Town Planning in Sumatra - A linear organic form
The towns and cities in Sumatra are
linear. Most towns, except for the
larger cities, stretch along the road so much so that a small town
will be 5kms in length. The larger
cities display a similar pattern but it is more of a spider web.
The linear nature of the towns have economic
and social functions. Nearly all
properties along the road will have a small stall, selling anything from cold
drinks, to fried bananas and coffee. Most stalls are staffed by females and
kids (after school) and most represent a second source of income for the
family. The stalls also operate as a
social hub. It is common to have people drop in, get fuel, drink a coffee,
change a tyre and sit around. The road
is a source of entertainment – white people on bicycles (!), horse (kuda) in
trailers, strange cargo loads and folk on motorbikes.
If you want to get to the next town you
also have to watch the road for a bus that could come at any time. Longer distance travel is catered for by
local buses which run to a timetable but the first bus leaves always departs late and then two buses
race (and I mean seriously race) to pick up passengers. The result is that people must wait at the small
stalls for the bus that ‘datang di sini jam karat (comes here in rubber
time)’. Therefore, to freight both goods
and people, the roads needs to be watched to allow a bus to be flagged down.
The streets become an integral part of the
towns – they drive the economic and social activity. It is not a hub and spoke
model like western towns and roads but on one of a continuous series of
‘micro-beads’.
Tsunami, the response and adaptation of time
The Tsunami that hit Sumatra on boxing day 2005.
It is estimated that 250,000 died as a result, in some places this equaled 1 in
4 people. The international community
responded in force. Now seven years on
there are very few signs of the Tsunami unless you look hard – the regularity
of the housing, the layout of the towns, the odd memorial and American style
roads.
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| Example of post-Tsunami housing |
The construction efforts have widely been
commended. It was truly impressive given the scale of reconstruction. The strategy for rebuilding the towns was based on a simple zoning
system that laid out houses on regular streets away from the main highway. The main highway, like highways around the
world, becomes that main thoroughfare for traffic between towns.
This fails to recognize the function and
value of roads in Indonesia. To separate the main routes between towns
undermines the social and economic value that is currently obtained from the roads
in Sumatra.
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| The 'town' at the rear of a new build facing the highway |
Seven years on the result is a relatively
large empty highway that is starting to be reclaimed to the Indonesian way of ‘planning’. It is now common along the highway that buildings
are being built on the road, and extensions are being constructed extending
houses onto the road (It was very difficult to capture good photos of this as our mini-bus driver was training for monaco gp). This is an organic
adaption of a western concept of separation of uses to their needs.
Disaster planning, though doing a great job
at implementing a response that got communities housed quickly, did not fully seek to understand the socio-economic
context of the region to inform the transport/town planning. A
concept that is very different in Indonesia!
This is just my initial musings and I’m
going to do some more research and planning to turn it into a more formal paper. Comments
welcome!
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| At at road level rear extension to an new dwelling |
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| An entire new dwelling on a highway. |
