The ‘Beautiful Indonesia’ house

The 1996 launching of ‘Kota Legenda’ or the ‘City of Legends’ near the Jakarta – Cikampek toll road might be one significant mark for a new era of Indonesian imaginations. The City of Legends is Indonesia’s first ‘travel town’. The styles of the houses offered are varied and a kitsch: You can buy a house in the style of the American Colonial, Classical Europe, or Japan. This is the promise: the world in your hands, without your having to leave Indonesia. This was also what the Jakarta middle class wanted due to the shifts that they and their country had been experiencing since 1985. Thse shifts created fragmented imaginations about new identities, which in turn would affect the imagination on Indonesia itself.

Imagination is the main foundation for the making of a community,[1] especially communities that surpass a certain locality, a city, a village, or the environment where they live. Indonesia as a nation-country has been created as a result of technological changes that enable people to imagine that they are a part of something bigger. Along with changes in communication and transportation technology, amid an outbreak of new imaginary societies, what Arjun Appadurai calls ‘the extraction of imagination from space’ might take place.

Such a new model of imagination is translocal and deterritorial. It is a person’s imagination in this era, which often cannot be mapped by using local entities. The identity of an immigrant from Uganda and an Indian in the US who watch Hindi movies; the identity of a student in a religious school in Garut who listens to Osama bin Laden’s sermons from Afghanistan and pictures in his head an international Moslem society: who is that person? The next question is: What and who are what we call ‘Indonesians’? When the postcolonial and postmodern imaginations entirely leave the idea of the nation-state behind, how are we to understand ‘Indonesia’? Or at least, how are we to understand Indonesia which had been constructed by the state under the New Order regime? What are the forms of such imaginations, and what propels them?


The New Order and its imagination on Indonesia
Unlike Soekarno whose nation-building planning had been very clear—i.e. by way of gigantic physical developments in Jakarta—Soeharto’s revolutionary slogan was ‘Development’. This was a slogan hinting at a sense of inferiority and simplicity. Soeharto’s ‘Development’ did not affect Jakarta’s skyline and neither did it influence how people view the city; rather, it changed the things that were close to us. Soeharto did not aim to create critical, revolutionary persons, but to create a ‘whole Indonesian person’ who is disciplined and obedient.

The New Order did not embark on a nation-building process by employing gigantic visual forms; rather, it used images that were continually being produced and re-produced on detailed and numerous levels. The state was eternally present at the most intimate level: in the morning when one walked through the Independence Day gateway,[2] when one went to the market and found a sculpture of a police at the crossroad, when one went to school and saw the cemented map of Indonesia plastered on the wall.

According to James Siegel,[3] the word ‘rakjat’—or ‘people’—that Soekarno had used in his speeches was something that connected people’s imagination with a grand imagination about the nation-country that was Indonesia. The word ‘rakjat’ was used to convey ideas on nationhood. After the fall of Soekarno, ‘rakyat’ turned to be “ghosts” and only appeared in extreme forms such as “communists” or “bad guys”. But I think Soeharto’s idea on nationhood had been replaced with his idea about the “complete Indonesian person”, and the nation was manifested in the country’s engineered landscape, whether through the presence of state institutions such as police stations, postal offices, or the subdistrict offices; or through other images and state rituals such as independence day celebrations, Kartini day competitions, etc. Soekarno-Hatta Airport, Taman Mini Indonesia Indah (TMII) or Beautiful Indonesia in Miniatures, and the complex of University of Indonesia had all been based on New Order’s idea of “traditionalism” and its effort to seek the essence of Indonesia (or at least the essence of Java).[4] They portrayed the peaks of New Order’s efforts in its nation-state imagination project. This is why the second half of the 1980s has been crucial. Most of the visitors to the New Order’s monuments—be it the TMII, the Monument of the Return of Yogya, or the Lubang Buaya or the Crocodile Hole—are people from the kampongs and villages. The middle class people would rather go to the malls than to TMII, probably merely because malls are air-conditioned and one’s skin must be protected from the sun, or perhaps because the early imaginations of the New Order are already obsolete for them.


