Living in a Hot City: Heat Mitigation in Informal Settlements of Megacity Jakarta

LIVING IN A HOT CITY: HEAT MITIGATION IN INFORMAL SETTLEMENTS OF MEGACITY JAKARTA
 
The rise of Urban Heat Islands (UHI) is harming people across megacities in the world. In Jakarta, the informal settlements are most affected due to the lack of adequate infrastructure to deal with the heat. The heat problem in the informal settlements was primarily exacerbated by overcrowding and a lack of access to cooling infrastructures. In this talk, we observe how residents of the informal settlements take on a cooling practice collectively. Our study is situated in five urban kampongs located in the most populated sub-districts (kelurahan) in Jakarta. Nine months of ethnographic fieldwork were conducted to unpack the residents' endeavor to mitigate the heat problem. To explicate the process and the role of these cooling facilities, we use the notion of social practice comprising three fundamental elements: competence, material, and meaning. “Social practice” aptly characterizes how the residents in each kampong worked together to build cooling places that also function as communal spaces. Our research discovered that despite limited resources and technical competence, each kampong recognized the necessity of communal spaces to maintain their cooling practices. These measures enabled them to engage in cooling practices while building social relationships through chilling outdoors. By demonstrating the capacity of residents in the informal settlements for constructing vernacular forms of cooling infrastructure, this research offers a pluralistic view of heat mitigation in megacities of the Global South.
 
About our speaker: Sulfikar Amir is Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society and a faculty member in Sociology Programme at the School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University. His research interests primarily focus on examining institutional, political, and epistemological dimensions of scientific knowledge and technological systems. He has conducted research on technological nationalism, development and globalisation, nuclear politics, risk and disaster, design studies, city and infrastructure, and resilience. Amir is the author of The Technological State in Indonesia: the Co-constitution of High Technology and Authoritarian Politics (Routledge, 2012), and the editor of The Sociotechnical Constitution of Resilience: A New Perspective on Governing Risk and Disaster (Palgrave, 2018). Aside from being a scholar, Sulfikar Amir is a documentary filmmaker. He has directed and produced three documentary films, all focusing on nuclear issues. The latest one is "Healing Fukushima", which chronicles the role and experiences of medical experts in Fukushima in dealing with radiation hazard in the aftermath of nuclear disasters.
 
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