Dewi Tan

As one of the world’s most densely populated cities, Jakarta faces mounting challenges as a coastal city with threats of rising sea levels and increasing rates of land subsidence largely attributed to anthropogenic activity such as groundwater extraction. Historically urban floods have been a common problem, and it is thus not a surprise that floods continue to pose increasing threats to the rapidly developing cityscape. In Jakarta, there are numerous communities who live in “informal” kampung housing near or along flood-prone areas such as canals, coastlines, and riverbanks. The crisis of flooding poses new challenges to the state’s existing system of property rights and land claims as the urban poor are pushed to even more socioeconomically vulnerable positions. Since the emergence of the pandemic, the urban poor who cannot afford to stay home and engage in social distancing measures are once again in the most vulnerable positions to the impacts of the public health crisis. My research seeks to understand how discourses of sanitation and hygiene have been decontextualized from deeper, longstanding issues in the forms of a housing crisis and land tenure issues in Jakarta. In addition, my research hopes to analyze urban resilience and its differing forms (social/communal vs. infrastructural resilience) in dealing with ongoing crises such as perpetual urban flooding and the pandemic.