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Architecture has evolved from ancient time to now in many different forms and functions. One thing we have to understand that they all come from a simple understanding of ‘space’.

As New Year had just passed, which is also a form of Roman culture invested in our life, festivities are bound to take place on all earth surface; fireworks, parties, heavy conjunctions, shopping activities and so on. So, what’s this got to do with architect as a profession?

As an architect in this era, our responsibilities mounted as high as a mountain, we are the core development on earth. We need to look back in history as a reminder on Roman Architecture, which is profoundly shaping the urban scape in many cities of the world. Whether we see it as a facade on a house, a building with functions, the roman style has been implemented as classical style that is easily to  be detected; massive structure of columns, heavy and bulky forms, and high ceiling. In contrast with this form, we now have high demands to meet special requirements such as: Eco-friendly architecture.

In some parts of the world this type of roman style is not needed, they would look strange and astray in totally different culture. Although so, heritage of the old colonial time in Indonesia, has left us many Dutch architecture which has a root on Roman style in some ways. They now stand as marks, but ridiculously there are some examples that try to imitate this style in totally new buildings. These inconsiderate moves will create foreign and fake feeling to the surrounding. We should know better, than recreating a Disney world into our own culture. What would be my advice to young architects out there, use your creativity to meet the clients request, without leaving out your own culture.

Happy New Year 2009!!!

May this year will bring happiness, good lucks, and success to all of us.

“It is predicted that without the 3R program, by 2012 Surabaya’s landfills will be totally paralyzed by the enormous amount of trash produced per day. Thus a zero waste solution must be devised; preferably a simple, cost-efficient, and community-based method.”

Everyone knows that trash, rubbish, garbage; whatever you want to call it, society’s refuse is a problem to practically every city in the world. A city has faced waste-related problems at least once during its existence. Failure to treat waste can lead to the genesis of an unhealthy environment, and the degradation of the city’s image. During the 1950s, Europe faced a trash crisis, which led to composting as a treatment for municipal solid waste. Surabaya faced an overflow of waste in 2001; her landfills couldn’t cope with the amount of trash that the society coughs out daily. The stench was so extreme that people living as far away as ten kilometers from the landfill can still smell its “bitter-sweet” aroma. This I know because I live more or less ten kilometers away from the Keputih Landfill!

Before the discussion develops any further, it would be best to briefly describe Surabaya, the capital of East Java province. Covering an area of about 326.36km², divided into 31 districts, and 163 sub-districts, Surabaya is the second largest city in Indonesia with inhabitants amounting up to 3.2 million during the evening, and almost twice as much during the day. From the aforementioned, one can imagine the amount of rubbish produced per day, thus, a question arises: “how much (waste-related) load must Surabaya bear?”

Surabaya produces more or less 8.700m³ of trash per day; 72% of it is made up of household rubbish. Out of the total amount of rubbish produced per day, 69% of it is piled up in landfills; 4% is incinerated; 14% is recycled by trash collectors, and only 1% is recycled by the society. This simple statistic shows how low Surabaya’s society’s awareness towards waste management is.

When discussing waste, the facts of the matter are cliché; the society still lacks the awareness to dispose of garbage in a proper manner, resulting in litter, and rivers, canals and waterways turned into landfills. To make matters even worse, sidewalk retailers

and instant marketplaces that occupy the city’s perhaps marginalized spaces contribute greatly to the added waste load that Surabaya must bear. The formal sector doesn’t seem to help much as well as most of them still use non-recyclable packaging materials. To top all the aforementioned, trash has not been professionally treated. The outcome can be easily guessed; rivers and various other waterways (including ground water) become soiled, air pollution staggers, floods occur regularly during the raining season as rivers and canals are silted. Slum areas also appear especially along river banks.

Waste Management

Basically Surabaya’s policy and strategy towards waste management cover the following aspects:

1. Maximizing waste reduction from its source of production; promoting 3R attempts and securing household waste, incentive and disincentive mechanisms in exploiting waste.
2. Propose active society involvement as partner in waste management; education as tool to introduce and raise awareness of waste management at an early age, and establishing social partnership between the society, women, and private parties in waste management.
3. strengthening waste management institute capacity; encouraging waste management institution form and capacity improvement according to service needs; separating bodies/regulatory and operating functions; improving cooperation and management coordination, and encouraging collective regional waste management operations; incentive and disincentive mechanisms for landfill areas.
4. Developing cooperation with private parties; encouraging an inductive climate for public-private-partnerships; facilitating public-private-partnership development.
5. Developing and improving services to achieve national aims in steps; optimizing the use of available waste treating facilities; improving just, planned, and programmed service capacity according to needs and scale of priority; improving landfill management quality and rehabilitating contaminating landfills; research and development of environmentally-oriented and effective waste management and treatment technology.
6. Application of cost-recovering principles; engineering cost recovery pattern guidelines; facilitating and assisting compilation of retribution standards that are cost recovering oriented; disseminating cost recovery guidelines to related institutes/agencies.

Improving law enforcing effectiveness; developing law by-products as foundation and guideline to waste management services; consistently implementing supervising system and sanction in establishing enforcers/officials, society, and private parties by a regulatory body/agency.

Understanding 3R

To overcome the problem, and aiming for a trash-free society, Surabaya has tried to implement a waste-reducing scheme known as 3R (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle). To explain briefly what each R means:

Reduce: waste should be reduced from the source. Ultimately this will reduce the amount of rubbish the city has to deal with in their landfills.

Reuse: waste should be reused as much as possible to avoid more rubbish input to landfills.

Recycle: a very common term, any recyclable material should be recycled so that it would not go to waste, and still has competitive resale value.

This method has been devised with a vision to focus on the environment by attempting to greatly decrease our traces in the environment through generating zero growth on the amount of garbage we produce each day. 3R is also a multi-stakeholder scheme, and a stimulant to generate economic effect. Throughout its implementation in Surabaya, an international cooperation has

been established in the form of a sister city program with Kitakyushu, Japan, treating organic waste into compost, to promote zero waste

growth; this has helped Surabaya’s citizens to better understand the appropriate methods and technology in dealing with (household) waste. Ultimately, the 3R program has encouraged Surabaya’s citizens to re-orient themselves into having a glocalized attitude towards waste.

3R: The Mission

There are a few general objectives that the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle program aims to fulfil, and they are as follows:

• To reduce organic faction until 15% by the end of the 5^th year
• To reduce non-organic faction by 5-8% by the end of the 5^th year
• Solid waste separation at the source
• To simplify solid waste management in the city
• Educating the community

3R in Surabaya

In general, 3R has been implemented in Surabaya using two different approaches; community-based decentralized waste management, and composting program.

Community-based Decentralized Waste Management

In this approach, the waste management program aims to reduce the amount of waste from its source through various community programs; Socializing garbage separation (organic, and non-organic waste) to ease further processing; organic waste will be turned into compost, whereas non-organic waste will be sold to trash collectors or recycled accordingly, and a kampong greening program. People from all stratums of society were involved in this waste management program to ensure the most optimum result is achieved. There were two main activities involved during the implementation of this program. The first being socialisation to shed some light on the proposed waste management program; aimed at raising community awareness, and changing the people’s general perspective towards garbage. Socialisation was carried out by city officials, and/or social groups, throughout Surabaya’s 163 sub-districts within 31 administrative districts. Cadres are trained to encourage environmentally aware social figures. These cadres were chosen by social groups that oversee waste management training programs in the immediate area. Continuous monitoring will be done by city officials, social groups, and the mass media. Citizens will then be assisted by horticulture and sanitary officials who cooperate with social groups such as Bangun Pertiwi, Sahabat Lingkungan, Pusdakota, BLTKI, etc. To encourage people’s spirits and interest in the proposed waste management program, sanitary equipments such as compost bins, takakura baskets, and garbage wagons were handed out to the immediate society. Compost processing plants were also built in some areas. The mass media is given a crucial role in promoting and monitoring the Green & Clean Program; Free from Garbage.

Composting Program

Composting can be used

as an alternative to landfill as concern about landfill space constantly increase. Worldwide interest in recycling by means of composting is growing since composting is a widely accepted process for converting decomposable wastes of natural origin into stable, sanitized products useful for horticulture. In Surabaya’s case, since most of the waste that occupies the landfill is organic matter, therefore a successful composting program will greatly reduce landfill load.

