Decoding Attempts at Conserving Cultural Heritage: Reading Texts of Semarang and Jakarta Citybooks

As a part of citybook.eu project, the Flemish Dutch House deBuren regularly holds atwo-week program where International authors and photographers resided in various cities. The goal of the program is to encourage these authors and photographs to write stories, essays, and poems about the cities. These writings were then uploaded to citybooks.eu in the forms of webtext, e-book, and 30-minute podcasts. In 2013 and 2015, citybooks about Semarang and Jakarta were published. The texts about these two cities generally discussed the cultural legacy of colonialism. Aiming to show the connection between space and attempts at conserving colonial cultural legacy, this research focuses on how cultural legacy is discussed by various texts in citybooks about Semarang and Jakarta. Aspects of space, issues of identity, and attempts at conserving cultural heritages in the text were analyzed. Based on the findings, it was concluded that Semarang and Jakarta were two cities which adopt different strategies in conserving cultural legacies of the colonial period.     Keywords: citybooks, deBuren, cultural conservation, city portrait, colonial cultural legac