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Geoforum 39 (2008) 1843–1858

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Geoforum
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum

Splintered networks: The colonial and contemporary waters of Jakarta

Michelle Kooy, Karen Bakker *
Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, 1984 West Mall, Room 217, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V6T 1Z2

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: This paper queries the relevance of the ‘splintering urbanism’ thesis to postcolonial cities of the South,
Received 30 May 2007 and responds to calls for the production of a decentered theory of urbanization through a case study
Received in revised form 4 June 2008 of Jakarta. Drawing on archival and interview data, the paper demonstrates that Jakarta has, since its
inception, been characterized by a high degree of differentiation of access to water supply, and of frag-
mentation of water supply networks. We document the origins of this fragmentation in the colonial
Keywords: era, and trace the legacy of the colonial constructions within the postcolonial city. Moreover, we demon-
Water supply
strate that the introduction of private sector management (in 1988) has not significantly disrupted, and
Splintering urbanism
Governmentality
certainly not caused, this pattern. In short, we provide evidence to support our claim that Jakarta’s water
Materiality supply system is ‘splintered’ rather than ‘splintering’, and demonstrate that this phenomenon was not
Infrastructure caused by the rise (or fall) of the ‘modern infrastructural ideal’. In order to explain this sustained frag-
Urbanization mentation of infrastructure and access, the paper develops a conceptual framework of postcolonial gov-
Jakarta ernmentality that emphasizes the interrelationship between materiality, governmentality, identity, and
urbanization, in particular through demonstrating how contested and evolving process of social differen-
tiation are linked to the differentiation of water supply infrastructures and of urban spaces. Although we
are wary of any simplistic comparisons between the colonial past and present, we argue that the optic of
postcolonial governmentality provides a powerful lens for dissecting the power relations that continue to
structure access to water supply and urban space in cities in the South.
Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction clearly increased. In short, we provide evidence to support our

This paper queries the relevance of the ‘splintering urbanism’
hypothesis (Graham and Marvin, 2001) to postcolonial cities of
the South, and responds to calls for the production of a decentered
theory of urbanization in the South through a case study of Jakarta.
Drawing on archival and interview data, the paper demonstrates
that Jakarta has, since its inception, been characterized by a high
degree of fragmentation of access to ‘public’ services, and in partic-
ular water supply. We document the origins of this fragmentation
in the colonial era, and trace the legacy of the colonial construc-
tions of urban water supply and citizenship within the contempo-
rary postcolonial city, demonstrating that the spatial (and social)
fragmentation of supply continue to be systematically inscribed
in the postcolonial development of Jakarta’s water supply system.
Moreover, in analysing the implications of private management of
the city’s water supply system (from 1998 onwards), we note that
neoliberalization has had ambiguous implications for the city’s
poor, and that the degree of differentiation or splintering has not
* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: melank@interchange.ubc.ca (M. Kooy), bakker@geog.ubc.ca,
karen_bakker@yahoo.com (K. Bakker).
URL: http://www.geog.ubc.ca/~bakker (K. Bakker).
claim that Jakarta’s water supply system was not substantially
characterized by the rise (or fall) of the ‘modern infrastructural
ideal’ (which does not, we should emphasize, necessarily obviate
Graham and Marvin’s claim that this ‘ideal’ structured infrastruc-
ture development in other cities, particularly in the North).
How, then, does one explain the sustained, highly unequal dif-
ferentiation of access to water supply in Jakarta? In contrast to
the ‘splintering urbanism’ approach, we employ a concept of post-
colonial governmentality to explore the interrelationships between
urban governance and infrastructure in Jakarta. This conceptual
framework emphasizes the interrelationship between materiality,
governmentality, identity, and urbanization, in particular through
demonstrating how contested and evolving processes of social dif-
ferentiation were linked to the differentiation of water supply
infrastructures and urban spaces. Specifically, we document how
relations of rule were materialized via hydraulic networks through
the projects of colonial government in the late nineteenth and
early 20th century, and through later attempts of postcolonial gov-
ernments to ‘modernize’ selected spaces in the city through the
provision of large-scale water supply projects. These projects were
not, of course, uncontested: in arguing that fragmentation of access
to urban water supply was a product of postcolonial government
projects of differentiation, we are also careful to point to acts of

0016-7185/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2008.07.012
 Author's personal copy
1844 M. Kooy, K. Bakker / Geoforum 39 (2008) 1843–1858
resistance which have contributed to forms of ‘splintering from be-
low’. Although we are wary of any simplistic comparisons between
the colonial past and present, we argue that the optic of postcolo-
nialism provides a powerful lens for dissecting the power relations
which continue to structure access to water supply and urban
space in Jakarta, a dynamic that complicates Northern-rooted nar-
ratives of urban infrastructure, and also the developmentalist nar-
ratives of international aid and multilateral financial organizations
which continue to misread the trajectory of Jakarta’s splintered
development and its implications for the contemporary city.
