Natural Hazards, Risk and Vulnerability

Floods and slum life in Indonesia

Roanne van Voorst

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317506911
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

Different people handle risk in different ways. The current lack of understanding about this heterogeneity in risk behaviour makes it difficult to intervene effectively in risk-prone communities.

Natural Hazards, Risk and Vulnerability offers a unique insight in the everyday life of a group of riverbank settlers in Jakarta - one of the most vulnerable areas worldwide in terms of exposure to natural hazards. Based on long-term fieldwork, the book portrays the often creative and innovative ways in which slum dwellers cope with recurrent floods. The book shows that behaviour that is often described as irrational or ineffective by outside experts can be highly pragmatic and often effective. This book argues that human risk behaviour cannot be explained by the risk itself, but instead by seemingly unrelated factors such as trust in authorities and aid-institutions and unequal power structures. By considering a risk as a lens that exposes these factors, a completely new type of analysis is proposed that offers useful insights for everyone concerned about how people cope with the currently increasing amount of natural hazard.

This is a valuable resource for academics, researchers and policy makers in the areas of risk studies, disaster and natural hazard, urban studies, anthropology, development, Southeast Asian studies and Indonesia studies.

1 Doing research in bantaran kali

DOI: 10.4324/9781315716411-2

Conducting long-term anthropological fieldwork in the very poor, unregistered and flood-prone neighbourhood of Bantaran Kali had the advantage that it offered me highly qualitative insights. Living along the riverbanks enabled me to study people in their own risky living environment. I became familiar with the riverbank settlers (as they became used to my presence), and was able to co-experience some of the risks that threaten them in their daily lives. My life and work in Bantaran Kali was often as insightful as it was challenging. Perhaps the greatest challenge for me to overcome was to get access to the research area; another one was to establish relations of trust with the inhabitants. In this chapter I discuss these challenges and explain how I have dealt with them, after which I present a section on the specific methods that I have used throughout my fieldwork. Finally, I elaborate on the concept of risk styles and introduce an analytical framework to define and interpret heterogeneous risk behaviour.

Getting there

Had it not been for my unexpected meeting with Rio, a teenage street singer (pengamen) and an inhabitant of Bantaran Kali, I might not have been able to conduct an anthropological study along the riverbanks at all.

Rio and I met in the bus, a few weeks after I had arrived in Jakarta to start this research project. At that point in time, I was still trying to decide where to pursue my research. The aim of my study directed me towards a flood-prone, urban research area. Before fieldwork started, I had collected information about the most flood-prone neighbourhoods in Jakarta with the help of newspaper articles, academic literature and Skype interviews with experts in the field. I had learned that the most flood-prone areas were also the city’s poorest neighbourhoods, and that they were generally considered ‘illegal’, as inhabitants generally own no legal documents for their houses or land. Hence, in theory, I knew exactly where to go. Only in practice, it appeared that it was not easy for a Western, female visitor to Indonesia to autonomously access these most marginalized communities in the city.

Despite my research permit, none of the government officials I interviewed was able or willing to help me to gain access. In fact, they consistently advised against pursuing my research in the neighbourhoods that I had planned to visit, warning me that these would be unsafe locations for me to enter. Riverbank settlers were overtly described as criminals and thieves; the riverbanks were called dangerous. Government officials would typically tell me: ‘In slums like that, you will be harassed. Besides, you will be flooded all the time! Why would you want that?’ Although I tried to explain to the government officials that actually, co-experiencing floods was exactly what I needed to do for this research, I soon came to realize that my attempts to convince them were futile. Jakartan officials would not help me get access to the riverbanks, not just because they were concerned about my safety, but perhaps even more because they felt embarrassed about the idea of me entering these poor areas of their city. Slums did not fit the image of the modern world city that they aspired Jakarta to be. To them, Jakarta’s overcrowded riverbanks were spots that needed to be cleaned, or at least remain far out of sight of visiting foreigners.

I changed strategy, and decided to explore the flood-prone areas in Jakarta without the approval or help of authorities, using public transport and a city map. But I soon learned that the government officials weren’t the only ones who disliked the idea of me working in riverbank settlements – many of the residents I met after entering their neighbourhoods appeared uneager to participate in my study as well.

Even though they were by no means aggressive or overtly disapproving of me, there certainly was a sense of distrust between us. All riverbank settlers I spoke to seemed afraid that I worked for the government, and that my data would be used to justify slum clearance or would have other negative consequences for interviewees. As a result of this sense of distrust, the residents that I autonomously approached would usually politely listen to my introduction, but then quickly cut off the conversation and head back to their daily lives, indicating that I should do so too. My questions about whether it would be possible for me to live among them for a while to learn more about floods and kampong life were consistently ignored or laughed away.

On the afternoon I met Rio, I was no longer sure I would be able to conduct the type of research I had designed beforehand. As I had done each day before, I had stepped into the bus that morning, determined to spend yet another day of exploring potential research areas, but this time my hopes were low.

