Jakarta Waterscape: From Structuring Water to 21st Century Hybrid Nature?

Abstract

This paper explores how changing conceptions of human-environment relationships have been materialized within Jakarta, Indonesia’s planning and development practices and how these practices have contributed to shaping today’s problematic waterscape. By refusing the modern binary opposition of natureculture and arguing that our city is a hybrid human-nonhuman nature, this paper shows that there have to be socio-technological solutions for the water sector’s current problems. We center our chain of explanations on flooding without neglecting the fact that flooding is related to other water issues and broader issues of uneven spatial development. Hence, tackling the calamities of flooding has to be situated within the whole water sector framework and spatial planning processes.