The Glory of Semarang Coastal City in the Past, Multi-Ethnic Merchants and Dutch Commerce

Abstract

In The Image of the City, Lynch describes how individuals perceive and recall features in urban spaces. Lynch's approach is categorized by paths, nodes, edges, districts, and landmarks – giving shape to individuals' mental representation of the city. Recently, to test that theory on a large-scale city requires high accuracy to understand a city. So, it requires tools such as computational techniques using the GIS system. The cities of the 14th-18th centuries were not as complicated as the ones Lynch was dealing with in the 1960s. How do you reveal the image of the city? The image of the city in the past had not been explored yet. To explore the glory of Semarang city, Central Java, Indonesia, as Venetia van Java, which has the sugar industry in Asia, and the first railway track in Indonesia, you can still use hand-drawn sketches to reconstruct the image of the old city. Old data such as maps, photographs, and videos are integrated to reconstruct the image of the city in the past. Recently, the name of port of Semarang, Tanjung Emas– cape of gold – implies the glory of Semarang. The Semarang seaport played an important role in the pre-colonial and colonial eras. The architectural heritage at the two-river estuary of the Semarang coast uncovers the history of naming it the ‘cape of gold’. The river serves as roads and train lines, as the path is important as a tool to evaluate the city transportation facilities for urban planners, watershed services, and urban conservation.