Word by word suffocated my lungs and so they hung there, limped and numbed. The scattered houses down bellow are a jungle of undeniable truths of how living squatters in Indonesia’s biggest city, Jakarta is conditioned. I am sure if you open the car window you would smell the bad odor rousing from down there. Haphazard developments of housing on unattended or under disputes of ownership lands are what had happened to form these squatters.

In contrast of the glamour cityscape, behind skyscrapers, beyond hope these funguses of development live and grow. They do not belong to no one, these slums we may call; belong to us as citizens of the world. They appear not only in Indonesia, but also in other cities and other countries; disguised in different names, favellas of Rio, shikumen settlements of Shanghai, kampung of  Indonesian cities, and many others.

This phenomenon is discussed thoroughly in Mike Davis’ Planet of Slums. There seem to be a laisez faire of mental by governments of these countries to let them grow. Unfortunately, there is not much can be done to improve their conditions due to many top bottom decisions that lack of attentions. Many of improvements program are misled and used not according to the inhabitants’ needs. Not to mention the mean strategy some of the capitalists are using when they want the land for a certain development.

So, is there a way out of this? Of course there is, if we would all sit together and listen! The need of these people can be assessed by a simple act of observing. May be they who sit up there do not need this, but we as planner do. Steps are more effective taken from bottom up approaches.

Use the inhabitants’ communal spirit. Most informal settlements everywhere around the globe have strong ties with their neighborhood.

Improvements can start with small things. Cleanliness of the settlements is a god start. Give these settlers the understanding of a healthier environment by keeping clean their living spaces.

Grow the feeling of common ownerships. Participatory planning in slum areas would be proven effective, because the inhabitants are also involved in the process. We need to let them know first of all, that this is for the common sake of everyone.

The United Nations in their reports mentioned that more than one billion people now live in the slums of the cities of the South. This is our chance to help creating betterment for citizens of tomorrow. So, step up to it, my fellow planners and architects!

It seems though the design has some kind of a regular guide, pavement, reinstallment of railings, dike and of course urban furniture, such as lighting and bench. A pattern is seemed to be obvious as well, that the concern is no longer just to beautify the space, but also to function as an urban space. This attitude is really good, as a riverside or lake-side or beach, usually take up really long walkways and this means that the addition to city’s urban space is abundant along the water.

What should be considered is that the design should support facilities for the ‘diffables’; people with different abilities, especially the needs for standard dimensions. It is not a merely the design that will attract people to use this kind of space, most importantly is the’soul’, which will be added to the space by the activities that the user is doing. So, each city’s waterfront will have their specific ‘trademark’ according to their costum, culture and life.

Sparkling Surabaya is a new vision that the local authorities have conceived, and it aims at encouraging tourism in Surabaya to develop. Bearing that in mind, then it is apparent that marketing the city is something everyone should consider. However, even the dumbest of people can understand that marketing the city by taking using prostitution as packaging is a sensitive issue. It would even put shame on some people’s faces; and if we force the idea, we can expect a great deal of friction with religious parties, and other humanitarian organizations. But that is no reason to turn our backs on Dolly! One solution to take advantage of Dolly’s potential is to rehabilitate the red-light district, but retain its reputation as a red-light district, and market it as a sex-tourism district. Before you get me wrong, what I meant was to promote Dolly as a former red-light district (not promoting the fact that Dolly is a red-light district!), just like Amsterdam’s notorious de Wallen area. Imagine the amount of credit Surabaya’s city government will get if they succeed in rehabilitating Dolly as did the Amsterdam city government de Wallen (Jawa Pos 5th & 6th February 2008)! Can readers imagine a red-light Fashion District instead of an actual red-light District? The creative industry sector is the most suitable agent-of-change (in my opinion). The existence of art galleries will certainly be more appreciated compared to sex and a few cafes.

Resistance will certainly arise especially from those who work in brothels with unemployment being the most common reason. They should bear in mind, however, that if the rehabilitation project is successful, then jobs will certainly be available automatically. Cleaning out this district will also reduce various crimes, including drug abuse and human trafficking. The spread of HIV/AIDS will also be reduced. (I know I know, I’m being too optimistic!)

We should keep in mind that even if Dolly can be fully rehabilitated, the project will not totally wipe out prostitution. This idea is also not an overnight miracle stuff. But at least this idea can present a reflecting point; that even something that society has deemed as rotten and hopeless can become something good, just like the ugly caterpillar becoming a beautiful butterfly.