The emergence of the real estates and the shifts at the end of New Order
The 1980s were a time of big changes, not only because the period saw the height of the New Order regime, but also because it saw the emergence of a new middle class. After 1985, through the financial deregulation packages, the country saw an influx of foreign investments and multinational companies, which did not merely work in the extractive industry. There were real shifts in Indonesia because the influence of the oil boom had started to disappear and also due to the change in the country’s economic strategy, especially after 1986. As the result of the rapid economic growth and the strengthening of the national and foreign companies, which created a group of people who were not totally dependent to the state, a new middle class emerged in Indonesia.

In the early 1990s, the middle class was always ambivalently viewed. Some thought highly of them, thinking of them as the force that propelled democracy in Indonesia; and some viewed them as mere compradors with neither guts nor care to play a role in any change that might be necessary. I think the power of the middle class precisely lies in its consumptive power. Through consumption, they could be a ‘determining force’; every important party played a role in creating new forms of the city and affecting people’s imaginations.

The period after the fall of the New Order saw temporary disappearance of the state from Jakarta’s cityscape due to the riots that had traumatized Jakarta middle class, Chinese or otherwise. The shift from the New Order to the Reformation Era had weakened the state and, for some time, the Indonesian middle class. As the Reformation phase passed, the Indonesian middle class apparently became even stronger; oen could find their expressions in the fascinating cultural outbreak after the New Order, whether in the literary field, in films, or in discourses.

As we observe some housing advertisements in Indonesia between the 1970s to the 2000s, especially those published on Kompas and Tempo, the two main publications of the Indonesian ‘middle class, and those published in property magazines, we can gain fresh ideas on how to understand the shift in the nation-state imagination and the ways people think of the house itself—not as a physical place but as an idea about a place to live, within a grander identity-imagination.


The New Order family, the young executive in ads
The ad for Pondok Indah housing complex that was published in 1976 on Kompas daily stated, “There lies my house… amid the green, beautiful nature… at Pondok Indah”. Meanwhile, the ads for Bintaro Jaya housing complex in 1980 went with the motto “Living comfortably amid the fresh nature”. The nature, the greenness, and the beauty were the main values of the middle class housing before 1986.

The nature was what the middle class dwellers in Jakarta considered ideal—the nature that was safe and orderly, and not actually natural as it had been deliberately designed. A good housing complex was also one that could avoid Jakarta’s mess, even though at the time the population in Jakarta had not exceeded six million people, the toll road was only finished in 1978 and did not affect the location of the housing complexes, and security was not—or was yet to be—the main reason why one would choose to buy a house.

An advertisement from Taman Alfa Indah housing complex offers “…a comfortable dwelling, free from the pollution, the cacophony, and the flood”. The basic problems that haunted Jakarta, such as pollutions, cacophony, and floods, became the catch phrases. The existence of amenities such as clean water facility and the smooth asphalt roads indicated how well a housing complex was. Apparently the concept of a home during this era was also very simple: the place where one can hide from the ugliness of the city that is Jakarta, and the place where the existing facilities can provide an answer for such ugliness.

The emergence of the middle class as quite an independent identity in the Indonesian discourse could only be perceived as housing complexes were being built for the white-collared laborers who worked in the office towers that had started to appear in the center of Jakarta at the end of the 1980s. The advertisements for the housing complexes portrayed the new values of the New Order: investment, financial future, beautiful families, and efficiency.

In some cases, the late 1980s portrayed the changes brought by the New Order. The ceramic advertisement appeared for the first time in Tempo magazine in 1990, depicting a nice bathroom using beige ceramic tiles on its floor and walls. The KIA ceramic-tile has the logo of being “Indonesia Ceramics”. Who would have thought that after this no one would use the old tiles again; who would have thought that almost all the buildings in Indonesia would resemble the bathroom—using ceramics on the floors and walls. The ceramic tiles emerged simultaneously with the malls—one of the first malls in Indonesia was the Plaza Indonesia, which, along with Hyatt Hotel, was one of the first mega-building projects in Jakarta and during the process forced two embassies (the Russian and Australian Embassies) out of the site. This was the super-luxurious mall for the young executive who could also be super-luxurious (or at least tried to be so). The buildings had ceramic tiles, were air-conditioned, clean, artificially scented, with halogen lamps and plastic things—these were the characteristic of this shift.