We begin our story at the moment of the first major colonial
intervention into urban water supply – the construction of a sys-
tem of artesian wells in Dutch Batavia in 1870 – and follow the
development of the urban water supply network through the first
four decades of Indonesian independence. Examining the urban
water infrastructures of the colonial and postcolonial governments
and the accompanying rationalizations and discourses that legiti-
mated these interventions and prevented others, we demonstrate
how an ongoing fragmentation of Jakarta’s water supply accompa-
nied its concurrent (and current) expansion. We explain the oper-
ation of these seemingly contradictory processes as the product of
attempts by both colonial and postcolonial governments to differ-
entiate people by class and by race. In the final part of the paper,
we examine how the layers of colonial and postcolonial ‘rationali-
ties of rule’ necessitating the production of differences between
urban populations, spaces, and waters created successive archipel-
agos (rather than networks) of water supply provision that both
enable and constrain contemporary efforts to universalize potable
water supply networks in the city.
Before beginning the genealogy of water supply in Jakarta, the
paper briefly explores theoretical concepts of postcolonial govern-
mentality and the socio-natural production of urban water. We
discuss how water supply was (and still is) implicated in the dis-
cursive and material production of the city and its citizens. We ar-
gue that the inherently contradictory and contested project of
producing ‘modernized’, liberal, productive, ethical and obedient,
yet racially differentiated colonial citizens within a hygienic and
economic urban environment entailed not only physical rewor-
kings of urban space, but also discursive reworkings of the ratio-
nalities supporting water supply delivery; the associated
classification of ‘types’ of urban citizens, and resistance to these
classifications, was actively translated into differentiated urban
spaces which persist in the contemporary city. This imbrication
of water and constructions of citizenship is, as we argue in the con-
cluding section, a persistent feature of the urbanization of water
supply, and is still visible in the contemporary project of modern-
izing urban spaces and urban citizens according to neoliberal
rationalities.
2. Urbanizing water supply: governmentality, modernity, and
(post)colonialism
Like many ‘megacities’ in the South, Jakarta’s water supply sys-
tem is highly fragmented. The formal water supply system reaches
less than 50% of the city’s inhabitants; extending to mostly higher
income areas of the city, the spatial distribution of the piped water
supply system recalls a scattered ‘archipelago’ rather than a
homogenous network (Bakker, 2003a). The majority of Jakarta’s
residents make use of a variety of highly differentiated sources –
bottled water, vendor water, shallow and deep wells, public hy-
drants, network connections – to meet their daily water needs
(Bakker, 2003b), often relying exclusively on water provided, man-
aged and delivered outside of the network (Bakker, 2007; Surjadi
et al., 1994; McGranahan et al., 2001). Indeed, a significant propor-
tion of households with connections to the networked water sup-
ply system continue to rely primarily upon other sources of water
supply given low water quality and low network pressure.
This fragmentation of access to water supply and sanitation has
been characterized as one of the key development challenges for
the South in the next century. Halving by 2015 the proportion of
people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic
sanitation is one of the targets related to the Millennium Develop-
ment Goals established by the international community.1 The
World Health Organisation estimates that 1.1 billion people world-
wide do not have access to safe drinking water, and 2.4 billion are
without access to adequate sanitation (WHO, 2004). An increasing
proportion of users without access to adequate water supplies live
in urban areas; despite residing in a metropolitan area, poor families
in large cities in the South frequently do not have networked water
supply access.
