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Jakarta is a fascinating city. Its attraction lies in the incredibly wide variety of people - Indonesians, Chinese, Indians, Arabs, and Europeans - who have arrived over the centuries, bringing with them their own habits, folklore, and culture. Their descendants have resulted in a vibrant mix of people, most of them making a living along the thousands of small lanes and alleys that criss-cross the kampungs of this enormous city. Artifacts indicate that this area was inhabited from the fifth century. Hundreds of years later, a small trading post on the coast named Kelapa was founded and eventually grew into the mega-city of Jakarta with over twenty million people. This book provides a unique look at the history of Jakarta through the eyes of individuals who have walked its streets through the ages, revealing how some of the challenges confronting the city today - congestion, poverty, floods and land subsidence - mirror the struggles the city has had to face in the past.
Gangsters and Revolutionaries is the first in-depth study of one of the 'people's armies' which emerged from the chaos at the close of World War II in Indonesia to join the struggle for Indonesian independence in 1945. It traces the story of the People's Militia of Greater Jakarta from its origins as a loose network of petty criminals and labor bosses in the slums of urban Jakarta and the feudal estates of the surrounding countryside, to its destruction at the hands of the Indonesian army in the late 1940s. This book examines the social basis of the Indonesian revolution, especially the ways in which the revolutionary forces made use of existing social structures in mobilizing a popular foll...
At 23 and fresh out of university, life is just starting for Della, a young Indonesian woman with the world seemingly at her feet. A loving family, a caring boyfriend and a seemingly golden career path ahead of her mean she should be feeling on top of the world. And yet.....it still isn’t enough. Taking some time out, she decides to move to London and new horizons and in doing so opens herself up to a whole new world and way of life. Moving into a shared flat, she soon meets Stacey, a young English woman with a troublesome past, and it isn’t long before the two of them are drawn into a nefarious twilight world of gangsters, intrigue and shady dealings. Getting dragged further into murky waters, Della finds herself being drawn back to her homeland and into the middle of a scheme that could either see her realise her dreams or else land her in a whole lot of trouble!
This book combines the work of twenty-one authors from East and West, some of whom are long-time residents of Jakarta and all of whom have lived and studied there for shorter or longer periods. They have in common that each of them has become fascinated by certain characteristics of Jakarta’s many-sided life. The subjects they deal with range from conditions in VOC Batavia to particular national or ethnic communities to administrative developments. The essays on early colonial Batavia yield new insights into the demographic situation bases on archival research, and those essays dealing with more modern topics make use of special sources, including maps, that are not easily accessible through libraries. Reading through this volume one encounters striking parallels between the past and the present, because many aspects of present-day Jakarta are deeply rooted in the history of the city: demography and urban morphology, environmental absurdities, traffic, and floods as well as ritual and symbolism. Historians, anthropologists, sociologists, administrators, and town planners may well draw inspiration from this kaleidoscopic picture of Indonesia’s capital.
Prowling the seedy red-light districts, the underground club circuit and the house parties of wealthy Indonesian society, Moammar Emka offers a unique glimpse into the underbelly of modern, urban Jakarta. This is the book that took Indonesia by storm. Moammar Emka is Jakarta’s answer to Carrie Bradshaw; this is "“Sex and the City”" Indonesian-style!
A young woman takes a driverless taxi through the streets of Jakarta, only to discover that the destination she is hurtling towards is now entirely submerged... A group of elderly women visit a famous amusement park for one last ride, but things don’t go quite according to plan... The day before her wedding, a bride risks everything to meet her former lover at their favourite seafood restaurant on the other side of the tracks... Despite being the world’s fourth largest nation – made up of over 17,000 islands – very little of Indonesian history and contemporary politics are known to outsiders. From feudal states and sultanates to a Cold War killing field and a now struggling, flawed d...
Jakarta is being transformed in an unknown speed and manner by new types of urban authorities and drivers of transformation. These actors are moving in a field of opportunity that was created by recent and severe changes in the economic, socio-political and natural environment of Jakarta. Including chapters written by contributors who have lived and worked in Jakarta for years, this book shows how urban space in Jakarta is increasingly created by the entanglement of different layers that co-exist in political and socio-economic life, with actors criss-crossing between formal and informal spheres. In each case the authors explore who are the drivers of urban change, and what are the processes...
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR, THE FINANCIAL TIMES, AND GQ “A radical new history of the United States abroad” (Wall Street Journal) which uncovers U.S. complicity in the mass-killings of left-wing activists in Indonesia, Latin America and around the world In 1965, the U.S. government helped the Indonesian military kill approximately one million innocent civilians. This was one of the most important turning points of the twentieth century, eliminating the largest communist party outside China and the Soviet Union and inspiring copycat terror programs in faraway countries like Brazil and Chile. But these events remain widely overlooked, precisely because the CIA's secret ...
Expert Christopher Silver shows how Jakarta was transformed from a colonial capital into a megacity of well over ten million inhabitants.