The emergence of the middle class incited various reactions. The film Catatan Si Boy, or “Boy’s Note”—‘Boy’ being the name of the protagonist—which became a hit, was a compromise between New Order’s family values and the “degeneration” of the new class. Boy is a young man from the upper class who follows closely the tenets of the New Order, handsome and intelligent, surrounded by fans (men and women alike), pious, loves without having sex, drinks without having alcohol, and a good fighter, too. Boy is a young executive. The matter of the degenerate young executive and the middle class became a discourse within the New Order society who felt the need to create a perfect East. The issue of the social status was the fault of the middle class, the young executives, the new Boys, who failed to meet the demands for the perfect New Order male prototype. This issue of social status could serve as something positive, if only there was a political will from the part of the government to take on social engineering practices.

The worse news was that this middle class was not only proud and full of themselves, but also greedy: opinions on houses were shifting. An advertisement for Kosambi Baru housing complex shows stacked up houses, with the house above bigger than the one below it. The house is an investment. In another advertisement, the house disappears altogether, what is seen were only two gold bars implanted erect on the ground. The house is a bar of gold that will go on making profits.

Because the house had become the locus of investment where the dream of the perfect family found its context, the security of the house accordingly became the focus of attention. Most of the housing advertisements state security as the reason why we should choose a particular housing complex. The Melati Point House states in its ads that it is “A housing complex that protects the security of your family with the comfort of an apartment complex”. It even goes on to describe four security features that the complex offers: (1) 24-hour security surveillance (with a picture of a guard standing erect), (2) Identification system at the gate, (3) A single access to the complex, (4) Air-phone communication system from every house to the security post.

Housing complexes are also closely related with the emergence of toll roads. Jakarta is a city with toll roads. A housing complex is judged according to its proximity to the toll road. New housing complexes, especially the mini-town kinds or the mega-complex that appeared at the time (such as the Bumi Serpong Damai satellite city in 1989 and Lippo Karawaci satellite city in 1992) were built according to the location of the existing toll roads. Where there is a toll road, there is a housing complex. Working at the office, the young father naturally does not want to grow old on the road—“You can even have the time to play with your little ones before going to the office”. According to an advertisement, the Little Ones can spend more time with Dad, who has become a young executive and must work in an office at the center of the city. What the housing complex offers was a lifestyle; the pride of an urbanite who must spend time with the little ones. The nature and its beauty were replaced by new needs for a lifestyle that had barely existed before. From the toll roads, Jakarta would disappear. The toll roads are places where you can truly feel that you are nowhere; you can be in Indonesia, but you can very well be in the US, too.

At the height of the New Order economic might, the new middle class created (or at least bought) new places to support a lifestyle, which was often mentioned with such a pride, but which might also be a logical consequence of their being. The favorite place to forget the fatigue after a week’s work was the malls, avoiding the sun and the pollutions of Jakarta. Jakarta itself has been built for the middle class: the streets are places where you go driving, not walking. The new middle class was a confident bunch. Carrying the Little One in his arms with his wife proudly looking on, our Boy lived in an Asian tiger country, a part of the Asian Miracle. On this foundation, housing complexes are offered, trying to fulfill the Indonesian dream: having a green and beautiful house with all the facilities offered for the needs of the family, with only two children and a white-collared job.

The advertisement of Kemang River View housing complex shows the changes of the discourse on “the Indonesian person”, or at least on the new urbanite of Jakarta who appeared at the end of the New Order regime. The ad portrays a young executive talking to his future father-in-law; his marriage proposal has been blessed because the young executive chooses his house well, considering it as an investment. There are the patrimonial look of the father (as the wife-to-be only exists to smile and nods, letting the Father decide) and the confidence on the part of our young executive in choosing the ideal home for him as a young manager, in accordance with the traditional views about a good housing complex (beautiful and green, within a comfortable environment and complete with clear water) as well as with the new views (the house as an asset, a long-term investment). It is also important to remember that the house is a growing house that can be made bigger as there are more children in the family—it is of course expected that there will be no more than two children.

It is directly clear who the young executive was, with all the moral pretensions regarding a good family, paying respect to the strict but understanding father, who in turn has the future in mind and is certain that his daughter will be benefited by this investment, because the house price had not suffered from the crash during the crises, or because the young man had not realized that he could be fired when the crisis struck. How could such a calamity strike, anyway? It was the era of the development, when one pictured the future brightly as was characteristic for the discourse on Indonesia that the New Order had built. No one would think that there would be a time when Indonesia did not develop, that Indonesia would not take off.


