UCLA

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.