Various authors have explored why this fragmentation has
emerged, and attempted to explain why has it proved to be so gen-
eralized and persistent in cities in the South (see, for example, Bal-
bo, 1993; Graham and Marvin, 2001; King, 1990). As Graham and
Marvin have argued in Splintering Urbanism, the past two decades
have witnessed a fragmentation of access, control, and pricing of
network infrastructure, including water supply (Graham and Mar-
vin, 2001). This ‘splintering’, Graham and Marvin assert, has oc-
curred along with the restructuring of utility networks in both
the South and the North, embedded in wider changes in aid and
financial flows, technological innovation, social attitudes, and gov-
ernance – particularly the reconfiguration of citizens’ entitlements
in light of newly dominant understandings of the appropriate role
of the state in services provision. The ‘collapse of the integrated
ideal’ in networked utility provision reflects, in other words, a com-
plex admixture of social, economic, and technological changes
which, with local variants, is occurring in cities around the world.
Jakarta, with its toll roads and gated communities, is positioned
alongside other Southern cities as characteristic of a ‘splintered’
urbanism arising from processes of liberalization, privatization,
structural adjustment, and financial speculation. Water supply is
emblematic of the increasingly splintered city, an example of
which is the perverse system of water pricing in Jakarta, as in many
cities in the South, where wealthy consumers connected to the
public network pay substantially lower volumetric rates than poor
urban residents reliant on water vendors; at the height of water
scarcity in the dry season, water vendors may charge prices up
to 50 times higher per unit volume than tap water prices (Bakker,
2003b).
Like much work that questions the relationships between soci-
ety, cities, and infrastructure, Graham and Marvin’s work is rooted
in a Northern context. Their concern with the social and environ-
mental impacts of the ‘collapse of the integrated ideal’ presumes
the existence of modern infrastructural networks with universal,
or at least widespread provision. Although they acknowledge the
differentiation of service provision which characterizes ‘colonial’
cities (which they characterize as ‘spatial apartheid’), their concern
with the interrelationship between splintering infrastructure net-
works and fragmentation of both urban space and social consensus
is based on a narrative which assumes the prevalence of the ‘mod-
ern networked city’ as a generic phase, or stage of urban develop-
ment. Indeed, much of the literature in the field of ‘Science,
Technology and Society’ (STS) and in urban studies which engages
with questions of urban infrastructure is premised upon detailed
case studies of, and intimate familiarity with ‘world cities’ such
1
The eight United Nations Millennium Development Goals were agreed upon at
the UN Millennium Summit (2000). The MDGs set a specific target for water supply:
reducing by half the proportion of individuals without sustainable access to adequate
quantities of affordable and safe water by 2015. See http://www.un.org/millenni-
umgoals/.
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M. Kooy, K. Bakker / Geoforum 39 (2008) 1843–1858
as Los Angeles, New York, and London. The absence of integrated,
universalized networks in cities of the South, such as Jakarta, is
compared with these ‘global cities’ and characterized as an in-
stance of failed or lapsed modernity, in which elites are integrated
into, and the remainder of the population excluded from infra-
structural networks.
This type of approach has been the subject of two sets of cri-
tiques within urban studies and geography. First, recent work in
urban studies and urban geography has critiqued the rather myo-
pic focus of much of the literature on so-called ‘global cities’. In
particular, researchers have highlighted the dangers of extrapolat-
ing theoretical frameworks developed through research on cities
such as London or Los Angeles to other cities, particularly from cit-
ies in the North to those in the South (see, for example, Robinson,
2002, 2006). Robinson argues that analyzing a small range of eco-
nomic and political activities of a small number of cities within the
restrictive frame of the ‘‘global” (while contrasting these to poorly
serviced parts of ‘non-global cities’) fails to account for the diver-
sity of activities within cities, and for the constant repositioning
of global and local links which all cities negotiate (indeed, which
all locales negotiate, as Tsing explores in her ‘global ethnography
of connection’ (Tsing, 2003)). The ‘global cities’ approach, charac-
teristic of much of the urban studies literature, also presumes an
implicit hierarchy, positioning a few key cities as nodes of global
trade and culture above the (inconsequential, impoverished, and
marginal) remainder. In response, Robinson follows Amin and Gra-
ham in calling for a new approach which subverts this hierarchy,
breaks free of the categorizing imperative of the ‘global, developed
city’, and ‘‘embark[s] on a cosmopolitan understanding of ordinary
cities” (Amin and Graham, 1997; Robinson, 2003, p. 549).
