17 August 2024 did not end up being a significant milestone for Nusantara, Indonesia’s planned new capital city currently under development in East Kalimantan. That year, on the 79th anniversary of Indonesia’s independence, outgoing president Joko “Jokowi” Widodo had intended to celebrate the inauguration of a brand new capital. Instead, amid delays caused as much by the Covid-19 pandemic as the unrealistic timeline for phase of the ambitious project, Nusantara saw scaled-back celebrations against the backdrop of incomplete government buildings.

This caused renewed uncertainty over the long-term prospects of the new city, despite pledges by the new president, Prabowo Subianto, to continue Jokowi’s political legacy. Given current public dissatisfaction with Indonesia’s political elite, it is worth examining not just the promises over the capital city relocation project but also some of the assumptions about its origins and development which have so far been taken more or less for granted.

Beginning with its political origins, this article explores how Nusantara was conceived and rationalised by policymakers during the Jokowi presidency (2014–2024). It shows that various internal contradictions that arose from the planning process, including its rushed timeline, ambiguous justificatory narratives, and developmentalist idealism, have led to the city looking more like a speculative urbanisation project than an inclusive city for all Indonesians. The arguments presented here are based in part on the author’s recently completed doctoral thesis on the policy mobilities on Nusantara, which included 12 months of fieldwork in Indonesia and semi-structured interviews with policymakers, urban planners, architects, and consultants with first-hand knowledge of the capital city relocation project.

Hazy origins

The idea of relocating the national capital to somewhere more geographically central is not new in of itself. Indeed, Sukarno went so far as to develop a masterplan for relocating it to Palangkaraya, which later became the capital of Central Kalimantan. Sukarno wanted to develop a new capital to embed a new nationalist, modernist, and postcolonial identity for Indonesia, but later abandoned the plans due to technical and economic challenges and kept Jakarta as the de facto capital.

Nevertheless, the idea of fulfilling Sukarno’s vision kept simmering in intellectual circles. It was invoked in official government discourse on the capital relocation process in the early years after Jokowi’s official announcement in 2019, including in the Ministry of National Development Planning (Bappenas) Buku Saku (Handbook)  in 2021. At the time of writing, Sukarno was still mentioned as the progenitor of the idea on the official webpage of the National Capital City Authority (O-IKN), the government body created to oversee Nusantara’s development.

In reality, today’s capital relocation project bears very little resemblance to Sukarno’s vision and was initiated for entirely different motives. Although the idea of relocating the capital periodically surfaced in the 2000s, particularly in the aftermath of perennial flooding in Jakarta, there was no consensus on the best approach. Some states like Brazil, Nigeria and Myanmar had created purpose-built capitals far from their colonial-era capitals after independence, while Indonesia’s neighbour Malaysia had chosen to create a new political capital, Putrajaya, only 25km away from the commercial capital of Kuala Lumpur.

The contemporary capital city relocation plan embodied in Nusantara can trace its origins to the lobbying efforts of Tim Visi 2033 (TV2033), a small private think tank founded in 2008 by Andrinof Chaniago together with two other academics and a policy analyst. Their small outfit promoted big ideas for Indonesia’s development challenges, including relocating the capital city to the geographic centre of the country and building a network of new urban centres across the archipelago. In principle, this would help rebalance economic development and reducing the population burden of Java Island. Indeed, TV2033’s official logo shows a series of interconnected cities centred around a hypothetical capital in the centre of the country, somewhere on the Eastern coast of Kalimantan; TV2033’s founders, particularly Chaniago, made regular media appearances to spruik the idea of a capital relocation.

In 2010, Chaniago was introduced to a young up-and-coming mayor from Surakarta (also known as Solo). This political upstart, Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, would be elected president of Indonesia just four years later. At the time, Chaniago and his colleagues saw a lot of potential in Jokowi’s progressive and participatory approach to urban development, and began inviting him to Jakarta to participate in national television debates.

Meanwhile, Chaniago also began lobbying behind the scenes to have Jokowi put on the PDI-P ticket for the Jakarta Gubernatorial race in 2012 and, later, the 2014 Presidential elections. Although the general idea of relocating the capital did not originate with TV2033—the idea was a common topic of debate among Indonesia’s intellectual and political elites in the early 2010s—TV2033 clearly ended up having a significant influence on Jokowi. Chaniago became a close adviser to Jokowi, and during an official visit to the president-elect’s office in 2014 handed Jokowi a copy of a TV2033 policy brief. Chaniago was briefly put in charge of the Ministry of National Development Planning (Bappenas) in 2014–2015, and oversaw the first of a series of internal feasibility studies undertaken by the government. However, plans for Nusantara soon began to mutate and take on a life of their own.

Sukarno’s motivation for relocating Indonesia’s capital was based on a desire to break free from the past and create a new modern, postcolonial identity for the country. In contrast, the current vision for Nusantara—what I like to call capital city relocation 2.0—is predicated on the ideology that a new capital city can solve complex socio-economic and geographical development problems. Moreover, Jokowi’s version of Nusantara gradually adopted various high-modernist rationales that attempted to legitimise the project as a smart, green utopia (although much of that rationalisation was decided post-hoc, as explained in the next section below).

Although these ideas are not necessarily contradictory to the Sukarnoist vision, they are qualitatively different in that they envision “a particularly sweeping vision of how the benefits of technical and scientific progress might be applied” through the central state, which James C. Scott saw as characteristic of high modernism. The clean slate approach to facilitating various forms of high-tech spatial interventions across a 256,000-hectare territory further sets Nusantara apart from the modernist vision of Sukarno. Therefore, and in contrast to scholars who characterise Nusantara as a form of techno-nationalist urbanism, I argue that Nusantara is essentially not a city, but a high-modernist and speculative development project. I will return to this point again below.

A discursive black box

During Jokowi’s first term, the government (2014–2019) was focused on finding a suitable location for the new capital, whereas his second term (2019–2024) was defined more by the immense push to legitimise the relocation project. Legitimacy comes in different forms and depends on the audience being targeted. In the case of Nusantara, the post-2019 period saw Jokowi and his inner circle initially focusing their efforts on internal legitimacy within the state. These efforts included the creation of a strategic masterplan by a McKinsey-led consortium and various lobbying efforts in parliament to secure the 2022 Law on the National Capital passed without significant resistance by any of the political parties.

The 2022 law also sent strong external signals to potential investors and the general public, and was complimented by various forms of government discourse such as press releases, media statements, and other policy documents. Similarly, the design competition for the administrative core (Kawasan Inti Pusat Pemerintahan or KIPP) in late 2019, won by local urban design firm URBAN+, was an important tool for appropriating resistance among Indonesia’s urban design professionals (which includes architects, planners, and landscape designer).

However, many key decisions—such as the size of Nusantara, the exact location of KIPP, and the emphasis on green urbanism—were driven more by the need to rationalise the capital relocation (and create consensus among political elites) than by any overarching policy goals. This should perhaps come as no surprise, as scholars of governance and public policy have previously shown that evidence-based policy making practices are a “myth”—and that more often than not, policy is evidence-making, with key planners selectively picking evidence to craft whatever narrative they think is most likely to compel other policymakers.

Importantly, the various internal and external legitimisation strategies pursued by the Indonesian state created a “collective lexicon” of discursive frames for politicians, planners and third-party consultants to draw upon. Indonesian policymakers were somewhat adept at adding new operational logics to justify Nusantara over time, especially in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, which led to concerns over national economic recovery. It did not take long for Nusantara to become burdened by a bewildering set of design ideals and discursive frames: green city, smart city, sustainable city, inclusive city, sponge city, resilient city, liveable city… the list goes on.

In my research, I categorised 64 different discursive frames—defining concepts, principles, and approaches—used in government discourse to legitimise Nusantara. This gado-gado of policy concepts has made it impossible to pinpoint what Nusantara actually is, or even stands for, thus undermining project coherence. The negative effects of this strategic ambiguity may have been unintentional, but it speaks volumes about how the government has sought to rationalise this megaproject and helps explain some of its internal contradictions.

The city that never was

There are several internal contradictions in the capital relocation project that the preceding sections can help us illuminate. The first is its rushed implementation towards the end of Jokowi’s second term, which undermined due diligence and contributed to the chair and deputy of O-IKN resigning in June 2024.

Nevertheless, when considered from the perspective of an anxious executive that was running out of time, accelerating project implementation also served a strategic purpose, according to a forthcoming paper by Tim Bunnell, Anders Moeller, Priza Marendraputra, and Andrew Schauf: Jokowi, who was constitutionally barred from running for a third term, desperately needed to create path dependency for Nusantara to ensure that the crowning jewel of his political legacy outlived him. The rush led to coordination issues and contradictory design ideals among key planners involved in it, as well as a lack of meaningful inclusion of local communities in the planning process. It was also costly to accelerate construction efforts, and engineers and architects frequently had to amend plans on the fly due to insufficient geological data in the preparation phase. Nevertheless, and despite the lacklustre ceremony on Independence Day in 2024, Jokowi’s rushed project timeline helped propel Nusantara forward and embedded it in people’s imagination—at least amongst Indonesia’s political elite.

Similarly, and as already described above, the rush to legitimise the project led to significant ambiguity over what the project stands for. Nusantara may have scores of attractive policy buzzwords, but it has no core goal or overarching operational logic guiding it. This has in effect turned Nusantara into a political black box that any policy ideal can be attached to, whether it is the promotion of high-tech pharmaceutical industry or spearheading a low-carbon economic model for the country. This has also led to increasingly idealistic claims, such as the idea that Nusantara will help fulfil the promises of Golden Indonesia 2045, the national policy goal of achieving developed-country status by the centenary of Indonesian independence, or to achieve civilisational progress for the country. In essence, this boils down to a logical fallacy: Nusantara is good because Nusantara is good. And who would not want to support a project that is good for the entirety of the country?

This may also help explain why Nusantara, according to some critics, looks like an elite vanity project. The original promise of capital city relocation 2.0 was that a distended relocation approach—that is to say, somewhere far away from Jakarta and in the geographic centre of the country—would automatically rebalance economic growth and reduce the environmental burden of a 156-million-person population on Java Island. These developmentalist assumptions were not only built on shallow policy research, but seemed to completely miss the point when it was announced in 2019 that Nusantara would be built in the second-wealthiest province (based on GDP per capita) in Indonesia.

This is not to say that there are no logical reasons for building it in East Kalimantan; the area has relatively low population density, and much of its resource-depleted land concessions were own by private corporations which could (with generous compensation) be made available for public investment. But the lack of inclusive consultations, both locally with indigenous Dayak populations and nationally with the general electorate, has made the fanciful promises of Nusantara sound increasingly disingenuous.

This leads us to perhaps the biggest contradiction of them all: the fact that Nusantara is not really a city-building project to begin with. Although government charts usually portray Nusantara as constituting a core city (which includes KIPP) surrounded by a wider city development area, it is actually being planned out as nine distinct industrial development zones. While KIPP is slowly beginning to look like a small but functioning urban administrative district, the rest of the 256,000 hectares set aside for this project was never intended to become a singular city.

Instead, Nusantara has all the trappings of a speculative development project, where a “space of exception” was declared to facilitate private investment. While it is true that Jokowi genuinely believed that private investment could shoulder the majority of the cost of this multi-billion dollar project, Nusantara’s speculative development model contradicts the original vision of building an inclusive new capital city that would symbolise the unity of the archipelago’s hundreds of ethnic groups.

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In the morning of 1 October 1965, 37-year-old Eneng (not her real name) woke up in Bandung, about 200km from Jakarta, to an unexpected news broadcast via Radio Republik Indonesia (RRI): a group of people had taken measures to protect President Sukarno from a coup mounted by a “Council of Generals”. Although unanticipated, the news relieved her. Sukarno was an ally of the movement she was part of, as a member of Gerwani—abbreviation for the Gerakan Wanita Indonesia (Indonesian Women’s Movement), one of the largest organisations in Indonesia campaigning for women’s rights, anti-imperialism, literacy, and labour.

Eneng felt a flicker of pride as the group—later calling themselves as the Revolutionary Council—sounded appropriately ready, though not for long. By the evening that day, the narratives had changed. The army under Major-General Suharto had gained control of RRI and blamed the Partai Komunis Indonesia/PKI (Indonesian Communist Party) for the coup. Given its affiliation with the PKI, Gerwani was suddenly in the wrong, and Eneng was guilty by association.

A primary school-educated housewife, Eneng had been a Gerwani member for seven years by then. When she joined the movement in 1958 at 30 years of age, little did she know that it would profoundly impact her life—and death. Several months after that morning, in November 1965, Eneng was detained without trial. It was years later, when she was 44 years old in 1972, that her imprisonment was officiated in a set of documents containing her mugshots, fingerprints, and all her personal details, along with a list of all her close family and friends and their addresses. We know little about Eneng’s case beyond this time.

Eneng’s file is part of the Sukamiskin Prison Papers, a compilation of 58 prison records we, the 1965 Setiap Hari collective, accidentally encountered in a second hand bookshop in Yogyakarta in December 2024. Unlike the other files, hers does not contain the release documents—the so-called “voluntary” agreement to be released back into society only to be systematically surveilled, never to sue the government.

Eneng’s story speaks to the experience of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Indonesians. That her documents—and others’ like them, containing sensitive personal data potentially impacting so many lives—could be sold as mere commodities in a second hand market only underscores the persistence of impunity. After the army took control, it used propaganda to portray members of the PKI and its affiliate organisations—such as Gerwani—as dangerous internal enemies of the country that had to be eliminated.

This propaganda, combined with the establishment of a military structure to coordinate the attack on the Indonesian left, led to widespread civilian participation in mass violence against PKI members and sympathisers. It has been estimated that from late 1965 to mid-1966 approximately 500,000 men, women and children were killed. In addition, over a million people were arrested and detained, often over lengthy periods of time, without formal charge or trial. Conditions of detention were extremely harsh, and prisoners endured inadequate rations, lacked access to health care, and suffered torture and sexual violence. Some prisoners were taken out of prison at night in groups to be killed. Those who survived imprisonment were subjected to systematic discrimination and denied an array of civil rights.

The violence was a crucial part of the ascendancy of Suharto’s authoritarian New Order regime. After 1998, there have been various efforts to address the 1965 violence, as well as other human rights crimes of the regime. However, these initiatives have largely failed, which can largely be attributed to the continuing presence of military elites in politics, who were implicated in human rights abuses during the New Order and who have been able to influence policy in such a way that accountability for perpetrators was avoided.

The presidency of Joko Widodo (2014–2024) was prefaced by an electoral promise to address past human rights abuses. However, this promise did not translate into improving existing mechanisms or reviving earlier endeavours. Instead, in Widodo’s first term new initiatives were introduced that were presented as more “culturally appropriate” ways of addressing past human rights crimes. In the second term, human rights issues were pushed even further into the background, with the exception of the President’s 2023 acknowledgement of past human rights violations, including the 1965 violence placed at the top of the list.

Although this acknowledgment allowed for socio-economic measures, including financial compensation, it fell short of holding those responsible for the violations to account. Moreover, it did not allow for genuine reconciliation measures such as truth-telling or revising official historical accounts to include the experiences and perspectives of those victimised by past human rights abuses. These measures have therefore only shielded the military and other elites from accountability.

Accountability for human rights crimes has only become more elusive following the 2024 election of Prabowo Subianto, a former army general responsible for the disappearances of pro-democracy activists in 1997–1998 and human rights violations in Indonesian-occupied East Timor. In May 2025, the Minister of Cultural Affairs Fadli Zon—who has a record of denying human rights violations—announced a Rp9 billion (US$551,000) project to rewrite Indonesia’s official history. The project has drawn strong criticism from Indonesian scholars and activists who argue that this new history will conceal darker episodes of Indonesian history—including the 1965 mass violence. The history re-writing project is thus part of a broader context of sixty years of impunity.

Historical rewriting has long been a tool of power-building. The practice of damnatio memoriae in ancient Rome—erasing or excluding names, images, and records—set a precedent for using history, and the act of remembering itself—as rulers’ political tool. Later empires reframed colonisation as civilisation, and nation-states in recent decades have gone from recasting history to banning the teaching of significant historical topics—ranging from slavery and systemic racism to nuclear warfare and gender—under the guise of sensitivity, divisiveness, or age-appropriateness. When history is rewritten by power, how do we keep alive the memories it seeks to erase?

Culture, too, is a political route to power. It is telling that the Prabowo presidency, resonating with several cultural power plays in Europe, including the Sweden Democrats’ strategic cultural moves, has formed Indonesia’s inaugural Ministry of Cultural Affairs under which the very project of rewriting history is being undertaken. Yet culture, by definition, is shaped through connections between individuals—by citizens, by the people. While the state invokes “culturally appropriate ways” to contain justice within symbolic gestures, culture can also be deployed differently. Collective memory work and other cultural interventions cannot substitute for state policy, but they do offer counterweights.

It is only within state narratives, however, that historical events appear isolated. Like the country maps we memorise in primary school, states appear as neatly bounded entities, with self-contained stories. For decades, the global publicity of the American War in Vietnam has obscured both the Malayan Emergency and the Indonesian genocide, even though the model of repression travelled—for instance, in the warning “Jakarta is coming” which appeared in Chile in 1973.

In reality, as state security and methods of exerting power operate beyond borders, practices of memory and solidarity must do the same. The urgent task ahead, therefore, is not to rescue, but to listen, to stand alongside, and to amplify. How can the heirs of Enengs—engaged in struggles worldwide—mobilise culture as a field of aesthetic resistance, connecting across boundaries to resist erasure in the name of power?

1965setiaphari.org

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In late August and early September 2025, Indonesia saw one of its most intense protests in the country’s post-reformasi history. Sparked by public anger at salary increases for high-ranking officials, the demonstrations soon tapped into wider frustrations over social justice, economic inequality, inflation, corruption, state’s violence and militarism, and ultimately descended into violence and riots in which at least 11 people were killed. The police responded with heavy-handedly, arresting thousands of protesters. In recent weeks, authorities have justified their response by blaming “anarcho” groups (kelompok anarko), portraying them as the architects of unrest.

This fits a pattern seen in Indonesia’s recent protest waves: from the #ReformasiDikorupsi student protests of 2019, the Omnibus Law protests in 2020, the “Emergency Warning” (Peringatan Darurat) rallies of 2024, to the “Dark Indonesia” (Indonesia Gelap) actions of early 2025. In each case, officials quickly blamed “anarchist” agitators for unrest, using the anarko label to discredit demonstrations and justify crackdowns. The term anarko (anarchist) has thus become a catch-all bogeyman in official narratives of protest violence. But is the threat of anarchist groups truly as grave as portrayed? Since when did Indonesian authorities begin using this label, and to what effect?

Anarchism in Indonesia: a long-standing but fringe movement

A textbook might define anarchism s a political philosophy that rejects hierarchies of domination, especially the state and capitalism. Anarchists, accordingly, advocate for horizontal forms of social organisation based on mutual aid, voluntary cooperation, and direct democracy. In Indonesia, however,  “anarki” is commonly understood to mean “chaos” or “vandal”. This linguistic overlap has fuelled deep misconceptions. Police and media often equate any violent protest or act of vandalism with “anarchism”, regardless of whether those involved identify with anarchist ideology.

This gap between anarchism as an ideology and anarki as chaos is especially striking given Indonesia’s own anarchist history. Anarchism has existed for decades in Indonesia. Its roots stretch back over a century, although it has never been a mass political force. Early traces of anarchist thought appeared in the Dutch colonial era. For instance, anti-colonial writer Eduard Douwes Dekker and his grandnephew Ernest Douwes Dekker are often regarded as early anarchist figures in Dutch East Indies. Anarchist cells and syndicalist unions grew through the 1910s, though colonial authorities repressed them by the 1920s. After independence, anarchism vanished—especially under Suharto’s New Order, as his regime brutally suppressed leftist movements.

