Historical Context

Early Land Use Plan during the Dutch Colonialization in 1933 (Leiden University, 2019)

1641

Bandung was a small village called Negorij Bandoeng or West Oedjoeng Broeng which has the same characteristic as rural kampung (Martokusumo, 2002)

1800s

Bandung underwent major development marked by the construction of Bandung Great Post Road. European administration building started to grow and encroach the kampung land.

1900s

Land use plan of Bandung was created. The zone was divided by ethnicity. The European lived in northern part of Bandung with spacious area (see figure in red). The Indonesians lived in kampung mainly in southern part of Bandung, along Cikapundung River, and in peri-urban area (see figure in yellow).

1940s

Independence period of Indonesia. The regime changed from the Dutch, Japanese, to Indonesian. Frequent upheavals occurred resulting in exodus and influx of residents. Many kampung residents left the city to outer region.

Post 1945

Majority of residents came back to urban kampung due to the vast development and source of income. Kampung started to accrue informally and the density was rapidly growing. Meanwhile, the government had other priorities in the transition period after gaining independence.

Today

Kampung is associated as slums. The regulation and policy only use the term ‘slums’ to refer to urban kampung. Bandung still has plenty of urban kampungs and attempts to improve their quality have been executed but the effects remain limited.

From autonomous regions to slums. What is next?

Current urban development is the evidence of unwanted dialogue with the colonial past. In the spirit of anti-colonialism, what has happened is the reproduction of the colonial state (Kusno, 2000).

During the Dutch period, anything produced by Indonesians was considered informal and what Europeans produced was formal. Since kampung had existed before the Dutch came and had its own characteristic, the Dutch acknowledged kampung as an autonomous region. It means that kampung is selfregulating and independent (Achmadi et al., 2019; Cobban, 1974).

The ethnic separation reinforced the autonomy of kampung to apply its customary law, administration, and regulation. The autonomy law disadvantaged the position of kampung. In one hand, municipal government was restricted to carry out any intervention, on the other side the Dutch kept neglecting them because they were autonomous. After the law was abolished, the municipal government took unilateral improvement, but later the Dutch created a new law regarding the restriction of the construction of poor-quality building. This generated the scarcity of affordable housing options for low-income groups. At the end, lack of control became the state’s failure to improve kampung condition.

After the independence, instead of reviving the presence of urban kampung, the Dutch’s practice was still inherited by the new Indonesian administrators. Urban kampung kept being autonomous since the improvement was not the priority during that transition period. After settling down, Bandung attracted many migrants but most of them could not afford a decent housing and ended up living in existing kampung and building illegal housing in riverside. Kampung became overcrowded and deteriorated which then started to be associated with slums (Reerink, 2015, Reksadjaya, 2017).

Today, the current system treats urban kampung as slums in any policy and regulations. With the pressure to excecure the global city concept, Bandung has attempted to become more marketable by intensifying urban renewal projects (Achmadi et al., 2019) such as parks, fly overs, malls, and street revitalisations. Instead, urban kampung becomes more vulnerable because the land value is rapidly soaring. Such attempts for urban kampung improvement have been exercised but there has been neither specific program for ‘urban kampung’ nor the policy for urban kampung management (Anindito et al., 2018). The lack of control to urban kampung has been deeply entrenched since the colonial period and is descended into the current practice leaving urban kampung autonomous, excluded, and marginalised.