Thirteenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

Walking in Jakarta, one can easily find gates in front of the alley and some main roads near residential areas which locally called as portal. The gate is installed by the local community, at the edge of a road inside the community to block the access into the road during the night. Despite the material similarity, this cannot be captured as neo-liberal urban development akin to “gated communities” (Blakely and Snyder, 1995). Construction of these gates is tightly correlated with role neighborhood organization, especially its night watch practice that culturally and administratively embedded in Indonesian urban societies (Barker 1998, 1999; Kusno 2006). This became foundation of the scape of residential streets that breaking dualism of spatial exclusiveness where gates can be observed in wealthy as well as poor neighborhoods. This paper will describe how gates replace “traditional” night watch in community and perform routine and spontaneous manipulation of the territory in selected localities. Furthermore, this paper will argue that, nocturnal space that created by them as representation of collective derive to “reterritorialize space with the intent to reinforce some semblance of conventional order and regularity in the darkness” (William, 2008 p. 521). In this sense, it is a manifestation of vigilance of anxious urban majority (Simone, 2014). Thus, the gating is the intent to occupy and secure the nocturnal segment of their everyday life from diurnal bustle of contemporary Jakarta where main streets outside the territories are projected as source of disorder that may bring unwelcome mobility inside the territories.