It was only after the fall of Suharto in 1998 that anarchism reemerged in Indonesia’s activist subculture. In the 2000s, Indonesian anarchist collectives began to form and appeared in May Day protest in small numbers. Throughout the 2010s, anarchist ideas spread widely within youth subcultures, such as the punk music scene, football supporter groups, and DIY art communities, especially in urban centres. These groups fostered anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist sentiments among segments of marginalised youth. By the late 2010s, Indonesia’s anarko scene had coalesced into loose networks sharing a common aesthetics (black flags, circle-A symbols) and tactics (graffiti, street protests). Anarchist-oriented activism gained wider visibility in recent years thanks to social media and mounting public frustration with the government. Online platforms have allowed youth activists to share anarchist literature, memes, and organising events across regions.

The 2019 May Day and the spectre of “anarko”

The first major public scare over “anarchists” occurred on May Day 2019. In Bandung and Jakarta, labour rallies were joined by an unprecedented number of youths dressed in black, wearing masks and carrying anarchist flags. In Bandung, a bloc of up to hundreds of young protesters shocked the public and authorities. It was “the largest to date” of such anarchist appearances. Footage from the Bandung rally showed marchers in black chanting anti-capitalist slogans, with some of them engaging in vandalism. Their photos and videos went viral on social media and caught attention worldwide in anarchist forums.

The reaction from police was swift and severe. In Bandung alone, authorities detained around 619 people who had worn black clothing. This 2019 May Day incident was the first time Indonesian police systematically used the term “anarko” to arrest protesters. National Police spokesmen alleged that an “anarcho-syndicalist network” had infiltrated the May Day rallies across several cities. Even a major labour union echoed the claim, suggesting “anarchy groups” had snuck into the worker demonstrations. From that point on, “anarko” became a buzzword in the media. Headlines blared about “anarko” as agents of provocation.

Just a few months later, in September 2019, the pattern repeated. Indonesia was rocked by the #ReformasiDikorupsi protests: massive student-led demonstrations against the weakening of the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) law and controversial changes to the criminal code. These were the largest street protests the country had seen since the 1998 Reformasi uprising. Largely peaceful at first, the rallies in Jakarta, Bandung, and other cities eventually descended into clashes. In some places, mobs burned public facilities and vandalised property. Police confidently pointed to “anarko” groups as the culprits behind the unrest.

The script established in 2019 replayed with each new wave of protest. In October 2020, when unions and students mobilised against the Omnibus Law on Job Creation, riots broke out in Jakarta and other cities. Officials again blamed “anarchist infiltrators”. Police claimed to uncover an anarko plot, paraded a detained youth as the “leader of the anarchists,” and arrested others for graffiti or carrying black flags. Hundreds were detained across cities, often on questionable evidence.

By 2024–25, the narrative intensified. The Peringatan Darurat protests against democratic backsliding in late 2024 saw over 300 arrests in Jakarta, with police again citing the role of “anarko”. In early 2025, the Indonesia Gelap demonstrations, sparked by anger over legislative perks and police brutality, were cast in even darker terms. West Java police accused “anarko” groups of infiltrating the protests and spreading disinformation, and by September 2025 authorities even alleged foreign funding was backing “anarchist riots.” Each time, the message was clear: anarchists were to blame, and extraordinary measures, such as excessive use of tear gas, mass arrests, surveillance, were justified. But this raises a question: are anarchists really the dangerous force the state claims them to be?

A real danger or a convenient scapegoat?

To a limited extent, Indonesian anarchist groups have acknowledged their engagement in militant actions. There have been instances of vandalism, arson, or clashes initiated by self-identified anarchists, typically targeting symbols of state or capital (e.g. police posts, toll booths, banks). The actual size and capabilities of Indonesia’s anarchist movement, however, remain modest. Their protests gather at most a few hundred people, and they lack wide popular support in Indonesia. Why, then, do the police portray anarchists as so significant, even the culprits behind every eruption of unrest? There are at least two reasons.

First, as Dominic Berger notes, the state targets anarchists precisely because they are “weak” dissidents. Their numbers are small, leaderless, and operate in loose, decentralised networks. This makes them far easier to vilify and demonise with little political cost. Their association with punk aesthetics, black clothing, and confrontational slogans already marks them in the public eye as unwanted outsiders. By branding these groups as the face of disorder, the authorities create a convenient enemy that justifies harsh policing in tackling mass demonstrations.

Second, observers have noted that the government’s label on “anarko” echoes the New Order’s old tactics of labelling regime opponents as subversives. During Suharto’s authoritarian rule, the spectre of “komunis” (communists) was used to justify repression. At that time, dissenters were often accused of being communist agitators, invoking the national trauma of the 1965 PKI affair. Today’s treatment of “anarko” mirrors that logic. Though it is different in scale and context, the state narrative has turned “anarchists” into the new scapegoat akin to the communists of the past.

In short, the exaggeration of an anarchist threat is used to justify crackdowns on dissent. By turning anarchists into a convenient villain, the state doesn’t just justify crackdowns, it changes the dynamics of public protest. What does this mean for Indonesia’s democracy and for the future of mass movements?

Dividing the masses, burying the issues

The state’s scare tactics directed at “anarko” have several troubling implications for Indonesian civil society. For one thing, it divides the protest coalitions from within. After the events of May Day in 2019, mainstream demonstrators (students, labour unions, etc.) became increasingly distrustful of anyone outside their own groups during protests. Organisers began implementing informal “security checks”: for example, during campus-led protests, participants without university jackets were viewed with suspicion. In some cases, student marshals even expelled or detained individuals simply for “looking anarchist” (e.g. wearing black clothing or masks).

While these measures are often justified as a way to avoid chaos, it carries important implications. Without critical awareness, these dynamic risks fostering a culture of political exclusivity. It may hinder broader public participation in political protests, undercutting the strength of mass movements. The unity between different social groups, such as activists, students, workers, and urban poor, is fractured when each suspects the other of harbouring “anarchist” agents. Ultimately, this opens up opportunities for authorities to benefit from divide-and-conquer dynamics. It isolates the marginalised individuals, with no formal affiliation, from the larger movement, making it easier to pick them off. A concrete example of this divisive outcome occurred during the 2020 protests. Student groups themselves apprehended a few youths accused of being “anarko” agitators and handed them to police. These kinds of incidents show how the spectre of anarchists has been used to turn protesters against each other.

Narratives that scapegoat anarchists also delegitimise genuine dissent and justify repression. By focusing on the “anarko” groups, the government shifts public focus away from the issues being protested and onto the protestors’ methods. By labelling protesters as “anarchists”, the state paints them as criminals or even terrorists rather than concerned citizens. As a result, the core messages of the protests get drowned out. For instance, the substantive grievances of the 2025 protesters—amond them social justice, corruption, economic inequality, and militarism—were quickly overshadowed by news of rioters burning buildings, which officials attributed to “anarchist groups”. The government is thus allowed to escape accountability on the underlying issues. Once riots occur, rather than addressing why so many people are angry, officials can reframe the situation as one of law-and-order: riots must be quelled, provocateurs punished.

The endgame of such framing is evident: it has been used to justify crackdown on political freedoms. Indeed, following the anarchist-blamed riots in 2020 and 2025, the state launched sweeping arrests. Each time, the general public’s fear of “anarchy” was leveraged to grant security forces a blank cheque.

Lastly, these dynamics risk invalidating the voices of the informal and sidelined political actors, such the marginalised youth.  The youth who engage in more militant protest behaviour often do so out of a sense of desperation and rage at systemic injustices. Dismissing them all as mere “anarko” ignores the social conditions fuelling their anger. As Ian Wilson observes, marginalised youths have authentic political agency that is “messy” and doesn’t fit respectable narratives.

However, the current discourse erases that agency by attributing any unruly behaviour to shadowy manipulation. This not only unfairly criminalises dissent, but it also lets the state avoid dealing with the grievances people are raising. Over time, constantly branding angry protesters as “anarko” could further alienate them from politics. At the same time, problems like corruption, inequality, state violence, and impunity are rarely addressed, while the state focuses instead on this “anarko” political myth. In the long run, it is not the spectre of “anarko” that threatens Indonesia, but the persistence of myths that distract from addressing the grievances that bring people to the streets.

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“They treated us like animals! Even when you move a chicken or a dog, you set up a temporary cage first,” exclaimed Hasan as he watched his home, along with the homes and workspaces of dozens of others, be razed to the ground in North Jakarta’s Sunter Agung neighbourhood in 2019. Setiyo, a neighbour, shook his head, recalling the days of authoritarian rule: “People said we are in a time of reformasi, but it feels just like Suharto’s era. They [the government’s forces] came with arms and weapons like they wanted to go to war.” The previous day had seen violent clashes as residents scrambled to shield their homes and workplaces from demolition by government authorities.

The North Jakarta Deputy Mayor said the demolition was needed to restore the waterway’s flow, prevent flooding, and make way for a jogging track to create a more “friendly and healthy” environment. An offer of relocation to public housing in Marunda, a neighbourhood two hours away by public transport, was rejected by many residents, who feared the move would cost them their communities and livelihoods as used goods sellers. With nowhere else to go, some evicted residents constructed makeshift shelters just across the street.

Just a few kilometres away, however, the story unfolded differently. Families across Muara Angke’s kampung—self-built settlements of low-income residents, often without secure land or infrastructure but bound by strong social ties—still live with broken drains and under constant threat of eviction. By contrast, residents of Kampung Akuarium, demolished in 2016, fought successfully to have their neighbourhood rebuilt as a state-backed, community-designed vertical kampung.

The contrasting fates of these communities are not anomalies, but the rule. Jakarta’s informal settlements have been built on unstable political ground throughout Indonesia’s history, from independence through the authoritarian New Order regime, and into post-reformasi democracy. Government responses consistently swing between eviction and embrace of informal residents, swayed by a complex interplay of interests, power, and narratives. I call this pattern “discretionary urbanism”: a way of governing the city through selective enforcement and shifting application of rules. This ambiguity is less about weak institutions than political strategy. Urban development in Jakarta works not despite such inconsistency but because of it, allowing informality to persist while giving elites room to pursue power, profit, or prestige.

But in the democratic era, another force is coming into play. The opening of political opportunities has led to a rise in grassroots activism, allowing communities to adopt what urban scholar Faranak Miraftab calls “insurgent planning”—bottom-up interventions that bypass and contest state-led development by creating alternative infrastructures and governance models. Their tactics include forging political contracts with gubernatorial candidates, forming cooperatives to secure land, and even rebuilding their own neighbourhoods with self-managed systems for waste disposal, sanitation, and environmental protection. Through insurgent planning tactics like these, Jakarta’s marginalised citizens are no longer merely surviving the system but reshaping the city from the ground up, proving that when they are united, their communities are far from powerless.

My doctoral research explored why and how Jakarta’s discretionary urbanism shapes the fate of informal settlements. Prevailing theories often assume a uniform logic of global capitalist expansion, elite capture, or colonial legacies that inevitably displace the poor. Jakarta’s reality is far more contradictory, swinging between coercion, neglect, and care. To unravel this puzzle, I combined historical analysis, ethnography, and comparisons across regimes, leaderships, and neighbourhoods. I conducted fourteen months of archival research, fieldwork in five kampung, interviews, and media analysis. I found that the outcomes are shaped as much by leaders’ political interests, the power of community organising, and competing public narratives as by structural pressures. Rather than passive spaces of exclusion, informal settlements emerge as arenas where authority is contested, and urban futures are actively negotiated.

Informality as a reality

Jakarta’s informal settlements are living examples of the complexities of urbanisation sweeping across Southeast Asia. As cities like Bangkok, Manila and Jakarta continue to expand, millions of people are funnelled into informal neighbourhoods that lack essential services yet power the urban economy. In Indonesia, nearly a third of the urban population—about 30.4 percent in 2018—live in slums, informal settlements, or inadequate housing, with around three million residents in Greater Jakarta lacking basic infrastructure. Despite their vital contributions to the labour force and city life, these communities confront evictions and neglect, impacted by arbitrary government responses.

Informality is positioned in contrast to the “formal”, particularly in relation to state regulations and bureaucratic systems. Hernando de Soto argued that the informal economy represents the people’s spontaneous and creative response to the government’s failure to meet their basic needs. But government actions also shape the emergence of informal settlements — and in many cases, informality is partly by design.

When rule of law is weak, after all, local leaders like governors or mayors wield wide discretion, often prioritising their vested interests over consistent application of policy. Responses to informal settlements by Indonesian governments reflect this: when settlements align with leaders’ priorities they may be tacitly allowed or even encouraged, but when they are seen as obstacles to economic development or modernisation, local authorities may resort to violent evictions.

Informal by design

In the early years of Indonesia’s independence, informal settlements emerged not merely as a consequence of urbanisation but as a direct result of government policies. During the transition from Dutch rule to independence after the Second World War, both the central Indonesian government and the Jakarta administration played a crucial role in shaping these settlements.

Initially, the Jakarta government embraced informal land occupation as a form of resistance against colonial rule. During the chaos of the Indonesian Revolution and the subsequent Dutch reoccupation, local authorities encouraged citizens to squat on land to undermine Dutch governance. Jakarta’s then mayor, Sudiro (1953–1960), recalled this strategy in his memoir, where he disclosed that the Indonesian leaders themselves “on purpose… incite the people, to occupy empty lands, regardless of who owns the land.” A lack of enforcement of property rights further allowed squatters to establish homes on contested lands. My archival research uncovered a letter sent to Sudiro by residents of Central Jakarta’s Salemba Tegalan neighbourhood, who explained that they had occupied the land and built houses as a “compulsory act… with the intention of destroying and complicating the development plans of Gemeente Batavia” by the Allied army. Driven by the political turmoil, these actions inadvertently contributed to an informal urban sprawl.

As the Jakarta government grappled with a housing crisis worsened by rapid urban migration, discriminatory and counterproductive housing policies were introduced that further fuelled the expansion of informal settlements. Public housing was primarily allocated to civil servants and the military, while development projects favoured the upper middle class. Affordable housing schemes or land price controls were absent, while kampung were excluded from the supervision of the Housing Affairs Office. As a result, the poor had little option but to construct their own homes on vacant land. The administration’s failure to provide adequate housing and its intentional neglect of low-income communities directly contributed to the proliferation of informal settlements throughout the city.

Under Sukarno, prestige projects were prioritised over public welfare. Major modernisation initiatives, such as the construction of Jakarta’s landmark National Monument (Monas) and infrastructure for the 1962 Asian Games, led to the widespread displacement of long-term residents in the inner city. Poorly executed relocation strategies pushed residents to occupy informal land, as many chose to remain near the source of their livelihoods rather than relocate far from their communities.

Sukarno claimed that prioritising the poor was equal to opposing broader national interests, illustrating the disconnect between the state’s ambitions and the reality of urban poverty. In a 1965 speech to parliament, he scoffed: “There is a leader who says don’t demolish illegal huts, we must remember the poor people! What kind of leader is this, they only remember the interests of that person, that group of people!” Here, Sukarno pitted the poor against the national interest, framing evictions as necessary for progress. Thus, what began as a tactic of resistance and state-building laid the groundwork for a city where informality remains both a survival strategy for the poor and a tool of power for elites.

Shifting motives and policies of the New Order

Discretionary urbanism persisted even under the high-ranking military officers appointed to lead Jakarta under the New Order regime (c1967–1998). Some governors combined evictions, neglect, and improvement schemes, their choices shaped primarily by immediate political and economic priorities. In short, local leaders even in an authoritarian regime retained agency in deciding which “hands of the state” they would move.

One of the best-remembered governors of this period, Ali Sadikin (1966–1977), employed an ambidextrous approach by pairing mass evictions with distributive initiatives like the Kampung Improvement Program. Sadikin’s dual strategy arose from a vision of Jakarta as a modern international city attractive to investors, while also tackling housing shortages. Kompas reported in September 1969 that thousands of households were cleared during his tenure, even as unprecedented funds were channelled into kampung upgrading.

Sadikin justified this contradiction by invoking fear and hope. In a 1971 interview with Kompas, he warned Jakarta risked becoming “a second Calcutta” if slums were left unchecked, adding it was better to “sacrifice several thousand now” to save millions in the future.  In a 1969 speech, he argued that an “orderly and healthy kampung” would make residents more productive. These dual framing legitimised evictions while allowing the government to project a benevolent image through its improvement schemes.

Sadikin’s successor, Tjokropranolo (1977–1982), took a more permissive approach, leading to a significant reduction in evictions despite facing similar economic pressures. Rather than resorting to force, he focused on maintaining social stability, aware of the political climate and the need to gain support from opposition groups—particularly Islamic factions and the poor after the contested 1977 elections. In line with this strategy, during a 1979 session of Jakarta’s parliament, Tjokropranolo stated that migrants and the urban poor “also have their rights and share in building this city.” He championed their right to live and work in Jakarta as part of his vision for a “socialist-religious Jakarta society.”

The remaining governors of this period—Suprapto, Atmodarminto and Soedirdja—shifted back to stricter policies.  Evictions escalated to restore order and authority they believed had been weakened by Tjokropranolo’s leniency. Suprapto began by re-disciplining local officials, telling them to “be orderly first before bringing order to others” (Kompas, October 1982). Atmodarminto pushed for the demolitions of informal houses to “maintain the authority of the government” (Tempo, November 1987). Soedirdja went further, promoting a disciplined society in line with Jakarta’s real estate boom, capped by a 1994 decree envisioning the capital as a city of skyscrapers. Together, they underscored how discretionary urbanism under the New Order swung back toward repression, with political motivations, particularly the maintenance of authoritarian control, took precedence over considerations for community welfare.

Throughout the New Order era, leaders used contradictory narratives to justify their choices and make them seem necessary. Informal residents were depicted alternately as illegal occupiers who undermined city planning and public order, or as a “safety valve” that absorbed housing shortages and self-reliant citizens embodying Indonesia’s spirit of mutual cooperation, gotong royong. This discursive flexibility allowed governors to swing between eviction and accommodation, aligning their actions with shifting political and economic interests.

The rise of urban poor activism

The “consistent inconsistency” of previous decades has carried over through the post-reformasi period. Sutiyoso, whose governorship spanned the reformasi period from 1997 to 2007, fluctuated between harsh evictions and brief periods of leniency. He evicted thousands of families, including more than 8,500 in 2003 alone, in the name of flood prevention and public order. His successor, Fauzi Bowo (2007-2012), the first directly-elected governor, continued this punitive trajectory, evicting around 3,200 families.

Joko Widodo (2012–2014) experimented with more negotiative approaches, such as constructing a nearby social housing project for families displaced by reservoir development in Muara Baru. He launched an on-site redevelopment initiative using the concept of kampung deret (row kampung), planned for 74 sites. Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, or “Ahok” (2014–2017), presided over one of Jakarta’s most aggressive eviction waves, displacing more than 8,000 families and 6,000 business in 2015 alone. Instead of focusing on in-situ redevelopment, Ahok prioritised relocation to distant rental flats (rusunawa), often with little to no negotiation. Anies Baswedan (2017–2022) shifted again, introducing accommodative policies such as the Community Action Plan. However, implementation was uneven, with some kampung receiving substantial redevelopment while others faced neglect or demolition.

In the midst of ongoing volatility, movements and organisations representing the urban poor have become increasingly important. As democratisation, decentralisation, and human rights paradigm gained momentum, the military’s dominance receded, creating a more favourable environment for activism. The Urban Poor Consortium (UPC), founded in 1997, brought together activists, architects, and journalists to address urban poverty. From this network, the Urban Poor People’s Network (JRMK) emerged in 2009, quickly expanding its reach to 26 kampung and various informal groups across Jakarta.  These organisations offer community leadership training, advocacy support, and networks that empower residents to engage with political leaders. Their rise and resilience signal a growing ability of the urban poor to influence government actions and shape policy.

