Abstract

In this paper I argue that popularly controlled cities occur when its people overcome its parts and capture it in whole. I demonstrate this through a history of Surabaya, Indonesia, from August 1945 when the electricity station was taken over by Indonesians and electricity sent to poor neighbourhoods and cut-off from European neighbourhoods. I view this redistribution of electrified power as the moment when the city was truly under popular control. I contrast this moment of popular control with that following the anti-communist purge of 1965 when the city’s pre-eminent urban engineer, Johan Silas, implemented his idea of distinct and contained neighbourhoods that put an end to the revolutionary city. I argue that Silas reinstated a vision of the compartmentalized colonial city that relied on what the Dutch once called the great absorptive capacity of the urban slum in housing the many newcomers entering the city after the collapse of the hinterland plantations in the 1930s. I consider how Silas’s ideas are humanist but not revolutionary and, as such, resemble those of biologist and urban planner Patrick Geddes in failing to overcome the stultification of top-down synoptic views of the city. Finally, I show how Silas’ model came to an end after the political and economic crisis of 1998, and how the current method of capturing newcomers through data rather than neighbourhoods reveals an inability to capture the city, either in part or in whole.

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S2 2016 Series Speakers
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Date                  Speaker
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Jul 27          Jane Ferguson
Aug 3          Alison Witchard
Aug 10        Hans Baer
Aug 17        Simone Dennis
Aug 24        Debra McDougall
Aug 26        Michael Hertzfeld
Aug 31        Robbie Peters
Sep 21         Zazie Bowen
Oct 5           Jennifer Alexander and Shun Deng Fam
Oct 12         Bonnie McConnell
Oct 19         Francesca Merlan
Oct 26         Avail
Nov 2          Heidi Sinevaara-Niskanen
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