Surviving Existence through a Built Form The Advent of the Daseng Sario
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| Author keywords |
marginal community; urban transformation; built form; power and resistance; Manado; Boulevard Commercial Project |
| Authors | | Top |
- Susilo, C.R.
- De Meulder, B.
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| Abstract |
This chapter explores how an excluded group of fishermen employs a built form as a tactic to deliver their actions of resistance and survive against the oppressive presence of the Boulevard Commercial Project (BCP) in Manado, Indonesia. Employing the rhetoric of `delivering Jakarta lifestyle to Manado', a consortium of six private investors built the BCP on 70 hectares of land reclamation along the coast of Manado with the support of the local government. Despite its 'success', the BCP has transformed Manado into a stage for discontent. The remaining Sario fishing community suffers from marginalization caused by the city's denial of their existence and rights to the lands and sea, their social fragmentation from their former neighbours who have accepted the BCP, and the transformation of their neighbourhoods. All of these are the results of aggressive physical expansion by the BCP. With the backdrop of the physical built environment of the BCP, the visual contrast among the dominant wealthy image of the BCP, the deteriorating settlement of the remaining Sario fishermen and the physical improvements in the settlement of their (ex-) fisherman neighbours looks very prominent. This chapter explores the acceptance, resistance, and meaning of the BCP from the local perspective through interviews and questionnaires distributed among the nearby residents, both groups of (ex-)fishermen, investors, and the key persons in local government during our ethnographic fieldwork conducted from 2009 to 2012. It reveals how the marginalized community has built their own spaces to defend their existence in urban space. It also shows that there is still a place where the marginalized group could reverse their power relationship with the oppressive development project, since the people have the capacity and tactics to deal with the situation. Physical development and built forms can mirror the tension and counter-reactions among the oppositional stakeholders in the urban space. However, built forms can also serve as a medium through which to express and manifest protests in the material world. For these struggling fishermen, the physical space of their built forms, their permanency and visibility contribute to underscoring their resistance, establishing their presence in the urban space, and defending their rights to the space. |
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