The importance of this critique becomes apparent when one en-
gages with the specifics of different cities in different places. Bo-
land’s research on urban water supply networks in China, for
example, is illustrative of the relevance of Robinson’s critique:
whereas water supply systems in socialist China were highly frag-
mented, and differentiated according to socio-economic criteria
(such as workers blocks or units), trends of simultaneous integra-
tion and fragmentation of water supply networks can be observed
in ‘post’-socialist China (Boland, 2007). The systemic fragmenta-
tion of water supply networks in many global cities of the South
– built under a range of ideological regimes – is not sufficiently
acknowledged, nor adequately explained by a ‘splintering urban-
ism’ hypothesis. Moreover, the phenomenon of ‘splintering from
below’, whereby populations excluded from access to the central-
ized network water supply system are also agents in its fragmen-
tation, is excluded from explanations of fragmentation within the
thesis of ‘splintering urbanism’. In contrast, we demonstrate in this
article how splintering may have its origins in phenomena other
than neoliberalism, and may be a constant, rather than a new
development, in cities. In order to analyze this, the historical pro-
duction of water supply networks (which are some of the lon-
gest-lived urban infrastructure, lasting well over 100 years in
some instances) must be taken into account, including an explora-
tion of how current choices may be constrained by historical ac-
tions. The relationship between ideology, governmentality, and
infrastructure is, in other words, iterative and historically contin-
gent – underscoring the importance of Robinson’s call for ‘cosmo-
politan’ analysis.
A second critique of the ‘splintering urbanism’ thesis relates to
the categorization of cities as ‘developed’ versus ‘Third World’
implying an urban norm to which cities such as Jakarta clearly
do not conform. This categorization has been implicitly resusci-
tated, argue scholars like Robinson, within the ‘global cities’ litera-
ture (see also Douglass, 1998). Postcolonial theorists have critiqued
the resulting (often implicit) academic division of labour that allo-
cates the study of certain cities, places and peoples into sub-disci-
1845
plines such as ‘urban geography’ or ‘development geography’
(Power and Sidaway, 2004; Robinson, 2002, 2006) offers a critique
of Euro-American centered forms of theorizing, and calls for the
decentering of the parochial focus of urban geography and urban
studies through a production of urban theory for the South, in
the South. In particular, she asserts the necessity of challenging
the assumed universalism of theoretical claims that are developed
without reference to the range of different cases to which they are
assumed to apply, such as cities in the South. Indeed, recent schol-
arship on specific cities in the South has highlighted the impor-
tance of Robinson’s points (e.g. Boland, 2007; Gandy, 2005, 2006,
2008; Legg, 2006; Loftus, 2007; Nijman, 2006; Swyngedouw,
2004).
Building on these critiques, we argue that the concept of post-
colonial governmentality can help to construct alternative, more
flexible theories of urbanization, which can generate more appro-
priate explanatory frameworks for the fragmentation of urban
water supply networks (and, indeed, many public services and
amenities) in cities in the South. As originally employed by Fou-
cault, the term governmentality refers to a specifically modern
(and Western) form of rationality that emerged in Europe during
the 16th and 17th centuries (Foucault, 1991). The term denotes a
new, diffuse form of power through which an increasingly admin-
istrative, bureaucratic state comes to rely less on physical force and
military might, and more on a new set of savoirs or rationalities
(such as statistics) which enable an unprecedented degree of con-
trol and surveillance over individuals (Barry et al., 1996; Dean,
1999). The twinned concerns of this new form of rationality are
populations and resources; the interrelationship between societies
and environments thereby becomes a central concern of the state.
As developed within the social sciences, the theoretical frame-
work of governmentality is an analytic used to examine the oper-
ations and relations of power (for background see Burchell et al.,
1991). In this framework, power is defined as relational, operating
through both discourse and material practice. Empirically,
employing the concept of governmentality implies a focus on
power (both domination and subordination) as exercised by both
the governors and the governed through both discourses and
practices. In other words, a focus on governmentality calls for
analysis of the interrelationship between actions and knowledge,
and specific attention to the continual process of constructing
knowledges through which ‘subjects’ are governed, and which
they actively resist and reshape. Recent Foucauldian readings of
governmentality and postcolonialism have provided useful in-
sights into the application of this logic of government in colonial
contexts, in which colonialism proceeds in part through the dis-
cursive categorization of differences between European and colo-
nial subjects, the latter requiring both material and psychological
‘civilization’, underwritten by Western science and medicine
(Cooper and Stoler, 1989; Li, 1999; Prakash, 1999; Stoler, 1997).
This focus on colonial contexts provides a useful counterpoint
to Foucauldian readings of urban life focused on the West (e.g.
Joyce, 2003), in part due to their exploration of the limitations
and possibilities of the Foucauldian framework as applied in colo-
nial contexts, leading to a greater emphasis on discursive con-
structions of ethnicity, relations of rule, resistance, and
heterogeneity in subject populations (see, for example, Legg,
2006; Rao, 2006). In addition to emphasizing the heterogeneous
ways in which power bleeds across the social body, the applica-
tion of governmentality within colonial contexts has called atten-
tion to the ways in which the diverse ‘host of finalities’ concerned
with the ‘optimization of all of life’ (Foucault, 1991) inherently re-
sults in both contradictions and compromises to rule in both
Western and colonial contexts (Dean, 2001; Li, 1999; Valverde,
1996). Exploration of the contradictory and contested nature of
governmentality by postcolonial scholars has also usefully
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1846 M. Kooy, K. Bakker / Geoforum 39 (2008) 1843–1858
corrected earlier readings of governmentality in the West as com-
plete and totalizing projects (Li, 2007; O’Malley, 1996; Thomas,
1994).
Geographers and cognate disciplines have emphasized the
material as well as discursive dimensions of governmentality, in
which relations of power are inscribed in physical space and in
ecological processes as well as socio-economic relations (Kaika,
2005; Swyngedouw, 2004; see also Agarwal, 2005; Braun, 2000;
Scott, 1998). In the case of urban water, the social relations of
urbanization both shape and are in turn shaped by highly differ-
entiated circuits of water which flow within the city (such as pol-
luted rivers and canals for marginalized, migrant or ‘illegal’ urban
populations, which overlap both as supply and effluent with the
piped water supply for the affluent). As water supply infrastruc-
ture is long-lived these circuits and networks simultaneously em-
body successive ‘relations of rule’, through the patterns of water
supply infrastructure and water use practices they both enable
and disable. As such, the analytic of postcolonial governmentality
allows for an understanding of urban water supply as a historical
product. For example, patterns of urban water supply in
contemporary Jakarta remain influenced by the rationalities of
colonial government (colonial governmentality), while contin-
uing to undergo transformation through the postcolonial period.
The optic of governmentality thus allows us to acknowledge the
continued influence of colonial government rationalities within
the contemporary city, while giving equal attention to the strate-
gies of postcolonial governments. Indeed, it is only through trac-
ing the ways in which the colonial rationalities guiding the
construction of the original infrastructure have been incorporated
into postcolonial governmentalities that the ‘splintering urban-
ism’ identified by Graham and Marvin can be seen not as a recent,
neoliberal phenomenon, but rather as a pervasive, persistent
rationality of rule governing the production of urban water in
Jakarta.
In the following sections of the paper, we deploy this analytic of
postcolonial governmentality to highlight how these relations are
mobilized within particular systems of rule, enacting specific ef-
fects upon the production of infrastructure networks, urban space,
and identity. In particular, acknowledging Jakarta’s urban water as
the physical and discursive product of socio-cultural, political eco-
nomic, and ecological relations of power, we illustrate how rela-
tions around urban water in Jakarta are both a product, and
productive of a system of contested (post)colonial authority that
was based upon creating and reinforcing divisions of class and
race.2 The production of differences between urban populations
and urban spaces through the shaping of urban water flows – both
within and beyond networks – is the focus of our case study, to
which the paper now turns.
3. Colonial control: governing urban water, urban populations,
urban spaces
We begin our history of Batavia’s urban water infrastructure in
the colonial period, when a new relationship between water, secu-
rity, and health led to the development of a new discourse around
water, identity and citizenship that was both produced by and pro-
ductive of an emerging system of colonial authority. The chronol-
ogy then continues through to the development of a modern
urban water supply in Batavia. Through this chronology, we dem-
onstrate the interrelationship between the construction of differ-
ent types of technology and the construction and classification of
2
Although gender and religion were also categories discursively produced through
colonial and postcolonial governmentalization, these markers of difference are less
salient to networked water supply than class and race, and so are not examined in this
paper.
urban subjects. Moreover, we explore how the strategies of gov-
ernment of these subjects intersected with changing understand-
ings of the cleanliness of urban water, the identity of (racialized)
citizens (e.g. ‘primitive’ versus ‘civilized’) and its relationship to
hygiene and urban space. Governing water, in other words, implied
and enabled new categorizations and divisions: most importantly,
the delineation of the urban population into different categories
(European versus native; hygienic versus contaminated), which
guided the pattern of provision of successive urban water supply
systems. These divisions were fostered by (and reinforced) an
emerging realignment of colonial and postcolonial hierarchies,
whereby authority became located within one’s identity as a mod-
ern, hygienic citizen – a class of citizenship that both conferred
one’s rights to the networked water supply system, and then reaf-
firmed this and other entitlements through the lifestyle, and asso-
ciation with health and progress which plentiful piped water was
presumed to enable.
