The dissertation explores the trajectory of the Indonesian Housing Justice Movement, comprised of various grassroots organizations, NGOs, and individuals fighting for the right to the city and their struggle for housing rights. Through qualitative research, I study the evolution of a movement over the long term through changing sociopolitical and urban circumstances and how this influences urban transformation. I examine the practices of local grassroots movements in their struggle for housing rights, from street protests and legal suits to proposing alternative designs and proactively initiating and engaging in political contracts. I argue that Indonesia’s housing justice movement has grown as both a social and spatial network: building new collaborations across distinct groups of actors and expanding from Jakarta to an inter-urban network, also networking internationally. Housing justice movement actors within the existing network combine their expertise and resources to develop new strategies. Spatial expansion of the network enables learning to occur from the different experiences acquired in distinct places.The dissertation is divided into three chapters, written as separate journal articles. However, they address overlapping empirical and theoretical questions. The empirical content revolves around the struggle of the housing justice movement in Indonesia from the late 1990s. The chapters examine various aspects of its struggle for residents’ affordable and appropriate housing, advancing their right to the city. The first chapter examines the housing justice movement through the lens of the citizenship practices it has deployed, from street protests to lawsuits and political contracts. The second chapter focuses on the residents evicted from Kampung Akuarium in North Jakarta, examining how they were able to work with the movement to assert a right to place-making that culminated in community-designed housing. The third chapter examines the movement’s campaign to incorporate collective housing into national housing policy, interrogating the efficacy of inter-urban and international spatial networking and the politics of scale as interlinked spatial strategies for advancing this goal. In terms of theory, I mobilize concepts in ways that push back against applying dominant Northern Theories to the Global South. The chapters interrogated the traveling theory from the North and intercepted in the Global South, particularly in the Indonesian context.

This thesis aims to locate the kampung (urban village) within the broader mobilization of ‘slums’ as urban blight in Global South cities. Slums have been widely known as settlements with poor living conditions: comprising a lack of basic services, such as water, sanitation, drainage, waste collection, street lighting, and paved footpaths; as well as a lack of community space, schools, and clinics within easy reach. However, in Indonesian cities including Jakarta, the label of ‘the slum’ has been attached to the unique space of the ‘kampung’, which are densely populated areas of poor and working-class communities in the center and peripheries of the city. For decades, the kampung has been understood in a derogative way. Beginning in the Dutch era, kampungs have been identified as disorganized and relatively problematic space: a nest of disease, filth, and crime. The contested understanding of the kampung continued but the similar and misguided label of ‘the slum’ was added. I argue that the double stigma has strengthened the aspiration to “fix” the kampung through city beautification projects, that leads to massive forced evictions. These projects have reduced the number of kampungs and displaced hundreds of thousands of residents in the city – threatening the notion of the kampung as distinct settlement form and space of life in Indonesian cities.