ARCH 598 | Iowa State University

Instructor: Peter Zuroweste

This research explores the temporary assemblages formed by marginalized communities in Jakarta, Indonesia, as they adapt to an escalating environmental crisis marked by land subsidence, rising sea levels, and unchecked groundwater extraction. In the face of systemic neglect, residents—particularly in informal settlements—construct stilt houses and modular dwellings, transforming precarious geographies into spaces of survival and resilience.

Using Foucault’s concept of Heterotopia, these riverside settlements are examined as counter-sites—other spaces that simultaneously reflect, resist, and disturb the dominant urban order. Though excluded from official infrastructures, they become functional alternatives shaped by necessity and ingenuity. Spivak’s notion of Worlding highlights how the state’s high-tech relocation of the capital to Nusantara enacts a process of imperial mapping—constructing a global-facing national identity while erasing local modes of dwelling. In this sense, the government’s top-down urban vision renders Jakarta’s poor as external to its future imaginary.

The repeated displacement of riverside communities (first by flooding, then by eviction) resonates with Said’s idea of Exile, not only as forced removal from place, but as an ongoing condition of dispossession and non-belonging. The wall built to protect affluent neighborhoods physically and symbolically reinforces social segregation, while the riverbank becomes a fragile zone of occupation and resistance. The community’s makeshift presence there challenges normative ideas of citizenship and urban belonging.

Ultimately, the research argues that these ephemeral, marginalized spaces are not merely sites of crisis but are politically charged terrains where alternate urban futures are imagined, enacted, and continuously disrupted.