LIVELIHOOD STRATEGIES IN DEALING WITH THE CHANGE FROM RURAL TO URBAN A Case Study of Ambarawa sub-district, Central Java, Indonesia

Urbanization is done by local government in Indonesia in order to prevent the migration from rural to urban area. This situation affects citizens who live in a region in which a process of it runs. Normally, as also stated by Statistics Indonesia, agricultural sector is a main livelihood in rural area. When a region changes from rural to urban, people, who had a livelihood in agricultural sector, would be affected. This research addresses that situation considering with the main purpose of the local government to develop human resources. The local government tries to increase the well-being of their citizens by developing better infrastructures and facilities. Those developments induced the land use, people or environment. This research focused on people and tried to find the income generation strategies developed, by people who lost their farmland, and the way in getting those strategies using their assets and access. Since this research tried to explain why and how events occurred, it is an explanatory research of ex-farmers who nowadays have a new income generation strategies. This research mainly selective case in Ambarawa because it is one of important region in Central Java Province and in urbanization process. The primary respondents are farmers who lost their farmland and now they do not work as farmers anymore. The key informants are the head of Ambarawa sub-district, government of Semarang Regency and Statistics Indonesia. The DFID Sustainable Livelihood Framework is adopted in order to formulate the theoretical framework of research. Their income generation strategies were found through the way they managed their assets and access they had. They managed their assets in order to adapt with the new situation, which is urbanization, in their region. They converted their assets to others asset that they considered as fitted assets in urban area. They used their access in finding their selecting income generation strategies. Having access gave more possibilities and options for them to find the selecting income generations and try to reach their livelihood goals