Children’s poetics of fragments in a riverside kampung in Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Abstract

In this paper, we attend to the everyday creative practices of residents of a riverbank settlement, kampung Ratmakan, in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and the materials through which urban imaginaries are constructed. Building on Colin McFarlane’s recent insight that while ‘fragmentation’ is a crucial term in the grammar of urban theory, the fragments themselves have received little attention, we inquire into how children mobilise material and temporal fragments to produce unique forms of public life and imaginaries of what is possible in the city. Through a collaborative art project conducted with residents of kampung Ratmakan, we contribute an empirical richness to McFarlane’s calls for a politics of urban fragments. Using art practice as both a method of inquiry and means of co-producing knowledge, we document some of the ways in which a sensory politics is articulated through children’s embodied modes of relating to their urban environment.