3.1. Artesian water supply: 1870–1910s
The problematic of urban waters and the ‘sanitary city’ plagued
the colonial town of Batavia from its founding in 1619. High rates
of mortality in the 1700s that demoted Batavia from the ‘Queen’ to
the ‘Graveyard of the East’ were the result of waterborne disease
(Abeyasekere, 1985). However, prior to the 19th century there
were no direct links made between the health of body and con-
sumption of a standardized quality of clean water, and concerns
regarding the health of the city and its citizens focused more gen-
erally on the urban environment’s ‘killing vapours’, and ‘miasmas’
(Blusse, 1985). Flight from the urban spaces and urban populations
characterized by death and disease was the only solution, and
European residents repeatedly tried to escape the urban ziektenh-
aard (breeding ground for disease) by physically relocating away
from the urban core. It was not until the mid-1800s that connec-
tions began to be made between healthy urban spaces, popula-
tions, and water supply (see Moens Bernelot, 1873), motivating
the first significant intervention into the production of a discur-
sively delineated ‘hygienic’ water supply, and marking the begin-
ning of our genealogy.
In 1873, following the conclusion of various special council
meetings and the formation of commissions to look into the prob-
lem of water supply for Batavia, the central government (repre-
sented by the Council of the Indies in Holland) financed the
construction of a series of artesian wells, supplying the approxi-
mately 8000 European residents with a water supply free of cost,
delivered through a number of architecturally elaborate communal
hydrants (eerily reminiscent of contemporary hydrants; see Figs. 1
and 2) (Afdeeling Waterstaat, 1880). From 1873 to 1876 seven
wells were drilled, and initial production capacity was gradually
expanded so that by 1920, at the end of the era of artesian water,
there were 28 wells and 12 reservoirs with a capacity of 750 m3
available for public use (Maronier, 1929). Developing along with
the size and population of the city, the artesian water supply sys-
tem represented the ‘first steps’ of the city and its (European) res-
idents into a more modern colonial era. It was not until 40 years
later, 1910–1920, following an influx of a European middle-class
colonial immigrants, that Batavia ‘outgrew’ the technological capa-
bilities of the artesian water supply, with demands for increased
quantity (pressure), and quality.
We argue that the new mentality of colonial government that
arose in the late 1800s was central to the ways in which ‘problems’
of water supply in Batavia were framed as pressing concerns. The
quality of water in the city had been periodically raised as an issue
for over 200 years (Moens Bernelot, 1873); why now did the colo-
nial government identify the city’s water supply – for the first time
– as a problem of ‘government’? The introduction of a new ‘Liberal
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M. Kooy, K. Bakker / Geoforum 39 (2008) 1843–1858 1847

Fig. 1. Water vendors in Batavia filling gas jerrycans with artesian water from a public hydrant (1918) (source: Drost, 1918).

Fig. 2. Water vendor in North Jakarta filling ‘pikuls’ of water from a public hydrant (2005) (photograph: M. Kooy).

Policy’ of market capitalism by the Dutch colonial government in
1870, and the new type of European colonial resident this policy
introduced provides some explanation to the sudden problemati-
zation of the city’s waters as a concern of government, and the
swift construction of the city’s first urban water supply infrastruc-
ture. In abandoning the previous cultuur system3 monopoly (Robi-
son, 1986) the new purpose of the colonial government was to
encourage the increased participation of the private sector, while
maintaining the legitimacy of a system of colonial rule that enabled
3
From 1840 to 1870 the Dutch colonial government imposed the ‘cultivation
system’, a form of monopoly capitalism whereby 1/5th of all plantation land on Java
and other colonial territory was obliged to be planted with products under the direct
supervision of the colonial government.
profits to European investors. The new role of the government in
providing the conditions for capital was reflected in the building of
railways, harbours, steam-powered trams for intra-city transport,
and electricity networks (from 1870 to 1890s, see Mrazek, 2002).
