The capacity of community-based planning to reduce urban poverty : a case study of Gondolayu Lor in Yogyakarta, Indonesia

• Main Author: Beard, Victoria A.
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: Poverty; Poverty > Indonesia > Case studies; Community planning > Indonesia > Case studies; Planning > Indonesia > Citizen participation
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/9819

The rational comprehensive approach to planning has proven unable to reduce urban poverty due either to the exclusion or to the inappropriate inclusion of indigenous knowledge in planning practice. As an alternative, this dissertation analyzes (1) the capacity of local residents to apply their indigenous, contextual, experience-based knowledge towards the reduction of urban poverty and (2) the processes by which they do so. The research was based on an ethnographic case study of a single, low-income, urban neighborhood, Gondolayu Lor, in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The primary research methods included: 22 months of field observation, 48 in-depth interviews, 44 oral histories, and a census of the 275 households in the case study community. The dissertation found that local residents conceptualized poverty in terms of multifaceted deprivation, and for the purposes of community-based planning, three manifestations of poverty were identified for alleviation: (1) land tenure insecurity, (2) lack of preventive health care, and (3) the inaccessibility of information and reading materials. Through an analysis of community-based planning efforts in these areas, this study uncovered a diverse array of social spaces that provided windows of opportunity as well as obstacles to the community's poverty alleviation efforts. It was concluded that the capacity of indigenous knowledge depends largely on the ability of local residents to navigate these spaces. At times, this required commumty activists to redefine existing spaces, create new spaces, and/or abandon those that were deemed ineffective. It was also found that local residents engaged in community-based planning in a way not previously accounted for in either the inclusion or social mobilization models of citizen participation. This alternative form of citizen participation, referred to as pragmatic empowerment, was incremental in nature, grassroots in origin, yet practical (as opposed to political) in its objectives. In conclusion, the three examples of community-based planning analyzed demonstrate that local residents hold valuable knowledge for alleviating community-level poverty; however, they were unable to address chronic household-level poverty. In terms of implications for practice, this finding led the author to conclude that, in addition to community-based planning, a reliable social safety net must be provided if household-level poverty is to be substantially reduced in the future.