Hannah Liem

A Course for Jakarta DETOX Culture

Urbanism as a method to manifest circular culture

This project connects a landscape regenerative circular water- and waste strategy to the growth of economic- and educational opportunity for working-class and low income riverside communities in the inner-city villages of Jakarta called ‘Kampungs’. This is not only important for the communities themselves, but also vital for the urban metabolism of Jakarta.  

Jakarta was the most polluted city in the world in 2023, it is sinking, it is prone to floods and has safe water scarcity at the same time. Jakarta is developing at a fast pace, and the government seems to overlook long-term societal and environmental effects of their interventions. My thesis focuses on the most impactful of three large scale developments in Jakarta, namely: the flood mitigation method of inner-city rivers called ‘Normalisation’. Normalisation has many negative effects. Rivers are permanently widened and encased in concrete to increase the flowrate. This causes soil erosion and damages downstream. It destroys the ability of rivers to sustain a regenerative river ecosystem and triggers the degradation of riverside communities, as gentrification follows normalisation. 
This is exemplary for the way other large-scale developments are handled and impact Jakarta, which shows that Jakarta is in a ‘TOXIC’ spiral and is in desperate need to ‘DETOX’ its developments and environment. 

My design aims to DETOX a current normalisation plan in Kampung Melayu. It creates a secondary course to mitigate extreme flood events, stimulates an already existing recycling culture, restores the river’s regenerative capability and doesn’t trigger fast-gentrification by choice of governance, housing typology and limited car accessibility.  

I hope to show that it is possible to battle Jakarta’s many problems through solutions that are Jakarta-style and to course toward a cultural shift.  
It required careful examination of Jakarta’s potential, by understanding people’s behaviour and incentives to act, through desk research, interviews and a month long trip to Indonesia with my dad. It came together in a course that elevates a technocratic solution to become meaningful in people’s lifetimes in multiple ways. It layers all researched potentials and empowers people and organisations, to ultimately integrate DETOX practices into culture through urbanism. 


Graduation date: 28 May 2025
Graduation committee: Jeroen de Willigen (mentor), Pauline van Roosmalen, Jossep Frederick William 
Additional members for the exam: Markus Appenzeller, Herman Zonderland