Negotiating Time: Design as Historical Practice

Abstract

In North Jakarta, the bulldozed remnants of the April 11 (2016) eviction of Kampung Pasar Ikan presented a site of radical transformation and urban planning. The eviction was in part motivated by a Dutch-Indonesian alliance, to construct a 40 billion USD sea wall and reclaimed islands to prevent the city from slowly sinking. In this text we start by asking, how are people living in Pasar Ikan responding to and enacting their own futures through repair? What does repair in a landscape of complete disrepair look like? And how is history both erased and enacted in this process? We then move to West Kalimantan where a DIY drone collective makes aerial drone technology and trains groups to map land that they say is vulnerable to incursions by resource developers. We ask, how is the forest located, recognized and constituted by these and other cartographic practices? Whose time and in what time are forest boundaries set and reset by mapping techniques in West Kalimantan? How do these cartographies become artifacts that travel and influence how history is thought and practiced?