On Track. Spontaneous Privatization of Public Urban Land in Bandung, Indonesia

Abstract

The history of land control in Indonesia is overwhelmingly one of colonial conquest, government enclosure and expropriation of traditional property rights. However, beneath these great transformations, counter-currents also flow. Encroachment on state land and its gradual privatization by ordinary people sometimes gnaw at government property. Through a series of small, sometimes innocuous actions, people manage to undo the previous ownership regime. This article shows how settlers over a period of some 30 years – through a strategic mixture of civic disobedience and civic compliance – managed to appropriate, formalize and effectively privatize land belonging to the state-owned railway company in the city of Bandung. The authors argue that disobedient occupation and subsequent obedient payment of taxes, documentation of residence and ‘normalization’ of the area have reduced the company's ownership to thin formality, whereas new residents hold all the substantial elements of property rights to the land.