Sustainable landscape. A new eco-socio infrastructure for Ciliwung riverside slums, Jakarta, Indonesia

Abstract Jakarta is a very big city with the population of more than 10 million unfortunately has been experiencing unplanned urban development in very fast period of time during decades. With the needs of providing basic utilities for its citizen however it is supported by 13 big rivers and followed by more than 300 small river and canals that supposedly can give benefits to its citizen and yet becoming serious complicated environmental problems each year giving nightmare to everyone when the rain season comes and floods the city. Ciliwung is the longest river passing the city of Jakarta. With 120 km long, it affects mainly the ecosystem of the whole city. Now what is going on with this river?. First the fact that there is 350,000 people live in high-dense slum settlement along the cilwung riverside, we cannot deny that there is serious land use problem in the city. The riverside, on which should be the place for providing infrastructure and utilities for the city as well maintaining ecology of the city, now is occupied by this illegal housing due to a vast number of urbanisation growth. In other words this disconnects the river from the city. Secondly, This great number of urbanisation is not accompanied by the capability of the city to expand and provide housings and infrastructure for the poor people mainly coming from villages. Thus this phenomenon creates what so called informal city that is mainly unplanned and un-designed slum settlement mainly located on left-over space in the city such as along river, canal and railway networks. This illegal settlement brings a lot of serious problems such as traffic congestion, pollution to the river and flood. This happens because the city doesn’t prepare adequate infrastructure for them and also because of lack of environmental awareness of the people. If this keeps going on, the city will bear serious environmental and social consequences in the future. Thirdly, this informal settlement breaks the city into partial development as it occupied several city infrastructure element such as riverside, railway side and reservoir side that should support city connection, instead it prevents the city from integrated and more sustainable development. What we propose is what we believe. We believe that to solve the city problems mentioned before is not to terminate this slum settlement (slum clearance), but to regenerate it as a part of city transformation as well as improve the life quality of people there by connecting the river to the city, to have benefits of the river as the balancer of the ecosystem and also to create new sustainable community and infrastructure. This Informal city has to be re-contextualized to support the city needs in the future. In order to do so, we propose to create an eco-socio infrastructure as our urban strategy. This consist of making an urban acupuncture as a new urban corridor with several public building as urban regenerator and capturing unused space to trigger this settlement transformation. We cannot use conventional approach in dealing with informal city because of its complexity. So the transformation has to be incremental as it gives opportunity for people (the users) to respond and take participation in the progress. in dealing with informal design, it also has to be a small intervention but can create big changes in the future, housing upgrade and landscape upgrade are example for this strategy. The last but not least that in our proposal, we are not only designing an urban landscape and architecture, but we are also designing a sustainable community, in other world we have to think how this community should work as holistic sustainable life that they can produce their own need for food with urban farming, for energy with bio-resources. After all the goal is not only improving physical condition but also their human resources and economy. Providing a space for local market and shopping street is a way to create micro-economy network (co-operation) also provide jobs for local community. Urban regenerator is used as vertical public facilities such as classroom, theater, and local clinics. This new urban transformation is an integrated designed to serve a complexity and various activities so that it’s designed as multi-used public space that can accommodate different needs and change in the future and it’s a pedestrian oriented design that should encourage more sustainable movement in the city. The landscape is designed as an zone oriented designed that could accommodate different purposes and is constructed according to surrounding existing local settlement in order to keep the informality and the identity of the space.