One tactic used by urban poor organisations to engage in formal politics has been the use of “political contracts”—agreements that outline specific community demands in exchange for electoral support. UPC tested this strategy during Jakarta’s first direct gubernatorial election in 2007 and refined it in subsequent contests.  Political contracts forged by urban poor organisations have led to meaningful policy changes, especially concerning land, housing and livelihood security. During the 2017 gubernatorial election, for example, urban poor networks allied with Anies Baswedan and Sandiaga Uno, who pledged to stop evictions and prioritise on-site improvements and land reform. The resulting policy changes exemplify how urban poor movements can leverage strategies to secure concessions from political candidates.

Community power in action: rebuilding futures in North Jakarta’s kampung

The degree of success in the implementation of these pro-poor policies, however, largely depends on the strength of community power—shaped by informal leadership, community cohesion, political connections, and strategic capabilities—is essential for residents to effectively influence government actions.

Two informal settlements in North Jakarta, Kampung Akuarium and Kampung Tongkol, have demonstrated the power of community-driven initiatives through insurgent planning. Their strength comes from internal leadership and cohesion, combined with external alliances with urban poor networks, professionals, and political groups. In both neighbourhoods, residents developed alternative designs and proposals, presenting a united front to government officials.

In Kampung Akuarium, the community came together after their neighbourhood was demolished in 2016 under then-Governor Ahok. Many residents chose to stay put in the rubble, mounting resistance and asserting their rights. Driven by proactive leaders, the community built connections with professionals-activists, such as the Rujak Centre for Urban Studies, and political figures, strengthening their demands for redevelopment and inclusion in government plans. A diverse team conducted workshops to assess local needs and create a shared vision for their future as a maritime tourism destination. The cohesive community, united in purpose and action, proposed viable alternatives that addressed both their needs and government interests.

During Anies Baswedan’s governorship, the community proposed plans that not only responded to concerns about displacement but also aligned with government goals. Legal strategies such as securing land ownership and forming cooperatives, enabled them to navigate bureaucratic processes effectively. This approach led to the construction of Kampung Susun Akuarium, a five-storey collective housing complex for the community that was inaugurated in 2021. Funded through government schemes requiring developers to contribute to affordable housing, Kampung Susun illustrates the power of collective action. Their experience shows how strategy, leadership, and cohesion transformed resistance into negotiation and, ultimately, renewal.

Kampung Tongkol was threatened with demolition as part of a flood mitigation plan in 2015. Instead of waiting for eviction, residents organised as a community to partner with the city government in its plans for sustainable development. They voluntarily removed houses within five meters of the river to create buffer zones, reoriented homes to face the river, and implemented community-based systems for waste and sanitation. To strengthen their case, the community collaborated with Architecture Sans Frontières Indonesia and the University of Indonesia to build Rumah Contoh, a three-storey eco-friendly prototype that now houses seven families. By framing themselves as guardians of the Ciliwung River, they countered perceptions of informal settlements as illegal and positioned themselves instead as partners in Jakarta’s environmental strategies.

Together, these kampung show how community-driven urbanism thrives on collaboration over subordination, gradual transformation over abrupt displacement, and flexible networks over rigid hierarchies. The result is collective housing with stronger ownership, accountability, and resilience than most state-led schemes. Grassroots planning processes—organising communities, creating working groups, collaborating with facilitators and architects, and engaging in lengthy deliberation—can transform how planning works, shifting the relationship between planners, bureaucrats, and citizens.

Charting a new course

As urbanisation accelerates in Southeast Asia, Indonesia’s informal settlements pose both challenges and opportunities. President Prabowo Subianto’s bold promise to construct three million houses a year—for a total of 30 million homes if re-elected—aims to address Indonesia’s housing backlog, which BPS put at 9.9 million in 2023. However, analysts warn  that the program still treats housing primarily as a commodity rather than a right, disproportionately benefiting developers, banks, and financial markets while pushing low-income families into long-term debt. For Prabowo’s mission to be effective, the government must move beyond eviction and token upgrading.  One lesson from Jakarta’s kampung is that insurgent planning—where communities organise, design, and negotiate their own futures—offers a more durable path. These practices show how informal settlements already provide housing, livelihoods, and networks for the urban poor, despite neglect and threat.

A more promising approach would be to embrace this functional view of informality. This means institutionalising not only the management of settlements but also co-production with residents. The experience of Jakarta’s kampungs already point to innovative moves: collective land and housing management through cooperatives, the formal recognition of vertical kampung housing, and the push to establish a housing agency that would give communities a permanent seat in decision making. Embedding facilitators and architects into these processes would ensure that community-led planning is not an exception but part of the city’s governance fabric.

The broader moves are for city governments to adopt a long-term vision that extends beyond reactive measures. This will involve addressing the root causes of informality, including deep economic inequality, rapid rural migration, insecure land tenure, and limited access to affordable housing, while also building accountable governance and ensuring consistent policy implementation.

Ultimately, the future of Jakarta—and cities across Southeast Asia—hinges on the ability of governments to comprehend that the city does not just happen to its people; it is built by them. And that means the only sustainable way forward is to finally, and meaningfully, plan with the people who call it home.

••••••••••

This post is part of a series of essays highlighting the work of emerging scholars of Southeast Asia published with the support of the Australian National University College of Asia and the Pacific.

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A spectre haunts Indonesia’s tangible heritage: the spectre of raging flames. Across the decades, Dutch colonial-era buildings have been engulfed in fire—sometimes by accident, sometimes through neglect, and sometimes even through deliberate arson. Historically, setting fire to colonial structures could be a mode of resistance, a way of violently reclaiming spaces from the colonising power or preventing them from utilising them. Flames could purify and cleanse, severing visible ties to domination.

Yet in contemporary Indonesia, many of these sites have been reabsorbed into the rhythms of civic life, repurposed as government offices, museums, or community landmarks and leisure points, as I explored recently at New Mandala. Their survival and transformation reflect a shift: from being symbols of foreign domination to becoming shared arenas of collective identity. However, when these repurposed sites are reduced to ashes, as happened in the recent burning of the Grahadi (the Governor’s residence complex) and the Tegalsari Police Office in Surabaya amid nationwide anti-government protests on 30–31 August 2025, the significance these sites hold in the collective memory of the public needs to be taken into reflection.

In recent years, Indonesia has witnessed a troubling series of fires that have struck its cultural landmarks and heritage buildings. In 2023, the National Museum in Jakarta suffered a devastating blaze that destroyed priceless collections. In 2024, the old post office in Jakarta, repurposed into a popular social hub, was also badly damaged by fire. By August 2025, another blaze erupted in a heritage shophouse in Semarang, consuming structures that currently serve as a part of community life.

The protests that erupted in Indonesian cities in late August 2025 provide a stage to contemplate on the value of these structures for the community. The demonstrations began in Jakarta after parliament approved extravagant housing allowances for legislators, a decision widely seen as obscene in a period of economic hardship. What might have remained a familiar story of elite excess transformed into a nationwide movement when motorcycle rideshare driver Affan Kurniawan was killed by a police brigade vehicle near the parliament complex. His death became a flashpoint, transmuting anger over privilege into rage at systemic violence.

The protests spread to Surabaya, Makassar, Medan, and Yogyakarta. As in many uprisings, state buildings and symbols of authority became the primary targets. In Surabaya, colonial-era and governmental structures bore the brunt of the fury. But this is not about the hands that strike the match—this is about how the fire threatens the collective memories of struggle and resistance.

Among these, the destruction of the Grahadi Building was especially symbolic. Built in 1795 as the residence of Lieutenant-Governor Dirk van Hogendorp, it was reoriented under Governor-General Herman Willem Daendels into a neoclassical statehouse and eventually transformed into the official residence of East Java’s provincial governors after independence. Grahadi has lived many lives. It bore witness to various changing scenes of Indonesian history: Dutch colonial rule, Japanese occupation, the independence, the national revolution, and even other uprisings that followed after. Its continuity turned it into a vessel of collective memory to which it is an emblem not only of authority, but of endurance and transformation. It was eventually declared a heritage building in 2007.

To see it partially engulfed in flames in 2025 was to witness a paradox: in a space that once shifted from colonial domination into postcolonial civic life, history reenacts itself. But perhaps, in an altered course and meaning. Heritage here is never static but volatile, caught in between preservation, reappropriation, and destruction.

Icon, arson, reclamation

At first glance, such acts of arson might be interpreted as iconoclasm. Burning down heritage buildings can be read as an attack on symbols of belief, or even state and power, akin to toppling statues or defacing reliefs. Yet the comparison falters on a crucial point: unlike monuments or statues, these buildings had been recontextualised and reintegrated into Indonesian civic life. They were no longer serving as inert relics of colonial glorification but by multiple generations of Indonesians. To destroy them was not simply to resist acknowledging the collective struggles of the past in repurposing the heritage building, but to unravel its fragility in the memory of the present. In this sense, the fires of 2025 constituted less a reclamation than a rupture: an act of deliberate forgetting, where a certain interest overrode the tenuous continuity of historical meaning.

Facing this, Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of the Third Space becomes useful. For Bhabha, the cultural identity of the colonised is never settled; it emerges in negotiation, a constant process of interpretation and ambivalence. In the Third Space, there is a collapse of the colonial binaries of the Self/Other or the Coloniser/Colonised, giving rise to hybridity. The colonial identity of the “in-between” self, where a community desires but resists the coloniser’s position, is eventually settled through mimicry and distortion. Here, hybridity turns the coloniser’s own words and symbols into sites of resistance and reclamation.

In Indonesia, colonial buildings like Grahadi exemplify this process. They were inherited as symbols of colonial domination, but through inhabitation and repurposing, they were re-signified: from the residence of Dutch officials to the home of Indonesian governors, from a symbol of oppression to a hybrid site of postcolonial civic identity.

Yet the fire interrupts this hybridity. It halts the ongoing negotiation of meanings, the interpretation that allowed these buildings to embody a postcolonial present while carrying the weight of a colonial past. In this sense, the arson of Grahadi and other sites risks the erasure of the fragile Third Space where Indonesians had, for generations, re-signified colonial remains into something simultaneously inherited and their own. What was destroyed was not merely brick, stone, and timber, but the possibility of hybridity and decolonisation itself.

In regards to this, Ash Amin reminds us that infrastructure is not just material but symbolic and affective. Buildings, roads, and utilities embody collective sentiments of progress, belonging, or endurance. They function as mnemonic devices, reminders of past struggles or the improvisations that made settlements habitable. Informal urbanisation, through shared practices of adaptation, can transform bare material into collective infrastructure, knitting social identity into the built environment. Grahadi and other similar buildings, in this sense, were not just a colonial relic but a mnemonic infrastructure: it anchored Surabaya’s urban memory across generations. To lose it to flames threatens the mnemonic continuity. Even if rebuilt, the material rupture fractures the organic chain of remembrance.

The fires of 2025 also echo Indonesia’s own history of revolutionary arson. Bandung Lautan Api in 1946 and Malang Bumi Hangus in 1947 saw entire cities deliberately burned to prevent their reuse by Dutch and Allied forces. Fire here was a weapon, an assertion of agency over urban space. Yet the context matters: those acts of arson were strategic refusals to allow colonial reoccupation. The 2025 burnings, by contrast, were directed not at foreign occupiers but at reappropriated sites of collective identity. What once symbolised the reclamation of space now risks becoming the erasure of memory. Revolution and destruction, as history shows, stand on a thin scalding line.

The destruction of heritage buildings, then, is not merely a question of physical loss. Tangible and intangible heritage are interwoven: material structures anchor memory, giving continuity to stories that might otherwise fade. While Surabaya’s residents may be familiar with Grahadi’s history, the city is also an urban hub of migration, where many may not fully perceive its layered significance. In looking at heritage buildings, we would need to address our biases and privileges, which allow us to perceive them beyond their tangible aspects. For some, a building is simply a space or a structure that can be rebuilt. Yet when such sites are destroyed, the intangible dimensions of heritage, such as memory, resistance, and hybridity, are endangered. Fire risks collapsing centuries of re-signification into smoke, leaving behind only ruins or empty space.

This returns us to hybridity. The repurposing of colonial sites in Indonesia shows that revitalisation is not about glorifying colonial histories, but about reclaiming and reinterpreting the spaces. The Grahadi and other sites of similar histories embodied this hybridity: once instruments of domination, they became stages for Indonesian governance and urban life. Both resistance fighters and everyday residents have, at different times, inhabited these spaces and inscribed their own meanings upon them. They illustrate how colonial residue can be reworked into new forms of belonging and identity. To lose them is to lose not just buildings, but sites of hybridity where past and present, domination and resistance, continuously intermingled.

Ultimately, the fires of 2025 scorch us through these rising questions: Can heritage survive when the very infrastructures that anchor memory become targets of provocation? What does it mean when acts of resistance collapse into acts of forgetting? Fire, once a weapon of anti-colonial reclamation, now risks becoming a force of historical erasure. If hybridity is seen in the art of reworking colonial residues into living futures, then its interruption by flames exposes the precarity of postcolonial memory itself. The ashes of these sites remind us that heritage is never guaranteed; its tangible and intangible aspects must be continuously re-signified and preserved through proper measures and even communal engagement.

Blessing in blaze

History has a way of repeating itself, yet within destruction there often emerges a glimmer of renewal. After the fire at the National Museum, the charred remains of its galleries became, for a time, an exhibit in their own right; fragments that testified to both loss and resilience before restoration began. In a similar way, fire can carry a paradoxical grace: it draws public attention, sparks collective memory, and awakens a sense of urgency. The recent blaze at Grahadi and its surroundings stirred exactly this. Residents of Surabaya mourned the loss while also voicing how deeply the building mattered to their lives and identities. Only two days after the arson, Grahadi transformed into an impromptu gathering place. People flocked to its gates to take photographs, narrate personal memories, and weave new meanings around its scorched façade. Street vendors, too, seized the moment; not just selling snacks but sharing stories of what they had seen, turning commerce into oral testimony.

In this unexpected convergence, the space opened itself to organic storytelling. Revitalisation, after all, is not sustained by archives alone but by the voices of those who live alongside heritage. Perhaps, then, the blaze carries within it a blessing. Perhaps it is a wake-up call to remember the past struggle: the possibility of re-inscribing Grahadi’s narrative as a space that has been repurposed through the people’s awareness, along with their concerns, emotions, and claims of belonging. Fire, destructive as it is, can also purify, cleanse, and make visible what has long been hidden. In the end, what emerges from the ashes depends on how we choose to see, and how we choose to tell the story.

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Editor’s note: the author is a co-convenor of the 2025 ANU Indonesia Update Conference, which will be held in Canberra on 12–13 September. The theme of this year’s Update is “Navigating Climate Change in Indonesia: Mitigation and Adaptation Pathways.” You can live stream the conference proceedings, which will include updates on recent political and economic developments, on Zoom from 09:00 AEST on 12 September.

••••••••••

Back in the 1960s, American folk singer Pete Seeger posed a haunting question in his anti-war ballad: “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” The song spoke of loss, forgotten promises, and the tragic cycles we repeat. Today, one would ask a similar question in Indonesia: Where have all the energy transition policies gone?

In 2021, Indonesia boldly committed to achieving net-zero emissions by 2060—a pledge meant to confront climate change and improve urban air quality. For a time, energy transition dominated national discussions. But recently, it has quietly slipped off the agenda.

In his State of the Nation Address on 15 August 2025, marking Indonesia’s 80th year of independence, President Prabowo Subianto spoke extensively about free school meals, land reform, and state investment restructuring. There was no mention of the 2060 net-zero commitment. While these priorities matter, sidelining energy transition is a critical mistake—one that threatens our health, economy, and future.

Indonesia still relies heavily on coal and fossil fuels for power and transport. Combined with deforestation and forest degradation, the country is now among the world’s top six carbon emitters. Without a rapid shift to renewable energy, Indonesia risks undermining its own climate goals—and jeopardising global efforts to limit warming. Scientists warn that failing to act could push the planet past a dangerous tipping point.

This isn’t about distant projections; it’s about what’s happening here and now. Burning coal and gasoline releases toxic pollutants—PM2.5, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides—causing respiratory illness, heart disease, strokes, and premature deaths. In Jakarta, where air quality ranks among the worst globally, pollution already cuts life expectancy by an estimated 2.4 years, according to the University of Chicago. Thousands of Indonesians, especially children, suffer from pollution-related illnesses every year.

Recent findings from a University of Chicago–ADBI–SMERU–ANU collaboration reveal an even grimmer reality. Between June and December 2024, researchers monitored air quality inside Jakarta homes. The WHO’s safe PM2.5 limit is 5 µg/m³. Yet not a single second during the study met that standard. Outdoor levels averaged 37.8 µg/m³, while indoor levels were even worse at 40.7 µg/m³. At times, indoor spikes exceeded 300 µg/m³, once nearing 500 µg/m³—exposures comparable to severe forest fires, happening inside people’s living rooms.

So, why the silence? Why has energy transition faded from political debates? Yes, challenges exist: renewable projects need financing, the grid requires upgrading, regulations remain patchy, and entrenched fossil fuel interests resist change. But none justifies inaction. On the contrary, they demand rapid and smarter responses.

Under the previous administration, policy discussions gained momentum, and international support was growing. But much of that progress has stalled since 2024.

Some initiatives persist, such as the Indonesia Update Conference at ANU this week, where around 15 leading academics and 300 participants will discuss Indonesia’s prospects for meeting its emissions targets and achieving net zero by 2060. Yet isolated events cannot substitute for consistent political will.

Indonesia’s energy transition isn’t just about climate—it’s about health, economic opportunity, and national development. It’s a chance to breathe cleaner air, reduce dependence on imported fuels, create new industries, and safeguard future generations. Delaying this shift means locking in more pollution, more illness, and fewer choices for a just and prosperous future.

The good news: it’s not too late. Indonesia can revive the conversation, build stronger policies, and forge the partnerships and infrastructure needed to move forward. But this demands real leadership—from government, business, civil society, and ordinary Indonesians tired of choking on smog and broken promises.

If we keep asking, “Where have all the energy transition policies gone?” without demanding answers, we risk becoming like Seeger’s song—nostalgic, mournful, and too late. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We still have a choice. We still have time, but not much. And we still have the power to turn things around.

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The wave of protests that swept through Indonesian cities and towns last week bore more than a few resemblances to those that brought down the Suharto regime in 1998.

Some of the similarities are obvious. On both occasions, violence by security forces caused protests to escalate. In 1998, the shooting of students at Jakarta’s Trisakti University triggered mass rioting, generating the final crisis that forced Suharto to step down. Last week, the killing of a motorcycle taxi driver, Affan Kurniawan, sparked an uptick of rage across the country. Protestors began to attack and burn government buildings (at least eight regional parliament buildings were burned down, by my count) and to launch mass raids on the homes of prominent politicians, such as People’s Representative Council (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat, DPR) member Ahmad Sahroni and Finance Minister Sri Mulyani.

In 1998, as today, the backdrop of the protests was partly economic. In 1998, the Asian Financial Crisis caused Indonesia’s economy to collapse, driving millions into poverty and forcing many companies into bankruptcy. Economic conditions are not so severe today, but the economy is slowing, and the middle class is shrinking. Central government efficiency measures have badly affected numerous sectors: many regional governments, for instance, have raised land and property taxes in response. Labour informality and precarity are rising, both with the growth of the gig economy and with layoffs in manufacturing. And all this comes amidst severe economic inequality.

This setting helps to explain key features of the recent protests, such as participation by members of labour unions and rideshare drivers, even the targeting of the home of Sri Mulyani—so long the darling of middle-class liberals and reformers, now the public face of austerity to many protestors.

Subcultures of protest

Perhaps the greatest similarity between 1998 and 2025, however, is that both protest waves built on a subculture of street protest that had been growing for several years. The trigger in 1998 may have been the Asian Financial Crisis, but protesters that year were able to draw on the experiences—and the antipathy to governmental authority—many of them had built up through several years of escalating social and political unrest. An ethos of protest and opposition to the Suharto regime had spread on campuses, in sections of the middle class, and among many members of the urban poor, laying the groundwork for 1998.

