Community goes green to fight eviction
Residents of Jakarta neighbourhood cultivate vegetable and herbs in special boxes
Brightly coloured wooden and brick houses line a clean riverside path amid trees and vegetable gardens, a tranquil scene in the normally chaotic Indonesian capital Jakarta.
Residents have transformed the “kampong”, as traditional neighbourhoods are known in Indonesia, into a model of clean and green living in an effort to fight off the threat of eviction.
Tongkol kampong was once much like many other downat-heel riverside communities found across the overcrowded, traffic-choked metropolis of 10 million, blighted by dilapidated housing and strewn with rubbish.
But a series of controversial evictions of waterside neighbourhoods in the past two years, aimed at getting houses away from the capital’s rivers to combat annual flooding, spurred the residents into makingchanges.
“We want to prove that poor people can bring about change, change in their environment,” said Gugun Mohammad, a resident and one of the people behind the initiative to transform the kampong.
The project, which began in 2015, involved launching a major clean-up by sending rafts onto the stretch of river running through Tongkol to remove mountains of trash, putting up bins around the kampong and signs to remind residents not to litter. The most drastic part of the facelift saw residents taking sledgehammers to their own houses to remove sections that previously went right up to the water’s edge, with poor families sometimes demolishing entire rooms.
They wanted to ensure the buildings were at least five metres from the river.
Vegetable and herbs are cultivated abundantly in specially constructed growing boxes; papaya, mango and banana hang from trees; and composting organic waste is now second nature to the 260 families that make up the small community.