Making cosmo-religious landscapes: the design of a Balinese town's civic center (Bali, Indonesia)

Abstract

Bali, a provincial island among Indonesia's hundreds of islands, is a unique place mainly due to its existence as an island, populated mostly by Balinese Hindu. As such the Balinese traditional-religious conceptions of space are influential in the landscape design. This paper evaluates the site plan and landscape design of the Regency of Badung Civic Center in the Province of Bali, Indonesia. It describes the design approach taken by its designers, in which they explored the traditional-religious conceptions of space in relation to the design goals. The Balinese urban design principles as proposed by Samadhi (J. Indones. Plann. School Assoc. 1(1) (2001) 25, Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, 2001) will be utilized as the tool of evaluation.