Post-New Order housing
Jakarta descended into spreading and fearful social upheavals on May 20, 1998. A day afterward, Soeharto stepped down from his position as a president, and Indonesia slowly, gradually, and surely entered the post-New Order world. This is a world where standard forms do not (or are yet to) exist, where negotiations take place continuously among the multitude of elements within the country, so that such rich varieties arise. Groups that have rarely appeared within the Indonesian imaginations now emerge in forms that are paradoxical and strange: the hardline Moslems show their faces, and so do homosexuals, the Chinese, expatriates, and people who live and work across state boundaries (workers in foreign lands, students, white-collared workers). A collage of Indonesians that goes beyond the images of the good peasant and Boy the young executive.

It is clear that such a multitude of identities have existed even since before the New Order, but it is also clear that, first, they had no place in the discourse about the New Order Indonesian and that, second, in terms of the quantity, there have been an increase that makes their presence felt and talked about. What happened was that there was a paradigm shift, which can be perceived in the housing advertisements or in almost all the cultural creations by the middle class: the new novellas, the new films, and the new magazines. The new middle class is not a monolithic entity, but separated, crisscrossed, and in various translocal imagined forms—from the Chinese boy who likes to listen to Taiwanese pop songs, studies in Australia, goes to Singapore for a holiday, and has a sister who lives in Hong Kong; or a Javanese woman who works in a multinational corporation and listens to religious sermons by “international Moslem” leaders, reads Islamic novellas, and joins the rallies organized by the Islamic Social Justice Party, protesting the policies by the US; from a liberal Sundanese man who feels “westernized”, liberated from sexual shackles by aesthetic and moral forms learnt from the American series and glossy magazines. This, however, is a fragmented and crisscrossed class, whose members consume the same pop culture, similarly pass the roads of Jakarta with their traffic jams, and have similar fear for the sun and things from the kampongs. They are neither Indonesians nor “foreigners”. It is between these two oppositions that the new imagination on Indonesia must be understood; it is here where the new spaces for negotiations are created for a post-New Order state.

In the post-New Order Era, we see an outbreak of styles that refer to Spain (such styles first appeared during the New Order period). An ad for a new cluster in Cibubur’s Kota Wisata (Travel Town) shows a house with a “Victorian” style, duly called the Windsor Mansion, which offers the perfect combinations that can fulfill your needs, using impressive forms and the characteristic and exclusive Victorian style, as revealed in the details.

Windsor Mansion is the “Symbol of the exclusive taste of the English nobility”—notwithstanding the fact that no members of the English nobility have ever lived or, as far as I know, set foot in the Victorian-style houses in the tropical housing complex of Jakarta. A watercolor picture (very characteristic of the nineteenth century?) depicts one of the houses offered, with incongruous pastel colors and brick walls. There are also the chimney (for the smoke from cooking?), Victorian turret, and frightening asymmetry. Windsor is, of course, the anglicized name of the English royal family, whose family name previously was Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. The name was changed as the First World War drew near, because naturally if England was at war with Germany, her queen should not don a German name. The English Royal Family certainly do not live in a mansion; they live in a palace. It is very interesting if one thinks about it: a family name that had been changed along with the burgeoning nationalism in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century became the name of a housing complex in a nation who seems to be at loss as to where to locate its nationalism. The Windsor cluster is one of the many clusters offered at the Travel Town, alongside Amsterdam, Paris, or Morocco clusters.

The impression of being elegant and exclusive is the ad’s main idea: certainly not every one can live in the place designed for the nobilities. It is also such impressions that propel the changes in the styles of the apartments and housing complexes mushrooming in Jakarta after the New Order. The ad for Kota Bunga (City of Flower) housing complex in Puncak hints at the ideas that houses today must have themes. The ad shows the launching of houses in the theme of ‘Prague Villas’, and pictures houses with the styles that, as far as I know, are never seen in Prague, nor are they characteristics of any place in Eastern Europe. The ad says, “Presenting the exotism of the Eastern Europe architecture in the City of Flower, Puncak”. The ad shows some dancing Europeans: two people are doing the Spanish Flamenco, and there are women wearing traditional costumes (probably from Hungary? But they also resemble traditional costumes from Germany). What first came to my mind if I think about Eastern European architecture are mass apartments and flats built during the communist era in the 1960s to the 1980s. Flamenco is obviously not from Eastern Europe, and shouldn’t it be ‘exoticism’ instead of ‘exotism’? It is a tad difficult to connect the word ‘exotic’ with ‘Eastern Europe’, probably because definitions and images on exoticism have so far been influenced by views from the West and Hollywood. However, it is also interesting how, even if Eastern Europe is rarely considered as exotic by the Western iconography (at the most, the area is exotic as the place where Count Dracula had come from, at the Carpathian mountains in the country that is now called Rumania), the developer can still use Eastern Europe as a marketing tool, employing the theme of the exotic. This can be viewed as a part of the glocalization, a process in which global images (which often go in one direction, from the West to the rest of the world) are taken over locally and turned around using the logic of localities.

