Abstract
The Appearances of Memory: Mneumonic Practices of Architecture and Urban Form in Indonesia is a collection of essays that explores “the roles that architecture and urban space play in the making and unmaking of a history still in formation,” namely the recent history of Southeast Asian giant, Indonesia (p.4). Already recognized as one of the most provocative and persuasive analysts of modern urbanism in Indonesia, author Abidin Kusnoagain probes the meaning of interventions into the physical and social fabric of cities as he did in his highly acclaimed Behind the Post-Colonial (2000). The Appearances of Memory includes six previously published pieces and three new essays, although several of the ones that have appeared previously were not easily accessible outside Indonesia. Even with the inclusion of already published work, this volume has a freshness derived from the author’s quest to better understand how cities have helped to transform Indonesian society over the critical first decade since the fall of the Suharto regime and the nation’s new experience with a more inclusive form of governance.
Kusno stands by the theme of a convergence between the colonial and post-colonial urban strategies in Indonesia that was so eloquently presented in Behind the Post Colonial. In this volume, he focuses on the struggles to fashion a post-authoritarian global city. In a previously published article, he critically examined how Jakarta’s longest-serving governor, Sutiyoso, was in the unique position of being appointed under the authoritarian Suharto regime but who remained as the megacity’s leader in the post-New Order era of democratization. This essay (included in the volume as Chapter 1) is expanded in a new essay (Chapter 2) that explores the implications of Sutiyoso’s most important innovation in Jakarta, erecting a system of busways to address the city’s legendarytraffic congestion. Kusno regards Jakarta’s first modern transit system as a means for government to restore authority in the post-1998 period. As Kusno writes, the busway system “is about the restoration of order, discipline, status, and legitimacy of rule in the post-authoritarian regime of Indonesia” (p.66). The rapid imposition of the busway system was a form of “shock therapy” intended to demonstrate to the public that “power remained in the hands of the government” (p.57) and in the case of its architect, Governor Sutiyoso, “to regain legitimacy after a stormy start in his first term” (p.69).
Sutiyoso’s desire to appeal to Jakarta’s emerging middle class was also evident in his support for private investments in housing and commerce that displaced poorer residents and supported a “back to the city” movement. Although Jakarta continued its sprawling outward development after the worst of the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s had subsided, Kusno documents a discernible initiative to remake the city center for its more affluent residents through new developments led by the private rather than the public sector. In Chapter 3 (one of three new essays in this volume), Kusno examines several emerging architectural icons, the kampung architecture of Adi “Mamo” Purnomo, which appeared during the financial crisis to meet the need for well-designed low-cost housing that incorporated traditional features. This was juxtaposed with new superblocks, such as Senayan City and the Archipelago, both of which expressed a bold modernist value and underscored the privatization of public space. Urban reconstruction was also the motif in Jakarta’s Chinese community area, known as Glodok, in the aftermath of the violence of the May 1998 riots. These attacks on Jakarta’s main center of Chinese destroyed that area and terrorized its residents. As Kusno asserts, the architecture of reconstruction, especially the modernist Glodok Plaza and the postmodern Pasar Glodok, “speak, through the everyday environment, to a general need for an appreciation of the Chinese Indonesian experiences of violence and the difficulties entailed in presenting them and [to] overcome the trauma of the past” (p.124).
The Appearance of Memory also returns to the theme of colonial representations, especially in architecture, that contribute to contemporary identities in the chapter “The Afterlife of the Empire Style, Indische Architectuur, and Art Deco.” Kusno’s search also discovers little-known facets of the Indonesia’s urban past, such the writings of the young 1920s radical Mas Marco Kartodinkromo, who died in a penal colony in 1931 but whose serialized stories expressed the value of modernism and urban radicalism as a challenge to the contemporary colonial regime. In the late colonial period, from the 1920s through the Japanese invasion in 1942, and following the crushing of the communist revolts in 1926/27, the Dutch exerted control not only over the trouble makers through an extensive surveillance system, establishment of penal colonies, and through an urbanization process that emphasized order and the normality of colonial life. In Kusno’s view, the architecture of the late colonial period was “a form of dominance and political strategy of colonialism” (p.203). Even in such benign artifacts as the neighborhood watch guardhouse, or gardu, Kusno shows us how forms move across orders, reaching from the state level down to the “domain of daily life” (p.273).
Kusno’s wanderings, like the processes underway in post-authoritarian Indonesia, offer the reader no clear path or decisive conclusions. The drama of modernization through urbanization in Indonesia is continuously unfolding, while at the same time new connections from present to past are yet to be disclosed. The Appearance of Memory evidences Kusno’s unique capacity to probe the inner life of Indonesia’s distinctive political culture and to connect it to the urban environment that gives it form and meaning.