1 - Rivers and Cities: Spatial Contestations and Collective Action in Urbanizing Indonesia

Rivers are potential providers of much-needed natural resources of water as basic needs as well as social-cultural spaces, and therefore have historical connections with formations of human settlements. One river system may flow through many settlements along its banks and becomes a common-pool resource that require collective governance among different communities that depend on the river. Yet, Indonesia’s rapid urbanization since the second half of 20^th century has consistently increased built-up areas, particularly in and around cities as concentrations of commerce, industries, and services, altering the dynamics of river water in contemporary societies. Industrialization and urbanization have affected social and cultural relationships with rivers, resulting in spatial contestation between human activities and water dynamics. Such collisions are observable in the emergence of flooding as one of the most common urban disasters and water pollution as a familiar problem in Indonesia’s cities. Technocratic engineering approaches become conventional and “normalized” schemes as official attempts to control floods. Amidst development-induced reconfiguration of relationships between urban societies and rivers, what are the possibilities of collective governance of rivers as common-pool resources? As official narratives of river restorations may exploit technical approaches, to what extent do urbanizing rivers allow political landscapes for collective action? In this paper, I discuss narratives of spatial struggles over rivers in two cities: Jakarta and Surabaya, to understand potentials and challenges in questioning imbalance of power in river interventions through collective action.