Until I unexpectedly came across a boy named Rio. He entered the bus in which I was sitting and tried to make some money by singing songs for the passengers. He sang me a dangdut song and after I got out of the bus together with him, I bought him a coffee in return in a street kiosk. We talked about life in Jakarta and Dutch soccer players, my research plans, his parents who had both passed away and my diseased grandfathers. After three hours of talking and a shared plate of fried rice, he bluntly offered to take me to the neighbourhood in which he lived, not in a house but on the streets. ‘That neighbourhood is extremely flood-prone’, I said, recognizing its name from several newspaper articles that had reported on floods in the city. During several recent floods, the Jakarta media published images of its kampong residents wading through the water. In a rather unimpressed tone, Rio agreed: ‘Yeah, we have floods all the time. We have so many of them that we already have found smart ways to protect ourselves against them’.

Five hours later, after Rio had made enough money for the day, he led me through the narrow hallways of one of the most flood-prone and poorest ‘illegal’ neighbourhoods of Jakarta: my research area, Bantaran Kali.

Introduction to bantaran kali

My first impression of Bantaran Kali consists not of images but rather of smells and sounds. That is because I entered the neighbourhood for the first time after dark, led there by Rio. I had lost my sense of location and direction during the long trip that Rio and I had made to get from the city center to Bantaran Kali. I remembered that we had taken a public bus, then a smaller one, then yet a smaller one, then a motor taxi, and finally we had walked for about ten minutes before arriving in the riverbank settlement that Rio had called ‘home’ throughout our conversation.

The kampong had hardly any lighting, so all I could recognize were the vague shadows of people in between food carts and small houses (from 2 × 3 up to 3 × 5 meters), made from wood, plywood, bamboo or cement. The houses were built close together side by side and stacked on top of each other, from the riverside to tens of meters further away from the bank. Rio told me that the residents share six public toilets and use shared or individually installed groundwater pumps. I also learned that there is no piped water in the kampong, nor is there a sewage system or a regulated garbage disposal system. ‘Most garbage is thrown in the river’, Rio explained, ‘and most families use the river as a public toilet or washing place’. From the literature, I knew that due to this and other urban usage of the water, the river had become contaminated and smelly.

It was this smell that struck me most during my first visit to Bantaran Kali. Following Rio in the dark to the part of the street where he usually spends the night, I was overwhelmed by my unexpected arrival in a potential research area; but, most of all, I was affected by the intense experiences attacking my senses: a mixture of the strong odour of the river with the smell of garbage and motor oil, the feeling of the hands of the curious street children who had come out to accompany us during our walk and now one by one touched my white skin, the warm glow that came from small fires under cooking stoves. While walking, Rio shouted out to residents that he had brought a new friend along.

I could not see their physical reactions to that news. Trying to keep up with his pace, I could only make out some excited voices and questions plied to Rio about me. We entered the shack where Rio and five other homeless youngsters in Bantaran Kali sleep, and soon more people joined us inside. Men, women, children and the elderly sat down in a circle around us, demanding to know who the strange visitor was, and what I was doing in their neighbourhood. I tried my best to answer their questions and introduced myself as a researcher interested in getting to know life in a riverbank settlement. The circle of listeners immediately passed my explanations on to other arrivals who had in the meantime gathered outside. Yet more people entered – apparently they had been told by others to come and talk to me. The kampong leader joined the group, accompanied by his wife and children. He told me a few stories about the neighbourhood – the best food sold in the main street, the problem of flooding and how best to catch cockroaches to remove them from one’s house. Before I dared to take out my notebook, the conversation had already turned to the Netherlands and my personal situation. Are there good dams in the Netherlands to protect residents from floods? Can you buy rice in the Netherlands? What does it cost per kilo? Are my parents still alive and in good health? Do children in the Netherlands sing in buses as well? Was I planning to adopt Rio? Or marry him? Why was my nose shaped in such a sharp way, did I have a nose job? Why was I so skinny, did I eat enough?

My positive answer to this latter question was hardly convincing – despite my polite refusal, food was brought in at this point, and I was ordered to eat a meal of rice and tofu before the conversation could continue. The atmosphere remained excited, but also had become cheerful by this time. Residents laughed and told jokes amongst themselves, and Rio and his friends were singing more dangdut songs. One by one, people left the shack and headed for bed. I stayed overnight in the shack of the street children and spent the next day there as well to interview neighbours. On my second evening in Bantaran Kali, I again met the kampong leader to ask him whether I could stay in the neighbourhood for a longer period of time to pursue my research; he kindly gave his permission.

Rio helped me to rent a small dwelling from inhabitants for a local rental price. It was located a few meters from the river and built from asbestos, wood and cement. The owners of the house used my rental money (which I paid, on their demand, in advance for the full year) to build themselves a flood shelter on top of what was now ‘my’ home. After settling in, I slowly started to get to know Bantaran Kali.

