Bandung Creative City: Reinvigorating the Capital of Asia-Africa

On 17 April 2015, I was invited by The Global Times, one of China's leading English-language newspapers, to speak at their annual Global Ambassador Forum.  Of course I was delighted to receive the invitation, especially because I am not ambassador.  So, I accepted the invitation in a heartbeat.

The topic of the forum was "Building Smart and Green Cities", something that I immediately realized I had no idea about.  But I have always been told by a senior colleague that when given a chance to speak, then speak.  Because speaking gets Indonesia's name on newspapers (for the right reasons), and that's part of what our job is.

The words of that senior colleague do make sense.  At least, more so than the advise of another older diplomat, who once belittled me, and said that I shouldn't speak at a forum promoting Indonesia's movie industry because I "didn't have the competency to speak about such matters".  What nonsense, I thought, and still do 'til this day.

I will take the risk of appearing cocky and assert the believe that I am an authority in Indonesian matters, here in Beijing, China.  And this is not simply because I've entertained one too many questions from Chinese people about things Indonesian.  If anything, I believe that every diplomat should have it in his hearts and minds that he or she is an Indonesian resource person wherever they are posted. Not only competent, but an authority on Indonesia.

And so, it didn't take long for me to decide on Bandung as my topic of discussion for the Global Ambassador Forum.  The choice was somewhat easy.  I've been to Bandung many times.  Bandung is increasingly becoming known for its "smart" and "green" urban development.  Bandung was also about to host the 60th Anniversary of the Asia-Africa Summit, and many in Beijing knew little about Bandung. 

Indeed, following the forum, I was interviewed by three Chinese media that wanted to do a background story for the Asia-Africa Summit.  In fact, one of the publications resulting from these interviews can still be found on the website of East China News Service (ECNS.COM).

In case some of you are interested in what I said during the Global Ambassador Forum, please continue reading below.

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Excellencies Ambassadors,
Respected members of the diplomatic corps,
Esteemed editors and journalists of Global Times,
Ladies and gentlemen,

First and foremost, I would like to thank Global Times for inviting me to speak at this forum. 

I am a loyal reader of Global Times, and therefore, it is indeed an honour for me to be here, and to talk about my country, Indonesia.

In all honesty, I am not an expert in urban development.  Nor am I an architect or landscape designer. So I am not going to speak to you in jargons that I myself don't even understand.

But as a diplomat, I do get to travel, and feel the heartbeat of many cities.  From my experience, every city has its own, unique life.  And each city’s life is always evolving along with its population.

In this vein, today I would like to talk about Bandung, which is Indonesia's third largest city, after Jakarta and Surabaya. 

Bandung is the capital of West Java Province, and boasts a population of around 7.4 million people.  Surrounded by mountains, and sitting at almost eight hundred meters above sea-level, the city's climate is generally more comfortable than that found in coastal cities across the Indonesian archipelago.

Just two hours away from Jakarta, Bandung is known as a getaway destination for residents of Indonesia's capital.  This was true even during colonial times, when Bandung frequently entertained Dutch administrators and plantation owners from Jakarta and the rest of West Java.

In 1955, Bandung hosted the Asia-Africa Conference.  Attended by leaders of Asian and African countries, the conference was the first summit ever among many new nations that had just gained independence following the Second World War.

Indonesia's President Soekarno; India's Prime Minister Nehru; China's Premier Zhou Enlai; they were all there, and they voiced out their countries' respective nation-building processes, and efforts to establish peace, stability, and prosperity for the people.

The 1955 Asia-Africa Conference would later be known as the Bandung Conference.  And the spirit of solidarity and cooperation that was born out of that conference became known as the Bandung Spirit. 

That spirit continues to live on to this day, as Asia and Africa increasingly occupy the headlines of world news. 

Such a sense of solidarity is also reflected in the participation of many leaders, including Chinese President Xi Jinping, in the Bandung Conference's 60th anniversary commemoration, later this month. 

This is why I have chosen to speak about Bandung.

At the beginning of the millennium, beautiful Bandung, which was previously known as the Paris of Java, had gradually taken on many unappealing "big city" traits -- traffic jams, air pollution, and garbage. 

Bandung's urban problems can be traced to poor infrastructure and uncontrolled development.  The situation had become so damaging that many locals had succumbed to the possible irrelevance of Bandung in today's modern society.

However, things have changed for the better in the last few years. 

Bandung had always been known for its people's creativity and dynamism. And it was believed that any effort to make effective changes to the city would have to rely on these characteristics. 

In a city whose population is almost 50% made of youths, it is impossible to think of Bandung lacking in creativity and dynamism.

