Inundation 3

Master of Architecture Jakarta Studio [2014]

In the global resource wars, the environmentalist of the poor is frequently triggered when an official landscape is forcibly imposed on a vernacular one. A vernacular landscape is shaped by the affective, historically textured maps that communities have devised over generations... By contrast, an official landscape - whether governmental, NGO, corporate, or some combination of those - is typically oblivious to such earlier maps.

*— Rob Nixon*

A tower of chicken coops to protect the animals from rising flood water

A bamboo bridge locals use to cross the river

Waduk Pluit, the largest pump in Jakarta

Communal outhouse on a floating bamboo platform in the Ciliwung River

Informal stilted settlements adjacent Waduk Pluit

The massive pipes to expel floor water from the city up over the sea wall to to ocean at Waduk Pluit

Studio members cunducting research in Bukit Duri, an informal settlement, with members of Ciliwung Merdeka

Community built raised walkways for use during floods

Informal settlements on the banks of the Ciliwung

Beginnings of the government "normalisation process" to turn the river into a canal.

Community dump on the bank of the Ciliwung

Studio members presenting research at Pulse Lab Jakarta, and joint organization of the United Nations and the Government of Indonesia

Entryway to Ciliwung Merdeka, a grass roots organization working to restore the Ciliwung river

Opening of the final presentations made to the Government of Indonesia

The Inundation 3 Studio was the third part of a series of research studios held in Jakarta, Indonesia during the summer of 2014 in collaboration with anexact office, Map Jakarta, and Ciliwung Merdeka.

The work produced during this studio as part of the Natural & Urban Systems team was exhibited with that of the two other teams at the Paul H. Cocker Gallery at Ryerson University in 2015.

As Southeast Asia’s most populous and most dense metropolitan conurbation, and the second largest urban footprint in the world, Jakarta, Indonesia, is a city of remarkable complexity. However, recent trends in urbanization and development, weather intensification, sea level rise, extreme river pollution, river flooding, and coastal inundation make it one of the key sites for researching architecture’s agency within the complex urban systems of the 21st century.

Jakarta’s informal settlements were the primary sites of investigation during the Inundation 3 studio. The objective of the studio was to develop, test, and execute the design of an open platform website that crowdsourced data collection to promote urban and community resilience in the face of massive flooding. Through careful research along the Ciliwung River and other relevant districts in the city, we presented our proposals to the government and local organizations about how to best address the megacity’s unstable geography of water to promote more equitable urban development.

In order to address this enormous problem, the studio divided the research into three scales: