From ACHR E-News September-October 2008 On 24 August 2008, a large eviction took place in North Jakarta`s Tangjung Priok district. Some 6,000 poor squatters (most of them evictees from recent demolitions in other parts of the city) had been living for several years on a 26.5 hectare piece of public land, on which the Jakarta government has plans to build a sports center and public park. It took an army of 5,000 policemen, soldiers and Public Order Officers a single day to demolish all the houses and close all the community`s wells, leaving a very large and very dazed group of people still there, but now camping out amidst the rubble of their former homes. For a city which has seem some of Asia`s largest-scale and most brutal evictions in the past few years, under Jakarta`s former Governor Sutiyoso, this demolition is nothing new. But what IS different about this one is that there has been a good dialogue between the community, their supporters and the city government, which now has a new mayor and a new atmosphere of openness to new ideas. Here is more from Dian and Wardah at the Urban Poor Consortium, the NGO which is part of the coalition of groups supporting this community: A demolition with dialogue in Jakarta : At the beginning, it was the government`s idea to relocate the evictees to social housing 15 kms away or send the people back to their original villages. But what is exciting is that now, different than before, the local government is willing to have a dialogue, and we have come up with an alternative solution of nearby relocation. Nobody is against the idea of developing more public parks in a city that is increasingly starved for green space, and the community people are willing to cooperate with the government`s plans for the land they were living on. The people are now looking for vacant land in the area, gathering information about those alternatives and proposing them to the government. It`s now in the process and we also have also gotten the related departments in the national government involved in the process, as well as professionals like architects and city planners. So we`ve found that the crisis of eviction creates opportunities for building a more broad-based coalition to search for a more sustainable solution to the problems urban poor settlements and also for city planning. Hopefully, that will set a good precedent, not only for Jakarta, but nationally. Newsletter found at: http://www.achr.net/Download%20Library/Download%20Enews/ACHR%20E-News%20Sept-Oct%202008.pdf

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