Community Initiatives and the Reshaping of Collaborative Planning Practices in Indonesia: The Case of Creative Kampong

As planning is continuously moving into more collaborative-led approaches, the discourses around community involvement in planning practices have been progressing significantly. Community initiatives, in various forms, become the most realisation of community involvement, allowing the community to have more independence to articulate their aspirations and stronger power to negotiate their interests and strategies to the government within collective decision-making processes and consensus-oriented plans. Community initiatives also embrace the community to work with other non-governmental stakeholders to support each other towards certain development initiatives which may have lacked government support. Whilst their emergence in the Western countries have been enormous, community initiatives began to diffuse in the Global South, promoting collaborative planning practices that meet specific potentials and challenges, such as authoritarian governments, socio-cultural diversities, and informal practices in many aspects. There has been limited research discussing the potentials and challenges from the actual processes of how such initiatives reshaped planning practices in neighbourhood areas in the Global South. With attempts to enrich the lack of empirical studies, this thesis provides a research of the community initiatives in neighbourhood areas in Indonesia. The creative kampong initiatives in Indonesia, whereby creatively-themed community initiatives have been encouraged with the view of transforming the neighbourhood, are used as a research window through which to examine the process of how community initiative reshaped planning practice in the neighbourhood areas. Against a backdrop of decentralisation in post-reform Indonesia, the central argument is that such initiatives lead to a gradual transformation of neighbourhood planning, especially from government-led to more collaborative-led practices. In doing this examination, a governance analysis is provided. This approach examines planning practice on its changes within three dimensions, specific episodes, governance processes, and embedded cultures. A case study method, whereby information is collected through in-depth interviews with key stakeholders, documentary review, and resident survey, was used and involved two cases. This thesis concludes that in the unstable power relations, structures, and systems in the neighbourhood areas, social and traditional values which remain acculturated in local community’s organisations, norms, and routines, play a crucial role in determining the shape of collaborative planning practices