resistance responses. This was maintained, and
invested in, in several different ways. Those residents that had lived in the area for an
extended period – 20 years or more – developed social relations with their neighbours and
therefore felt a tacit acceptance of their activities (such as Pak Budi, the mini-door creator).
They also had greater networks throughout the city, with access to NGOs or political
parties. These residents also had stronger material relations, with more permanent
incomes – perhaps from owning their own warung, a business with some assets, being a
low-level manager in a supply chain, or a leadership role in the community. These who could
pursue class-action suits and protests for eviction (as in Bu Intan’s case) or be organisers
against reclamation (as in Bu Titi’s case) were often community leaders. Sometimes, a
resident’s willingness to practice reworking or resistance was related to their own personal
interests, and their sense of permanence in the kampung. Similarly, residents had different
risk styles (Van Voorst, 2015), and different anticipatory practices that infiltrated their
16 ENE: Nature and Space 0(0)

decision-making calculus. In Pak Budi’s45 words, you have to be ‘brave’ to stand up to the
‘big people’.
Acts of resistance were rare, especially compared to tactics of resilience and reworking
described above. Kampung residents often spoke of returning to ‘biasa aja’ (the normal), and
used their social relations, and reworked physical infrastructures, in order to do so. Choices
between actions depended on the perceived duration of the shock: residents were more likely
to practice resistance in response to eviction in an attempt to counter the long-term
livelihood implications. But, for residents in Tembok Bolong, everyday resistance seemed
less likely to reap dividends than practicing resilience and reworking in the short-term as
they seemed resigned to being moved to a rusunawa and their informal economic activities
being halted. Acts of resistance were not always endorsed by all community members. And
importantly, as we explore now, the gains of reworking and resistance actions did not
translate evenly to kampung residents, but rather filtered through existing social and
material relations and power structures.

The uneven politics of everyday resilience, reworking, and resistance

Communal social relations and physical infrastructures were not able to be drawn on equally
by all members of the kampungs. Bu Marina was not able to draw from social relations and
instead relied on an individualised response. Bu Marina grew up in Tangerang, one of the
outer western suburbs of Jakarta, and had only recently moved to Kampung Kerang Ijo.
Her husband’s relatives lived overseas in Vietnam. This made Bu Marina and her husband
quite different because many of Kampung Kerang Ijo residents are originally from
Indramayu in West Java. Bu Marina also did not have permission to work, as her
husband believed it was her responsibility to look after her children only. Because of this,
Bu Marina did not participate in the green mussel shelling work that many women in the
community conducted. Community leaders were often coordinators of the green mussel
shelling, and it was these same leaders that were connected to anti-reclamation activism,
sources of financial loans, and knowledge points for community activities. Due to these
disconnections Bu Marina was unable to build social and material relations within the
Kerang Ijo community. As a result, Bu Marina, and her family, got by through drawing
down their own savings, and encouraging their young son to work raising sunken ships.
Who belongs in the kampung and is deserving of the benefits of communal care is also up
for debate. During Ramadan in Kampung Akuarium, 200 boxes of zakat fitrah sembako
(Islamic charity of groceries) were donated. There were 169 households in Akuarium and
debate about how to distribute the remaining 31 boxes. One community leader wanted to
keep the groceries in reserve, another to divide the 31 boxes among the volunteers and
members of the external alliances that had supported the kampung. A resident from
neighbouring Kampung Pasar Ikan believed that they were also entitled to these
donations, and that the Kampung Akuarium leader was unfairly hoarding the zakat fitrah
sembako. Pak Rudi, one resident of Kampung Akuarium said they he and his family refused
all sembako and support from outside groups, as these resources could never be fairly
distributed, and would therefore always cause conflict.46 He preferred to avoid the
conflict. Investing in, and drawing down, on social relations was often an individual choice.
There are also different visions for practices of resistance in the kampung. And, although
these strategies are pursued collectively, there is no consensus. In addition to the described
organising, residents of Kampung Akuarium sought to use the legal system in seeking
compensation through a class action suit in partnership with LBH. Others in the
kampung disagreed with this action, instead thinking that the negotiations should be
Betteridge and Webber 17

pursued through MUI47 (Indonesian Islamic Council). Pak Rudi48 argued that these
divisions were based around existing employment opportunities – those with businesses
near the Fish Market that were destroyed in the eviction event were more in favour of
oppositional politics, as they had a clearer claim to receive compensation. In other words,
those with a more secure position in the kampung were more able to engage in these protest
actions.
For some, resisting eviction or infrastructure was not desirable. Bu Yuli, for instance,
explained that she was being patient in order to wait for the new Anies-Sandi regime.49 She
said that she would never want to oppose the government outright: she was a kampung
person but she had aspirations for her daughter to get a good government job with a uniform
and therefore never wanted to do something oppositional. To her, voting in government
elections and prayer were the more ‘natural way of things’. Bu Yuli did not see a life for
herself beyond the kampung, but she did aspire to that for their children. For Bu Yuli, this
meant using her savings to get her daughters into school in neighbouring Kampung Luar
Batang, as it was a relatively ‘more affluent kampung with a good school’. Other respondents
articulated they would always be an ‘orang pinggiran’ or ‘orang kecil’ (edge person or small
person).50 Meanwhile, in Tembok Bolong, some kampung respondents mentioned that
‘kampungs had no long-term future’. They explained that the rusunawa could be more
comfortable and secure from eviction for their children, but the problem was they were
just too far away from places of work.51 Whether from pragmatism, or hope for a
middle-class life, some residents wanted to move beyond kampungs.
In general, people with stronger and more numerous social relations felt emboldened to
take oppositional practices. Kampung Akuarium and Kerang Ijo were, compared to
Tembok Bolong, more established communities with shared social relations built around
livelihoods and ‘home-town’ linkages. This is partly why Akuarium and Kerang Ijo could
practice resistance. The choices between resilience, reworking, or resistance were also tied to
the temporality of the threat. In response to flashes of flooding, residents practice short-term
resilience strategies. But, the existential threat of eviction required longer-term strategies to
cultivate NGO, political and other kampung linkages to secure more permanent livelihoods.
At the same time, residents like Bu Yuli and others in Tembok Bolong continued to question
the longevity of the kampung. They aspired to a more middle-class lifestyle outside the
kampung and accepted a kind of inevitability of being moved to a rusunawa. This did not
mean they wished to forego shared social relations and structures of care, but rather
represented their desire to escape the material conditions of kampungs following
evictions. The contradictions across different kinds of practices and conflicts between
different actions by members of kampung demonstrate the disjunctures of kampung
residents’ imagined futures.

Conclusions
In this article, we examine how kampung residents respond to the experiences of flooding,
eviction, land reclamation, and uneven and uncertain access to physical infrastructures.
While there is a growing literature that examines the threat of flooding in Jakarta, and
the resilience of residents to flooding, we focus on the interconnected and overlapping
threats of urban environmental changes and urban environmental governance
interventions. Empirically, we document how Kampung residents manage these diverse
transformations, showing that their practices can be understood as acts of resilience,
reworking, and resistance. Here, we analyse the everyday practices of kampung
communities, and the ways that they ‘make worlds in which they imagined they had
18 ENE: Nature and Space 0(0)

a place’ (Katz, 2004: 259). We examine the clash between attempts to engineer urban
resilience that disrupt livelihood practices and social relations essential to the
reproduction of kampungs. Residents of the kampungs are not silent in the face of these
transformations, even where the scope of the urban environmental changes and
interventions vastly exceed their everyday practices. Our conceptual contribution is to
provide a critical reformulation of resilience that focuses on everyday practices and is
therefore attentive to the macro-structural processes of urban political ecologies while
highlighting the sites where these processes are felt and negotiated (following Lawhon
et al., 2014). This approach also captures the diversity of practices that respond to urban
environmental and governmental transformations and shows them to be open-ended,
unpredictable, and occasionally paradoxical.
Positioning these everyday practices in contrast to elite visions for urban resilience
demonstrates the difficulty of constructing resilience at a scale that might meet these
environmental transformations. As we show, the practices of resilience are diverse,
contested, and contradictory – sometimes individual, sometimes collective, sometimes
redistributive, and other times they reinforce existing inequalities – and as a result cannot
be systematically planned by city officials. Nor could a singular community voice or desire be
accommodated. What the catalogue of everyday practices does reveal, however, is that city
officials cannot be left to the task of planning urban resilience (indeed, future research might
insightfully contrast kampungs residents’ everyday practices with those of city technocrats,
thereby complicating the singularity of urban resilience presumed here). Further, it is clear
that urban resilience alone, without the redistributive potential of reworking and resistance,
is insufficient. Although these insights emerge from North Jakarta’s kampung, the concepts
of everyday resilience, reworking, and resistance provide insights into the situated practices
and social and material relations in environmentally and governmentally precarious popular
neighbourhoods more generally.
Of course, we should not overly idealise these strategies. These practices are not available
to all residents; they filter through existing power hierarchies and reinforce the
marginalisation of the most vulnerable members of kampung communities. In addition,
everyday practices of resilience, reworking, and resistance have uneven effects, with
benefits accruing to those with the greatest social connections and relations. And, some
residents simply dream of a formal, modern life outside the kampung – often conflicting
with their peers’, neighbours’, as well as their own everyday practices to manage urban
environmental transformations. It is also the case that these actions of resilience,
reworking, and resistance may be insufficient in the face of continued and worsening
urban environmental changes in Jakarta; such practices must be combined with those that
will halt the city’s rapid sinking and compensate for climate change-induced intensification
of flooding. But, the current form of large-scale, government-led urban resilience
programmes have negatively impacted those communities supposedly in need of urban
resilience, indicating that projects such as the GGSW are not the appropriate response.
Our documentation of everyday resilience, reworking, and resistance suggests that the
practices of kampungs residents might be a better starting point for the pursuit of multi-
scalar and multi-sited urban resilience.

Highlights
. Collects narratives from kampung residents in North Jakarta, highlighting personal and
collective responses to flooding and urban environmental governance interventions.
Betteridge and Webber 19

. Uses SUPEs and theories of urban resilience to reformulate resilience as an everyday

practice.
. Reflects on the limits to resilience and shows that it must be paired with everyday
practices of reworking and resistance.
. Highlights that everyday practices draw from and remake social and material
relationships which filter through existing power structures in kampungs.

Acknowledgements
Thank you to the generous residents of Kampung Akuarium, Tembok Bolong and Kerang Ijo who
shared their time and their tea and to Atika Gustini Anwar who was a steward of the research in
Jakarta. This article has benefited from the spirited engagement of Madsen’s ‘Urban Crew’ at the
University of Sydney and the generous readings of Kurt Iveson, Nate Millington, Jeff Neilson, and
Emily Rosenman, although all errors remain our own.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article: Brittany Betteridge received generous financial support to conduct fieldwork
in Jakarta from the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre at the University of Sydney.

Notes
1. We reject the term ‘slum’ as it is associated with the oppressive governmental regimes that seek to
displace kampung residents. It was common throughout the fieldwork for kampung residents to
discuss how middle class Jakartans and the media described them – using vocabularies such as
‘wild’ and ‘dirty’. These kinds of descriptors are frequent in everyday conversations in Jakarta and
are used by governments and the media. This stigmatisation is encapsulated by former Governor
of Jakarta, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama’s (Ahok) labelled Kampung Akuarium and neighbouring
Kampung Luar Batang ‘spreaders of tuberculosis’ (Lestari, 2016).
2. Although the SUPE approach is centred in cities of the Global South, its analytical insights need
not be contained there. This is particularly the case as urban infrastructures around the world are
increasingly stressed and social relations become key for material flows.
3. The province of Jakarta is officially named Daerah Khusus Ibukota Jakarta, or DKI Jakarta. This
translates as Special Capital City District of Jakarta and denotes the Special Administrative
division that governs the greater metropolis.
4. This fish market was destroyed in the eviction event of April 2016.
5. Interview, 12 July 2017, Kampung Tembok Bolong.
6. All names used in here are pseudonyms. Bu denotes an older female participant; Pak an older male
participant.
7. Interview, 12 July 2017, Kampung Tembok Bolong.
8. Interview, 24 July 2017, Kampung Akuarium.
9. Interview, 11 July 2017, Kampung Kerang Ijo.
10. Interview, 17 July 2017, Kampung Akuarium.
11. This is a contraction from Rumah Susun Sederhana Sewa (Simple Rental Flats).
12. Interview, 11 July 2017, Kampung Akuarium.
20 ENE: Nature and Space 0(0)

13. Interview, 27 July 2017, Kampung Akuarium.

14. Interview, 17 July 2017, Kampung Akuarium.
15. Interview, 27 July 2017, Kampung Akuarium.
16. KTP is the acronym for Kartu Tanda Penduduk (Resident Identity Card). These cards make it
easier to access healthcare, schooling, and sometimes compensation in eviction events.
17. Interview, 13 July 2017, Kampung Tembok Bolong.
18. Interview, 11 July 2017, Kampung Kerang Ijo.
19. Interview, 24 July 2017, Kampung Akuarium.
20. Interview, 17 July 2017, Kampung Akuarium.
21. RT is an abbreviation for Rukun Tetangga, or ‘neighbourhood association’. It is the smallest
administrative division of neighbourhoods, comprising of approximately 50–80 households. This
is governed by a Ketua RT (RT leader) who is popularly selected by kampung residents. Bu RT
indicates a female leader; Pak RT a male leader.
22. This a portmanteau of ‘nine’, ‘staple’, and ‘ingredients’ and indicates core grocery items, such as
cooking oil, rice, eggs, salt, sugar, and so on.
23. End of Ramadan celebration.
24. Interview, 24 July 2017, Kampung Akuarium.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. Interview, 10 July 2017, Rumah Susun Buddha Tzu Chi.
28. Interview, 27 July 2017, Kampung Akuarium.
29. Interview, 13 July 2017, Kampung Tembok Bolong.
30. Interview, 12 July 2017, Kampung Tembok Bolong.
31. Interview, 11 July 2017, Kampung Kerang Ijo.
32. This is an abbreviation in Indonesian from ‘Analisis Mengenai Dampak Lingkungan’
(Environmental Impact Assessment).
33. This is an acronym for Jaringan Rakyat Miskin Kota (Urban Poor Network), a non-government
group with community organisers from various kampung and ex-kampung communities.
34. The Jakarta Bay reclamation project was issued a moratorium in May 2017, after the completion
of 2 of the 13 islands. This was related to permit issues and the environmental assessment. The
Moratorium was recently lifted in October 2017, although the newly incumbent Governor has not
restarted the project since the Moratorium was lifted (Arbi, 2017).
35. Interview, 24 July 2017, Kampung Akuarium.
36. Interview, 17 July 2017, Kampung Akuarium.
37. Ibid.
38. This is an acronym for Jaringan Merah Putih (Red and White Network), an Indonesian NGO.
39. This is an acronym for Konfederasi Serikat Pekerja Indonesia (Indonesia Trade Union
Confederation), an Indonesian NGO.
40. This is an acronym in Indonesian from Front Pembela Islam (Islamic Defenders’ Front). This is a
conservative Islamic organisation who were prominent organisers in the anti-Governor Ahok
rallies in Jakarta on 2 December 2016 due to his perceived blasphemy. Residents described that
they only relied on their support in the first aftermath of eviction, before seeking basic grocery
provisions from other sources.
41. This is an acronym in Indonesia from Himpulan Advokasi dan Pengacara Indonesia (Indonesian
Lawyers–Advocates and Non-Trial Lawyers), a professional legal association.
42. LBH is the acronym in Indonesia for Lembaga Bantuan Hukum (Legal Aid Institute). It is the
largest legal aid organisation in Indonesia, and provides gratis law aid to victims of injustice, the
poor, the law-illiterate and oppressed.
43. Komnas HAM is an abbreviation in Indonesian from ‘Komisi Nasional Hak Asasi Manusia’
(National Commission for Human Rights).
44. Interview, 27 July 2017, Kampung Akuarium.
45. Interview, 13 July 2017, Kampung Tembok Bolong.
46. Interview, 27 July 2017, Kampung Akuarium.
Betteridge and Webber 21

47. MUI is the acronym for Majelis Ulema Indonesia (Indonesia Ulema Council). Ulema is derived
from an Arabic word meaning Islamic scholars. While Indonesia is nominally secular, this is the
highest Islamic Council in Indonesia and is influential in political decision-making.
48. Interview, 27 July 2017, Kampung Akuarium.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. Interview, 13 July 2017, Kampung Tembok Bolong.

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