In 2008, Bandung launched a "creative city" movement, which was aimed at harnessing the pre-existing cultural and creative industry into a more organized city-level community.  The main aim was to inject new life into a supposedly fading city.  

As ideas emerged, interchanged, and further developed within conducive discourse environments, concrete efforts began to materialize on how to make the city more livable, and more lovable.  Some of the locals even dreamt of making Bandung a world class city. 

In this way, the desire to make Bandung more habitable had come from the grassroots, from the bottom up.  The city’s upward progress was therefore positively linked to the people's increasing enthusiasm and participation.

And in 2013, efforts to reinvigorate Bandung hit the next gear, when a young, foreign-educated, local architect by the name of Ridwan Kamil was elected as Mayor. 

Kamil had stated that his vision was "to make Bandung the happiest society in Indonesia".  And he has worked hard to fulfill his promise by listening to the people, and absorbing their ideas. 

The government has since pushed for better and more integrated public transportation.  This includes a cable car program and a bike-sharing program, which is the first of its kind in Indonesia.  This is targeted at making Bandung's streets less congested and less polluted.

The citizens of Bandung have also been encouraged to change their lifestyle.  And Mayor Kamil has tried to lead by example, as demonstrated by his frequent bike rides to work.

Creativity, the lifeline of Bandung’s progress, could only surface from lively surroundings.  Therefore, a mutual symbiosis needed to be created between the people and their home. 

In this regard, the government and people of Bandung emphasized on the idea of green development, by creating new parks, and revamping old ones. 

More public spaces have also been created, to stimulate positive interactions among the local population.  For example, areas under bridges, which had previously housed criminal activities, have been shifted into outdoor movie theaters and soccer pitches.

Moreover, to ensure the sustainability of this movement, citizens are asked to become directly involved in local projects. 

For example, to refurbish the city's soccer stadium area, a design competition was launched.  And the winner's design was then adopted as the blueprint for the project.  

In other words, the citizens are asked not to only demand a better life from the government, but also to be responsible for such improvement in livelihood.  The hope is that such public involvement  would cultivate a sense of belonging, thus ensuring sustainability.

Esteemed guests,
Ladies and gentlemen,

There are a number of factors that I would like to highlight in the way that Bandung has become a more livable and lovable city.

First, creativity.  Many of the changes happening in Bandung began with creative ideas. The development of forums for exchanging ideas among the local population has provided the energy for the city’s evolution.  

Second, participation.  The ability to express one’s mind has led to more Bandung people participating in public discussions.  In turn, the establishment of such forums has stimulated the emergence of new ideas, often among people who had previously been indifferent about the city's fate.

At the same time, creative ideas would only remain as ideas if the people are unwilling to convert them into concrete, tangible projects. 

This is where things are different now compared to before.  And this has much to do with a government and a leadership that is keen on materializing the people's ideas.

Therefore, third, attentive leadership.  Mayor Ridwan Kamil continues to interact with the public, not only by meeting them face-to-face, but also by making use of social media and the cyberspace. 

Through twitter, facebook, and instagram, Kamil can get first hand accounts of life in Bandung.  At the same time, Kamil uses these social media channels to report on the actions he has taken in response to popular aspirations and demands.

And fourth, a sense of belonging.  By allowing the public to participate in the governance of Bandung, a sense of responsibility has been nurtured.  This is something that is important in making the people more connected to their home, to their own livelihood.

Of course, in spite of the progress that I have outlined here, there remains much room for improvement if Bandung is to become a world-class city. 

However, if we speak to any people from Bandung today, then I can assure you that you would feel a strong sense of optimism oozing from them.  A sense of optimism in their capacity to make positive, long term changes.

History will always dictate Bandung as the capital of Asia-Africa.  But, by making Bandung a creative city, the local people have successfully breathe a new, reinvigorated life into their beloved city.  

In doing so, Bandung, like the Asian-African cooperation, have progressively changed with the times.

When the Ideal Seems Far from Real

I first met Aimee Dawis last month, in an elevator in Guiyang, China.  It was in the morning before the China-ASEAN Symposium organized by Guizhou University.  

Least to say, it was a brief encounter, probably uneventful.  I thought that Aimee was Chinese, like the other 1.3 billion people in that land.  Then again, it is possible that Aimee may have also thought that I was Chinese, from somewhere in Guangdong, where the people can sometimes be of darker skin.

Now, when looking back, having just finished Aimee’s book, I can say how appropriate that encounter was. 

The confusion of identity.  And thus, the struggle to resurrect, rediscover, redeem this identity.  This is the underlying theme of Aimee’s book, titled “Orang Indonesia Tionghoa Mencari Identitas” (Chinese Indonesians In Search of Identity). 

