PhD defence: City improvers in the Dutch Indies and Indonesia

On Friday 7 November at 4 pm., Hans Versnel will defend his PhD thesis Stadsverbeteraars in Indië en Indonesië ('City improvers in the Dutch Indies and Indonesia')

In his PhD thesis, Hans Versnel argues that the decentralisation of local government was instrumental in improving the kampongs in the cities of the Dutch East Indies and later also in Indonesia. By establishing city municipalities with municipal councils and appointing mayors and aldermen in colonial times, a certain degree of autonomy was created. In this way, these newly formed municipal councils in general and their mayors in particular were able to make more efforts to improve the city kampongs in their municipalities. In today's professional jargon, this is called delivering customisation. The kampong improvement thus became a public matter. However, the powers, finances, hygiene and health care with the land policy always remained bottlenecks in policy and decision-making in the colonial era. 

It was not much different in the post-colonial era, especially at the time of the Orde Baru - New Order - the thirty-year reign of Suharto with his soldiers in all important administrative posts. The fact that kampong improvement was considered a government task was reflected in the much-heard slogan 'leave it to the government'. 

Remarkable at the time was Ali Sadikin, the almost legendary governor of Jakarta (1966-1977), who implemented his policy in a resolute manner through the internationalization of his Perbaikan kampung into kampong improvement. With his statement 'Kita tidak bisa lepas dari ide-ide sejarah dalam melihat ke depan', which loosely translated means that you cannot get rid of the ideas of the past when looking to the future, he determined the motto of this study: continuity and change. The question is to what extent the on-site kampong improvement still has a future.

Hans Versnel (Batavia, 1938) is PhD student at the Utrecht University School of Governance (USG).

Streaming video

You can follow this PhD defence also via streaming video: