Town planning and Tsunami (a little off topic)

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.

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.

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!

At at road level rear extension to an new dwelling

An entire new dwelling on a highway.