Contested urbanisms: The politics of heritage and housing in Jakarta’s kampungs

Do heritage-making projects resist or advance gentrification in Southeast Asia? Like other Global South cities, contested urbanisms chequer Jakarta’s postcolonial urban landscape. Competing ideas about urban development manifest in various ways of seeing and producing the city, as demonstrated by evictions, revitalisation projects, and informal housing. Increased evictions of urban villages (urban kampungs) between 2013 and 2018 in Jakarta saw growing grassroots heritage movements as part of a spectrum of resistance to top-down urban management by state and private sector actors who also stake their claims on what ‘heritage’ is. These tensions amongst the political projects of various actors led me to ask: how do heritage-making projects of/by urban villages affect housing conditions in Jakarta, with reference to gentrification-led displacement? Using ethnographic methods and thematic analysis, I delve into the constructions of heritage, the impact of heritage-making on housing security for residents, and the broader political impact of heritage-making from above and below in Jakarta’s Kota Tua and two of its kampungs, Luar Batang and Pekojan. I argue that the dominant heritage constructions in Kota Tua demonstrate a top-down logic that emphasises infrastructure and the built environment with strong private sector presence, which impact the kampungs in varied ways. Findings showed that top-down heritage-making demonstrates higher likelihood of driving gentrification through the commodification of space, prioritising capital and material values. Residents and their advocates employ heritage-making from below in various forms to reclaim their place in the city as they face various forms of displacement, with unanticipated consequences. The processes of heritage-making from above and below reveal the connections and disjunctures between different authorities which subaltern actors work through, producing new politics that contest or entrench existing conditions. The findings contribute to the theorising of the politics of gentrification in heritage and urban studies, and a deeper understanding of Jakarta’s Old Town.