Bantaran kali

Bantaran Kali is located on the border of East and South Jakarta, squeezed in between a railway and the banks of a branch of the Ciliwung River, the largest river in Jakarta. The Ciliwung has a length of approximately 476 square kilometres and runs downhill from Mt Pangrango in Puncak to the river mouth on the coast of Java in north Jakarta, passing by the cities of Bogor and Depok and crossing the provincial administrative regions of the Province of West Java and of Jakarta.

The Ciliwung riverbanks have been populated at least since the fourth century; the mouth of the river was instrumental in the founding of Jakarta. It functioned as a port, initially for the Indianized Kingdom of Tarumanagara, later for the Kingdom of Sunda and the sultanate of Banten. From the sixteenth century, it was used by European traders, who described the river as a ‘paradise in the tropical hemisphere’. To them, the Ciliwung was beautiful, relatively wide and useful, as it allowed small boats to transport merchandise within the downstream area (Batavia 2002; History of Jakarta 2011).

It seems improbable that these traders would still speak in positive terms about the river, had they seen it in its current state. From the twentieth century, human settlement started to increase extremely rapidly and the river environment was severely impacted. While in 1970, only 33 per cent of the river basin was used for human settlement, industrial estate and trade services, by 2000 this percentage had nearly doubled. These dynamics were paralleled with worsening water quality of the Ciliwung River (Fachrul et al. 2007).

At present, approximately 3.5 million people have come to live along the banks of the Ciliwung. Of them, 759 have settled in the area under study (or 232 households, counted by the number of household heads (Kepala Keluarga, KK). The first inhabitants of Bantaran Kali settled down in the area in the 1950s and 60s after they found work nearby. Hired by Indonesia’s Railway Corporation, these settlers were paid to construct railways and a large storage building in this part of Jakarta. The work would take nearly ten years. More and more construction workers were hired during this period, and most of them built their houses along the riverbanks. The neighbourhood ‘Bantaran Kali’ was established – and it would grow fast. Along with settlement came trade: a large night market developed right across the neighbourhood, which again attracted newcomers to Bantaran Kali. Many of them had travelled from Java’s rural provinces to Jakarta, looking for a better livelihood in the capital city, and found work on the market of Bantaran Kali.

At present, about half of the inhabitants of Bantaran Kali are grandchildren and children of the railway construction workers. These orang Betawi or orang asli were born in Jakarta and they have either built their houses themselves on a vacant area of land or inherited it from former generations. The other half of Bantaran Kali’s inhabitants consists of first- or second-generation newcomers (pendatang). They generally live in houses that are built and owned by orang Betawi and pay monthly rent to them. Most of them originate from the countryside in Central or East Java, while some come from other islands, such as Sumatra or Aceh. The large majority of pendatang has been living in Jakarta for ten years or longer; only a very small minority moved into Bantaran Kali less than five years ago – mostly youngsters, who have come to live with a family member.

As diverse as their ethnic backgrounds may be, most residents in the kampong share their Islamic religion. Over 95 per cent of both the orang asli and the pendatang are Muslim; the rest are either Catholic or Protestant. Another thing inhabitants have in common is the way they earn a livelihood. A large majority of both the natives and newcomers sell food or goods on the market or streets surrounding the neighbourhood; a small group works as motor taxi drivers (ojek), chicken butchers (ayam potok) or broom makers (tukang sapu). As was already noted in the Introduction to this book, natives and newcomers also form a rather homogenous group with respect to important vulnerability indicators, such as levels of education or income, citizenship status, and the levels of material vulnerability of their houses towards floods. I briefly elaborate on each on these vulnerability factors in the next section, which allows me to sketch the socioeconomic characteristics of my research area while also providing insights into the most pressing risks and problems that shape people’s ‘normal uncertainty’.

Normal uncertainty in bantaran kali

On average, residents of Bantaran Kali earn the equivalent of 3 to 5 US dollars a week, which is just enough to pay for housing costs and provide family members with food and clothing, but not enough to accumulate much money, which is problematic in case an emergency arises. There are several common, poverty-related risks that threaten the well-being of riverbank settlers. Teenage pregnancies or drug abuse are common fears for many impoverished families, not just because of the emotional aspects of these events, but mainly because of the possibility of high financial costs for family members. Similarly, people often worry about getting ill because of the possibility of high medical finances. Just to indicate how common these poverty-related risks are in Bantaran Kali: during my fieldwork, I attended 16 funerals. Fourteen of these were of riverbank settlers who h...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of figures
• Introduction: Get ready for the flood!
• 1 Doing research in Bantaran Kali
• 2 Orang antisipasi: An autonomous, illegal but licit business
• 3 Orang ajar: Cooperation with the government
• 4 Orang susah: Dependent on aid
• 5 Orang siap: Challenging the government, altering structures
• Conclusion
• Glossary and abbreviations
• Index