Bumi Serpong Damai housing complex launched its latest cluster, named ‘de Latinos’. One of the houses offered is called ‘Flamenggo’—this is a bit difficult to understand. First, because ‘de Latinos’ is grammatically incorrect in Spanish; second, because ‘Flamenggo’ is not a word. There is ‘Flamingo’, which refers to the pink birds that flock in the marsh and are characteristic of the Latin world. Then there is the ‘Flamenco’ dance, a beautiful national dance of Spain. Latin, meanwhile, certainly does not refer to a particular country, but to a vast area with a multitude of cultures. Flamenco does not originate from the Latin, but from South Europe. Why don’t they use, for example, the Tango, the national dance of Argentine, or Capoeira, the Brazilian self-defense sport? The varieties existing in the area are certainly remarkable: from Chile and Argentine with the Mediterranean climate, the white majority, and the Spanish language; to Brazil that is more tropical, with a multicultural population that speak Portuguese with a Brazilian dialect; to Bolivia where two-third of the population are the indigenous Americans (Indians), who live in the mountains and have lofty pre-Columbian culture, etc.

De Latinos, like the Prague Villas and the Windsor Mansion, presents a certain variant of the exclusiveness, exoticism, and elegance. All of them represent things that others cannot attain, notwithstanding the possibility that the offered aesthetic taste can perhaps not be attained by the English as well (even if they are members of the nobility), or by people living in Prague or Rio de Janeiro. The Windsor Mansion ad is a long one, but aside from the references pointing out the exclusiveness and elegance of the English nobility, there is not much that we can gather about why the houses and the area deserve the name of Victorian houses and complex. The history and the background disappear, what is left is only a collage of kitsch, a marketing strategy that plays with the symbols of the post-New Order Jakartans. It is an exclusive symbolization by way of travel around the world, through the production (as they are clearly not reproductions) of global images that are highly local. There is not one house, style, or ad that explains why a house with a particular style is truly worth having. The houses will always be Indonesian houses, because what is on sale are not Victorian English houses or traditional houses from Eastern Europe, China, Japan, or Brazil; but rather new imaginations that enable the residents of Jakarta imagine themselves to be a part of a new global world, after their old world, that of the New Order, has been shattered.

Apparently, the iconography that forms a part of the housing styles has been understood via the centers of global image making. This explains why, for example, there are no houses offered that are in the style of Sub-Saharan African, Mongolia, or Fiji. These images have been made global by the global image machine that, to a certain extent, is still controlled by cultural centers of the North countries that are rich and developed. This fact also appears in the very peculiar paradox of the Balinese style that has emerged as one of the favorite contemporary styles. Here, Bali is the Bali that has been processed by the said global discourse—a Bali that has been perceived by tourists, artists, and foreign business people. Interested by the exoticism that the island offers (which certainly is not so exotic according to its Javanese neighbors, for example), these people have created an idea of Bali that is hybrid and international. Therefore, the style can be a part of the new housing iconography. Here, Bali has been twice taken over: first by the foreigners who come to the island because of its exoticism; second, by the middle class residents of Jakarta who consider the island exotic because foreigners think of it that way. Therefore, the peculiar phenomenon arise: Jakartans who go on holiday on the Kuta beach and think that they are in an exotic world, wear sun glasses, and walk on the beach but certainly without sunbathing because it will darken their complexion.