Today, the dynamics are similar. The protests of 2025 definitely did not come out of nowhere. Instead, they are at least the fifth major wave of youth-led mass protest since 2019. First came protests in September and October of 2019 that were triggered, above all, by DPR and government moves to strip the hitherto very effective Corruption Eradication Commission (Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi, KPK) of key powers.

A year later, in 2020, another wave of protests greeted the passage of the so-called Omnibus Law on Job Creation, which among things accelerated the shift toward casualisation of the labour force and weakened environmental protection for natural resource investments. The “emergency warning” (peringatan darurat) protests of August 2024 the February 2025 “dark Indonesia” (Indonesia gelap) protests had distinct triggers and immediate targets, but all of these waves expressed a similar critique of Indonesia’s political elite and the corruption that pervades it. The economic and class dimension is stronger in the current protest wave, but that too builds on features already present in earlier episodes.

Each of these five waves of protest has represented another marker in Indonesia’s democratic decline and authoritarian revival. But they are also significant in their own right, pointing toward the emergence of a new protest counterculture in Indonesia’s towns and cities.

Building on earlier traditions of social protest, this new counterculture is centred on a deep and growing antipathy to Indonesia’s governing elite. United by new modes of online communication, ever-changing networks of loose organisations, as well as connections among more established institutions, such as student executive councils, labour unions, and NGOs, this movement is ideologically diverse—but it’s united around common threads of opposition to oligarchy, anger at the corruption of the ruling elite, and rejection of growing economic inequality.

Indonesian scholars and activists have noted the “rhizomic” quality of the new youth protest and social movements, and their diffuse and leaderless patterns of organisations. While some celebrate these qualities, pointing out the participatory character of the new youth movements and how their flexibility makes them difficult to eradicate, others have argued they lack the organisational strength and ideological clarity needed to bring about fundamental social and political change.

Two worlds at odds

The recent protests can thus be understood as product of a clash between two worlds of Indonesian politics: the world of official representative politics and the subculture of youth protest that rejects it. Part of what explains the severity of the protests is that, while the protestors understand the world of the politicians quite well, the reverse seems not to be true—at least until now.

When it was announced that DPR members would gain generous new allowances—a key precipitating event in the current round of protests—on top of their already large salaries, these politicians obviously saw themselves as gaining a well-earned reward. Elected politicians routinely complain about the onerous expectations of cash and other forms of assistance they face from constituents, and doubtlessly many of them believed their de facto wage increase would help them address this problem.

But the announcement and the verbal somersaults of those justifying it—to say nothing of footage of DPR members dancing happily during a recent parliamentary session—came while many Indonesians were experiencing deepening economic hardship, betraying a remarkable lack of understanding of how such news might be received by members of the public.

Throwing fuel on the fire, some DPR members went on social media to mock and disparage the protestors. Ahmad Sahroni, a particularly wealthy and brash politician, called protestors seeking the dissolution of the DPR the “stupidest people on earth”, prompting media outlets to remind readers of his fantastic wealth. Sahroni soon got his comeuppance when protestors attacked and looted one of his homes, parading luxury items they found there—such as a life-sized Ironman sculpture—on social media.

How could the gap between these worlds become so wide that Sahroni and other DPR members could make such fateful miscalculations? In the early years of the post-1998 Reformasi period, elected politicians were at least somewhat attuned to the world of street protest. They had seen how it could bring down a regime, and they were careful to pay attention to what protestors wanted and, where possible, to concede—even if only partly or symbolically—to their demands.

Time passed, and most of that first generation of post-Reformasi politicians passed from the scene, to be replaced by a new breed of politicians (often the children of the first generation) who were inculcated in, and products of, the culture of money-politics that has grown within Indonesia’s democratic institutions. As vote-buying and other forms of patronage politics became increasingly entrenched as the main way to win elections, DPR members and other politicians had to invest increasingly vast sums of money in their campaigns. More and more of them come from wealthy business backgrounds, or from established political dynasties.

These shifts have changed the political culture and patterns of work within Indonesia’s representative institutions too, increasing representatives’ need to use their official positions to generate income, or at least to access streams of patronage. A decade or so ago, as a researcher one had to tread carefully when investigating topics such as vote buying or informal fundraising within the DPR. As time has passed, my impression is that DPR members and other politicians have become increasingly open about discussing such topics, as these practices have become normalised.

Insiders, too, give accounts of how new members of institutions like the DPR are inducted into a culture of corruption by their seniors. A few months ago, one relatively young member of the DPR explained to me and colleagues what it’s like to be a member of that institution:

“…if you talk about defending the rights of the people, they will laugh at you, they will come to you and say ‘don’t be too serious’…‘don’t be so holy’….But if you talk about money, well, they will all come and deal with you very seriously and carefully. If you want to explain which projects will give you 30%, they will brag about it.”

Ordinary Indonesians notice these changes too. Corruption investigations—especially those launched in the past by the KPK—exposed the fabulous wealth of many politicians, with raids on their homes exposing collections of Hermès bags, Lamborghinis and similar luxuries. Politicians themselves have become increasingly open about flaunting their wealth on social media. At the same time, we know that politicians’ policy preferences track with those of high income voters, rather than with ordinary citizens, in areas such as social welfare and redistribution.

In short, years of patronage politics have created an ever widening gap between the political world of the governing elite who inhabit Indonesia’s democratic institutions, and that of the young protestors whose forebears played such an important role in putting those institutions in place.

The targeting of protest

Despite the many similarities, differences between the protests of 1998 and 2025 also stand out. For one thing, much of the violence on the part of rioters, and the looting, has been much more targeted so far than in 1998. In 1998, especially during Jakarta’s May riots, people attacked symbols of wealth and property in general, and there was a lot of racist targeting of ethnic Chinese persons and property in particular. This time, as well as violence generally being at much lower scale, there have not been (so far as I am aware) verified reports of anti-Chinese violence—despite many rumours and fears that it was imminent. Instead, violence has been directed against figures and symbols of state authority: the police, DPRD buildings, the private homes of politicians, and the like.

The political objectives of the current protestors, in contrast, are much more diffuse than those of their forebears in 1998. What gave the Reformasi movement much of its power was the precise nature of its goals, embodied in a number of daunting, but ultimately achievable, goals: the overthrow of Suharto, the end of the military’s “dual function” (dwifungsi), the dismantling of restrictions on political expression, and so on. Those goals could be achieved in part because the protestors were able to find allies, not only among members of mainstream political parties, religious organisations and the like, but also within the ruling civilian and military elite, many of whose members ultimately abandoned Suharto and threw in their lot with Reformasi.

Today the protestors’ goals are not limited to forcing out any particular leader or party, or even to repeal a limited set of laws or regulations. To be sure, they have many such targets—many of the protestors call on President Prabowo Subianto to step down, for the DPR to be dissolved, and for various laws and regulations to be repealed. But what they really stand for, above all, is rejection of the entire ruling elite.

And the entire ruling elite, more or less, stands united against them. This was symbolised dramatically on 31 August when leaders of all the major political parties lined up next to Prabowo as he delivered a speech in which he mixed concessions (cancelling the DPR members’ new allowances) with threats (accusing protesters of engaging in treason—makar—and terrorism).

As a result, it’s hard to see any way by which the current confrontation between the two worlds of Indonesian politics will disappear soon. To be sure, the current wave of protest may well disperse soon, as did the previous ones—in fact, it seems to be on this pathway as I write this piece. But so far, each wave has been followed by another, on virtually an annual basis. That pattern seems likely to continue. Elite politicians are trapped in a system of patronage politics that they would find hard to escape even if they wanted to. As a result, the protestors are a long way from achieving their goals, and their antipathy to Indonesia’s political class is unlikely to dissipate.

This, too, makes the current period seem different from the late Suharto era: back in the 1990s, even when protests were suppressed by the military, the most militant groups always believed they were working toward a defined goal: the overthrow of the Suharto regime. Today’s targets are not so well defined, and are captured by terms—oligarchy, corruption, and the like—which point toward deeply entrenched informal relations of power. Ending such phenomena will require deep systemic change, rather than a limited number of formal legal adjustments or reforms.

It’s hard to envisage such change occurring with the current crop of elite politicians holding elective office. Yet replacing them is also not easy. When progressive activists have ventured into the electoral arena in Indonesia they have almost invariably failed (in sharp contrast, for example, to Thailand). The elite politicians the protestors so revile enjoy massive organisational and material advantages that make them very difficult to beat, especially when so many voters have come to expect patronage in exchange for their votes. These politicians also operate political machines that reach right down into the communities where ordinary Indonesians live throughout urban and rural Indonesia—something the protestors also lack.

Overthrowing Suharto was a titanic achievement. The goals of the current round of protestors arguably are no less daunting.

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17 August 2025 marks the 80^th anniversary of Indonesia’s independence. Surrounding the commemorations are various discourses on whether Indonesia was colonised by the Netherlands for 350 years, or less than that. Regardless of the answer, traces of colonialism prevail. And the commodification of those traces is perhaps one of the very first steps to understanding the multiple narratives on history in Indonesia today.

The commodification of colonialism is part of a broader trend across postcolonial countries, where visible relics of empire, often in the form of enduring infrastructure, pose a choice: to erase them through neglect or demolition, or to repurpose them for new uses. In Indonesia, the early decades after independence saw leaders such as Soekarno and Soeharto promote a nationalist vision, favouring modernist designs by Indonesian architects. Yet the risk of erasing the colonial past altogether raised concerns that history itself might be forgotten.

From the 1980s onwards, heritage conservation initiatives emerged, seeking to preserve colonial-era buildings while embedding them within narratives of nationalism. Restoration projects multiplied, but the challenge remained: static plaques and written histories struggle to compete for public attention in an era when much of social life unfolds on phone screens. Recognising that people value immersive experiences over textual storytelling, governments and private actors began converting colonial clusters into open-air or “living” museums. This model, visible in Indonesia’s Taman Mini Indonesia Indah, Singapore’s Battlebox in Fort Canning, and the Netherlands’ Archeon, promises visitors not just a history lesson, but a sensory encounter and countless souvenirs they can take home: Instagram-ready shots.

