Spotlight on Surabaya, Indonesia

Surabaya is Indonesia’s second largest city but is not well known to the outside world. Yet in 1900, Surabaya was a bigger city than Jakarta and one of the main commercial centers of Asia. Collapse of sugar exports during the 1930s depression, followed by the Japanese occupation, revolution, and independence, brought on a long period of stagnation and retreat from the international economy. Not until the export boom of the 1990s did Surabaya regain prominence as Southeast Asia’s leading non–capital–city industrial area. Previous thinking on Indonesia is being reassessed in light of recent political and economic upheaval. Surabaya, City of Work offers an alternative to the Jakarta-centric focus of most writing on the country. It is a multifaceted view of a fascinating and complex city in the dimensions of time and space, economy and society, and the current transition toward decentralization makes it highly topical.

Exploration of this eventful economic history gives new insight into Indonesia’s modern economic development. Industrialization is recognized as being associated with rapid urbanization, but this is the first study of Indonesia from an explicitly urban perspective. Surabaya, City of Work takes a broad approach that links industrialization to socioeconomic trends, the increasing role of government, changing land use, and trade patterns. This well–illustrated local history encompassing national events and trends will be a central work on Indonesia for years to come.

Surabaya, 1945-2010: Neighborhood, State and Economy in Indonesia’s City of Struggle
Robbie Peters

Surabaya, 1945–2010, presents the recent history of one of Indonesia’s great port cities as viewed from a crowded low-income neighborhood (kampung) called Dinoyo. By following the lives of Dinoyo residents over three generations, it provides a new perspective on landmark moments in the country’s modern history, including the war for independence, the destruction of the Communist Party,anticrime campaigns, neigh­borhood improvement pro­jects, the fall of the New Order, and the rise of democracy, as well as more recent government campaigns to fight terrorism and promote urban renewal.

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Women and Politeness: The Hybrid Language and Culture of Chinese Indonesian Women in Surabaya
Esther Kuntjara

This book is an account of two generations of Chinese Indonesian women in their language behavior of politeness seen from their educational and cultural backgrounds. They were born and have been living in Indonesia, yet each would carry with her the unique blend of her Chinese, Indonesian, Dutch, and Western cultures. As women, they often bear an important role of generating and mediating their cultures to the next generation. Yet their presence is often silenced and neglected. The data that have been collected, presented and discussed here have been a unique contribution to an ethnographic socio-cultural-linguistic study of female language. Compared to the previous ethnographic studies conducted on Javanese or Indonesian language studies by non Indonesians, this study has taken a different perspective in which the writer, being a Chinese Indonesian woman herself like the participants’ background, allowed her as a participant observer, to put herself inside them. This study can therefore be an insider account of their language behaviors, in particular their politeness behaviors.

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Urban land policy and housing development in Indonesia: Surabaya as a case study
Ispurwono Soemarno

Choosing the city of Surabaya, Indonesia, as a case study, this book discusses the implementation of a ‘location permit’. Basically, this permit provide an opportunity for developers to buy land from land- owners to be used for housing development activities. Various restrictions related to this permits and land ownership patterns in Indonesia, raises some difficulties in land acquisition process. These various limitations, in turn generate a variety of strategies of the parties involved to reap their own benefits. Both legally and in violation of the existing regulations. Initially, there is a kind of allegation that housing developers are the most ‘naughty’ one in land acquisition process. Field studies indicate, however, that there are quite complex issues and related to legal, economic and social aspects of the parties involved. They are consists of government officials as the licensing of land acquisition, land owners, housing developers and other intermediary parties. Weaknesses in law enforcement also has an important role in the intricacies of the implemention of the location permits for housing development activities in Indonesia.

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