The travel around the world becomes a new architectural obsession in Jakarta. A mall built in Kelapa Gading area even offers seven kinds of atriums that can be enjoyed according to the type of the civilization they present: there is the atrium of the Archipelago, that of China, Persia, France, Italy, Japan, and also that of the Millennium. This is “the first mall that presents seven charms of the world in a Mall”, with an ad that shows a Shaolin monk performing Wushu—because China is one of the seven charms of the world that the mall offers, but also because a lot of the middle class people living in the area of Kelapa Gading are Chinese. The Chinese features become an important part in house marketing. This is because the Chinese are a significant market for houses, but it also signifies an important change from the New Order Era. The disappearance of the omnipotent country opens a door of opportunities for much more varied cultural expressions, be it of the Chinese, of other ethnic groups in the country, or of the international Islam and the Western liberalism. Such expressions are often determined by market forces.

All the cultural complexities and the richness of each of the civilization are compressed into cheap marketing terms: ‘eksotis’, ‘eksklusif’, ‘elite’, and ‘elegan’—all of these are Indonesian words borrowed from the English. But what has actually disappeared from the newspaper pages? Certainly words such as ‘investment’ and ‘green’ remain a concern, but it is also clear that in some ads, such words have been replaced by those Indonenglish terms. The optimism of our young executive has changed. The post crisis era is the time when one does not think that a house is good if we can make it bigger according to the increasing number of children living there. Our young executive might have been fired in 1997, but if not, he has chosen to live in an Italian-style house in a housing complex in Bekasi. The houses in the area where he lives of course form a cluster of houses, because such an arrangement provides better sense of security from the increasingly unsafe Jakarta. Overriding the feeling of comfort and the sense of beauty is the sense that our class is an exclusive class that must be protected from the continuing threat of “the masses”. As I read those ads, there is a strong sense that the future is no longer a part of the consideration, at least when it comes to the Indonesian future.

If we refer to David Harvey’s opinion about postmodernism, certainly the style of the post-New Order housing complex is one of the clearest manifestations of Indonesian postmodernism. In 1990, Tempo magazine published an article about postmodernism. The beginning of the 1990s was the beginning of the emergence of postmodernism in Indonesia, at least in the field of architecture. Actually, the neotraditional forms that the New Order regime had supported could be categorized as postmodernist forms, but the emergence of postmodernism is taken as an import from the West, so that one of the first forms that have been considered as postmodernists are the skyscrapers in Jakarta. When several architects were asked about the meaning of postmodernism, they answered that it was about disorderly design. That is exactly what has happened to Indonesian housing complexes: the application of disorderly design, where the local elements and foreign styles are incorporated into new forms. Just like the Indonesian people, the style of the post-New Order house is a style in negotiations: a changing style because it has not determined what its new form would be. But we can also say that in the postmodernist condition in Indonesia today, there is no longer an essential style. Are we thus facing a world where there will never be an idea about a fixed style? Can we then say that what we are seeing is the beginning of the death of “Indonesia” as a discourse and the understanding of a certain people regarding their identity?


Closing
What happened to Indonesia in 1997? Certainly the country has undergone many changes. The post-New Order Era is a vigorous time of cultural outbreaks. Referring to our initial idea which relates the cultural, social, and political forms with the economic form that serves as their base, we can say that such a condition is the logical result of the shift in the role of the state and of Indonesia’s entry to the pro-market and export-oriented global economic structure. Since the end of the 1980s, the New Order state had been weakened vis-à-vis the neoliberal structure; the fall of the New Order has intensified the influences of the global structures on the cultural and social orders.

Along with the changes, the shifts in the communication and transportation technologies provided bigger opportunities for imagining Indonesia. The city of Jakarta, as the capital and the entrance for the global influences, undergoes the most significant changes, not only because it has quite a big number of middle class people, but also because most of its urban spaces have been expropriated by neoliberalism. It is astonishing to see that the stronger the city is integrated into the global economic structure, the more it resembles other cities that have similarly entered such structure: the skylines in Manila, Bangkok, and Kuala Lumpur now resemble those of Dallas, Durban, Buenos Aires, or Harare.

Here I will offer a rather vulnerable conclusion: the post-New Order world is a world where the middle class residents of Jakarta are running away from Indonesia. The houses here remind me of suitcases that are ready to go, as if everybody still remembers the 1998 exodus and is traumatized by the experiences surrounding it. The advertisements for the houses no longer talk about young people who are going to live in a bright future; rather, they remind people of other places, other charms, which one day might be necessary should Jakarta descend again into chaos.




Leiden, The Netherlands, February 2007
Translated by Rani Elsanti