The book looks at the experience of Chinese Indonesians during the New Order era of Soeharto’s dictatorial regime (which ended in 1998).  An era when freedoms were limited, and more so, expressions of Chineseness, through written and spoken literature, performance arts, traditional ceremonies and the media, were simply not allowed.  They were all banned.

Forced into assimilation, the Chinese Indonesians were legally stripped off their cultural ties to Mainland China, the land of their forefathers.  However, Aimee argues that within such an environment, Chinese Indonesians managed to find semblances of their Chinese identity in the form of Chinese drama series, which were contraband items, whose possession could risk legal penalties.

Many who watched these drama series (most coming from Taiwan and Hongkong, two entities that were always careful to maintain a distance from Communist Mainland China) found some comfort in the values, ideas, and images projected in the series.  They gave the viewers a sense of what it (probably) means to be of Chinese background, in a surrounding devoid of any Chinese cultural symbols.

To those who felt prejudiced by the New Order’s dictatorial regime, the Chinese drama series gave their viewers a sense of a “desired other”, and imagined escape from their daily hardship.  To those searching for their cultural roots, the series gave them a sense of an “imagined homeland”.  And to those feeling disjointed from the Indonesian community at large, the Chinese drama series provided a feeling of “imagined community”, a feeling of belonging to something.

While appreciating her insights into the connection between media (as represented by the drama series) and identity, I also enjoyed Aimee’s discussion of the plurality of Chinese Indonesians.  Indonesians too often like to see the Chinese Indonesian community as a single, exclusive identity.  Many times, this has been to the detriment of these Chinese Indonesians.  Resentment towards affluent Chinese Indonesians often results in hardships for the poorer ones, just because they are of the same descent.  Therefore, recognition of plurality is a step towards breaking down exclusiveness, and the prejudices that come along with it.

What I like about this book is the honest tone with which it is written. Aimee doesn’t pretend to know it all, admitting that as a “native ethnographer” she is more susceptible to getting things wrong (in the guise of supposed truths) than right.  As a result, she allows the facts to speak, and the opinions to surface without major adulteration.  Aimee merely provides a framework of thought to guide the reader into understanding the underlying theme of her analysis.

Employing narrations obtained from focus group discussions involving Chinese Indonesians growing up during the New Order era, the book does not shy away from the stereotypes, prejudices, and feelings that color the uneasy relationship between Chinese and non-Chinese Indonesians.  It contained accounts of Chinese Indonesians from Sumatera to Papua, those who regard themselves as “totok” and “peranakan”, those who speak Chinese and didn’t.  In the end, the book says things the way they are, and not the way most Indonesians often prefer to.

So honest was Aimee that she wrote this at the beginning of the book: “Ini baru sebuah awal”.  This is just a beginning.  And if this is so, then I certainly am looking forward to what’s to follow.  Not only the views that Aimee would develop in the future, but as a whole, the body of literature on Chinese Indonesians, identity politics, the diaspora, Indonesian studies, China studies, and even diplomacy.  A body of literature born in a freer Indonesia, based and carried out by people relishing in these new freedoms. 

Aimee actually outlined some of the possible directions for such studies.  The possibilities are endless.  Maybe, just maybe, I can be part of this movement. 

I think that the notion of “a confusion of identity” will never wholly disappear.  Not with the Chinese Indonesians.  Not with every Indonesian in general, who live in a country so diverse and various.  For identities are never singular, and people are free to assume multiple identities in this globalized world.   

More studies on this theme, however, would raise greater awareness of the values, the prejudices, and the sentiments that we live with every day.  To make us feel more grounded, and assured of each and one of our identities. To make us recognize that what we deemed to be truths are sometimes actually far from it. 

At least, having read this book, the next time around I will know who Aimee Dawis is.  And that’ll be something, ‘cause that’s one identity I would not be confused of.

Linking with the Land-Down-Under

The media in Indonesia has become a battleground for ideas.  Am happy about this 'coz it signifies, in many ways, the maturity of democracy.  However, at the same time, I cannot help but feel that the Indonesian people remain very emotional in their treatment of the media as well as their digestion of matters in the media.

We have a long way before the Indonesian people can learn to be critical of the media, and use the media truly as an means to enhance their participation in this democracy.  

The Indonesian people also should not be provoked by the media.  It is important to recognize that the media provides a forum for forwarding different views on anything under the sun; difference should be celebrated with a view to moving forward successfully.

I take the example of my assessment of The Jakarta Post's selection of articles on Indonesia-Australia relations.  On this occasion, I cannot but applaud the Jakarta Post's attempt to present multiple sides of the story.  And more so, the fact that the Jakarta Post printed my letter as a source of reflection.

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/1999/10/11/two-neighbors-odds.html