While this approach integrates preservation with the economic demands of tourism, it also risks reducing complex historical narratives to a kind of theme park. The emphasis shifts from engaging with the realities of colonial oppression to offering an aesthetically pleasing, marketable fantasy. In Modernity at Large (1996), Arjun Appadurai refers to a yearning that is not rooted in lived memory as ersatz nostalgia—a longing for a stylised, imagined past where nostalgia and fantasy are reduced to consumption.

In Surabaya, the ghosts of the Dutch East Indies have not merely lingered; they have been revived through commodification in tourism. Wander through the revitalised “European Zone” of Kota Lama (Old Town) or a long-standing ice cream palace in the city, and one is bound to feel the seduction of a colonial past repackaged for modern consumption. Whether through architecture or cuisine, a certain narrative is quietly whispered: the colonial past was not only orderly and elegant, but perhaps even desirable.

In Surabaya today, following the revitalisation of the old town quarter that used to be reserved for the European community, colonial aesthetics have become central to city branding and urban placemaking. While such nostalgia can serve as a tool for historical reflection, its unchecked commodification risks perpetuating colonial myths, erasing uncomfortable histories, and displacing local narratives.

A “digital postcard” of colonialism

Surabaya’s revitalised old town complex comprises four quarters: the European Zone, Chinatown, Arab, and Malay Quarters. Yet it was the erstwhile hub for the Dutch East Indies’ European population—uncannily dubbed the “European Zone”—that quickly became a hit due to its stark black-and-white colonial façades, restored buildings, and tourism experiences such as period costume rentals, vintage military Jeep tours, and the influencer-endorsed toerwagen car rides.

After its grand relaunch on 3 July 2024, the European Zone quickly became one of Surabaya’s most photogenic destinations. Here, local and domestic tourists don lace dresses or aristocratic Javanese beskap and velvet kebaya, posing against a backdrop that once marked European privilege and native exclusion. The place has been transformed into a stage for colonial cosplay and a theatre of nostalgia.

This performative longing reflects the tendency to reduce a historical site into a glossy, consumable aesthetic. The area, once a colonial enclave of Dutch offices and military officers’ houses, has been restored into a site that offers middle-class tourists the fantasy of playing historical elites for a day. For as little as US$2–5, one can rent a costume; for a bit more, a professional photographer guides the experience, somewhat blurring the line between heritage and an accidental state-supported theme park.

While this may seem questionable at first, it could also be viewed as a means for people to exercise agency over the legacy of colonialism. The romanticisation of the colonial era here serves multiple agendas. Economically, it fuels tourism revenues and supports local microenterprises. Politically, it aligns with a nationalist desire to reclaim and repurpose colonial spaces. Yet culturally, it risks perpetuating a dangerous myth: that the Dutch East Indies were cosmopolitan, orderly, and benign—egalitarian, even, considering that the space is now accessible to the general public. In short, a time worth being longed for. The cost of such nostalgia is the erasure of the structural violence, exclusion, and exploitation that defined colonial life for the vast majority of Indonesians.

This transformation is not isolated. Colonial nostalgia has emerged as a potent aesthetic in urban Indonesia, particularly among middle-class members of a generation who never experienced colonisation directly. The new Kota Lama is a vivid example of a manufactured memoryscape that prizes photogenic charm over historical substance.

The tourism infrastructure here is telling. While electric becak pedicabs are mostly ignored by tourists for not fitting the European fantasy, the Jeep tours led by drivers in vests emblazoned with “Surabaya Heritage Tour” and the toerwagen are booked solid. The route begins and ends with the historic Red Bridge and a replica of Brigadier A.W.S. Mallaby’s car that was supposedly caught in a grenade explosion during a ceasefire that escalated into skirmishes on 30^th October 1945.

Though the circumstances remain contested, the car is symbolic of the struggle for independence for the people of Surabaya. On 25 October 1945, Allied forces, accompanied by the Netherlands Indies Civil Administration (NICA), landed in Surabaya under the pretext of disarming Japanese troops. The events that followed became one of the most decisive confrontations in the Indonesian National Revolution: the Battle of Surabaya, which began on 10 November 1945. Their defiance became a powerful rallying point for the independence movement, cementing 10 November as Indonesia’s Hari Pahlawan (Heroes’ Day). The monument is supposedly intended to provide a counter-narrative of anti-colonial resistance by the people of Surabaya, but is very much overshadowed by the charm of the architecture. Now, the sirens of the Jeep punctuate the ride like theme-park sound effects, reenacting military patrols of the allies rather than nationalist defiance.

Frozen fantasies: ice cream and class at Zangrandi

Down in the city centre, another site of colonial memory quietly churns out nostalgia by the scoop: Zangrandi Ice Cream Palace. Established in 1930 by Italian immigrant Roberto Zangrandi and his wife, affectionately dubbed Mevrouw Zangrandi, the parlour has long claimed its place in Surabaya’s culinary imagination. Today, it is celebrated as a heritage destination and “Dutch ice cream” among unknowing people, despite its Italian origins.

Aside from being a sweet indulgence, Zangrandi’s appeal carries a myth frozen in its image. The parlour markets itself as a “taste of tempo doeloe” (“olden times”), a culinary relic of the colonial era. Its trademark flavour is the Macedonia, with its rum drizzle, served in delicate glass bowls, evoking a gentler, more “refined” age. As the parlour mostly caters to the locals now, customers could choose between actual rum or a non-alcoholic essence. For Surabaya’s middle-class families, visiting Zangrandi is a symbolic ritual of a nostalgic journey inherited from parents and grandparents who once glimpsed, or aspired to, colonial cosmopolitanism. An escapism from the harsh reality of colonialism, an effort to assert their agency despite borderline cosplaying the coloniser.

Now we come back to the matter of what is being remembered here—and what is being forgotten.

Colonial cuisine in Indonesia has always been a marker of class and cultural hegemony. In the Dutch East Indies, milk products and ice cream were expensive and exclusive, inaccessible to the pribumi or locals except for the elite middle-upper class or those working in colonial institutions. Zangrandi thus represents not only nostalgia for a colonial aesthetic, but also for a colonial class structure that is still asserted until now. Only, it is not reserved on the division between the coloniser and the colonised, but rather between the local lower and middle-upper class itself, considering its prestige and price marks. Its survival and success are due in part to the myth that it offers an “authentic” experience of that imagined, upper-class past.

Meanwhile, local alternatives like es puter, a coconut milk-based adaptation developed as a substitute for expensive dairy ice cream in the past, are relegated to street stalls and plastic cups. While es puter evokes a modest nostalgia of postcolonial decades and class struggle following independence (c. 1960s–1990s), Zangrandi invites customers into a fantasy of leisure once reserved for colonial elites. The stark contrast is not just culinary but symbolic: one is a reminder of makeshift resilience, the other a sanitised simulation of European indulgence.

Nostalgia a commodity; history a casualty

In both Kota Lama and Zangrandi, the same logic unfolds: history is aestheticised, class boundaries are blurred, and colonial oppression is rebranded as elegance. Tourists pose before Dutch-era façades or sip milkshakes in rattan chairs beneath sepia-toned murals. The cityscape becomes a stage for a longing that is shaped not by memory but by media, beautiful architecture, and consumer rituals.

Popular films like Bumi Manusia (2019) have reinforced this fantasy. In Hanung Bramantyo’s adaptation of Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s seminal novel, the emphasis on the interracial romance between Minke and Annelies through warm colour grading, courteous gestures, and lace dresses in the film distorts the book’s political and anticolonial message. Mass media, including Instagram reels promoting Kota Lama’s “new face,” similarly reproduce these colonial myths, making the past feel desirable rather than interrogated.

This phenomenon is not inherently insidious, however. Observing these matters firsthand, I would argue that colonial nostalgia can be educational if framed critically. Zangrandi, for instance, could serve as a site to unpack culinary hierarchies, race, and class in the Indies. The Red Bridge and Mallaby’s car could be framed not as quirky backdrops, but more highlighted as symbols of Indonesian defiance. But in the rush to capitalise on nostalgia, the towering black and white buildings around it, these sites risk becoming hollow shells, monuments without memory.

The problem is not that Indonesians are remembering the colonial past, but that they are remembering it selectively. In the case of Surabaya, the interaction between the site and its visitors allows citizens to identify with the former colonisers, rather than with those who resisted. Media outlets endorsing “Instagrammable spots a la Europe” further put the spotlight on the wrong angle.

This myth of “order and prosperity” under Dutch rule is not new. Such narratives have always been carefully curated to project stability and progress. Today, that legacy continues, albeit with new packaging: European and priyayi (aristocratic Javanese) dress-up games, Instagram-friendly façades, and pricey ice cream.

The city government’s efforts to revitalise Kota Lama and the ongoing business of colonial cuisine like Zangrandi are not without merit. Cultural heritage deserves conservation. But heritage is not the same as history, and though the two overlap and complete each other, without critical engagement, heritage can become a dangerous mask.

Surabaya’s colonial past includes defiance, adaptation, mimicry, and survival. There is nothing inherently wrong with photographing an old building or enjoying a scoop of ice cream. But the stories we tell about these pleasures matter. When nostalgia becomes a commodity, and heritage a gimmick, we risk flattening a complex struggle of the past into a digital postcard posted on the ‘gram.

If Zangrandi and Kota Lama are to serve the city’s collective memory, then restorative narratives must accompany their romantic façades. Perhaps tour guides could highlight and put emphasis on class segregation during the Indies period; menu books could mention the economic exclusion that made such desserts inaccessible to most locals, to celebrate what the local people had endured and are allowed to consume now. Doing so would not diminish their charm; it would deepen it, shedding light on something else that should be appreciated rather than admiring their appeal on a surface level.

Only by holding beauty and brutality in the same frame can Surabaya truly honour its past. Colonial nostalgia, then, should not be a detour from history but a gateway into its darker aspects that let people learn from the past and reflect on what they have endured and reclaimed now. Let the tourists flock in, take pretty pictures; let them eat ice cream, but to be fair enough, let them also leave with questions and ponder each time they scroll through their photos.

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