In parallel, the legitimization of colonial authority required the cre-
ation of a modern, hygienic city that would both physically and dis-
cursively maintain the rationality of a racialized hierarchy of
government. From 1870 onwards, the influx of new kinds of Euro-
pean bodies, and the maintenance of colonial authority required
new kinds of urban spaces that would support new relations be-
tween urban populations, who throughout the 1800s had been char-
acterized by a racially mixed ‘Indische’ colonial society whose
hierarchy was built upon socio-economic class rather than race (Mi-
lone, 1967; Taylor, 1983).
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1848 M. Kooy, K. Bakker / Geoforum 39 (2008) 1843–1858
Contributing to the government’s concern over establishing a
new kind of colonial city – one that would support the influx of a
new kind of middle-class European resident, transform the existing
‘European’ residents, and secure investments for European capital –
was a new scientific understanding of water. Emerging in the mid-
19th century, developments like the microscope, and the study of
bacteria began to change the ways in which water was viewed, alter-
ing the ways in which people evaluated properties of water, its qual-
ity, its risk to the human body, and the basis for technological
interventions which would then ‘control’ for quantity and quality.
The standardization of a biophysical definition of water – its proper-
ties and potentials – and its proven connections to human health
thus initiated the development of new discourses around ‘safe’
water supply sources, and identified new water practices as manda-
tory for citizens of the ‘modern’ age. In the Netherlands East Indies,
an increasing uniformity of taste and understandings of quality
was fostered by analyses of drinking water quality by military doc-
tors (Moens Bernelot, 1873). Amongst the colonizers, previous
appreciations for the distinct qualities of different waters (with spe-
cific properties of water linked to treatment of specific ailments, or
religious rituals, see Hamlin, 2000) were deemed detrimental to a
system of government premised upon racial superiority, and what
became classified as ‘uncivilized habits’ (Moens Bernelot, 1873)
were to be replaced by a more unified understanding of water as de-
fined by a ‘scientific’ analysis of its biophysical properties.
The shift from recognizing ‘many waters’ of various beneficial
properties, to only one scientifically defined ‘nature’ for water with
its quality determined negatively (i.e. by what it did not contain)
precipitated the development of centralized systems of water sup-
ply throughout the world (see Melosi, 2000). Within the Nether-
lands Indies this new understanding of water also circulated a
new discourse around ‘modern’ identities and ‘development’ that
rationalized a more emphatically racialized system of colonial
authority,4 and inscribed new divisions between urban waters,
spaces, and populations. As ‘‘science was giving completely different
insights concerning hygienic requirements” (Maronier, 1929, p. 230),
the distancing of the European population from surface water both
spatially (proximity of residences) and bio-physically (replacing sur-
face water use with the treated groundwater from artesian wells)
became an indication of their modernity; scientific understandings
of water quality now defined the city’s surface waters as contami-
nated, while well water (given adequate treatment) became ‘more
pure’, and thus classified as a more suitable source of water supply
for the ‘civilized’ European resident who was guided to ‘take more
care’ in the selection of their drinking water (Bleekrode, 1865; Maier,
1868; Moens Bernelot, 1873). In contrast to the coding of treated
artesian water as civilized and scientific, the use of surface water
was relegated to the past – an example of a ‘primitive’ behaviour.
Therefore, as native residents remained reliant upon surface water
for all of their water needs (Argo, 1999; Wertheim, 1956), and native
settlements within the expanding European areas of Batavia re-
mained crowded along riverbanks, they provided convenient, and
necessary, visual evidence of their undeveloped habits (Van Breen,
1916; Vervoort, 1926). As recounted by colonial historians, native
populations continued in a mode of living characteristic of the past,
emblematized by their ‘traditional’ understandings and unhygienic
habits of use of untreated and contaminated water sources; natives
were seen as both spatially and temporally removed from the areas
of modern, hygienic, European settlements (see Moens Bernelot,
1873; Maronier, 1929).
The division of urban spaces and populations according to this
system of racialized modernity was incorporated into the water
4
See Li (2007) for a discussion of the increasing racialization of rule in Netherlands
Indies over the 1700–1900s.
supply infrastructure of the late 19th century. Intended only to
provide for a ‘modern’ European population who cared (or who
were to be taught to care) for a scientifically defined quality of
drinking water, the artesian hydrants were located only within
the newly concentrated European settlements (Van Raay, 1915).
Needing first to reform and modernize the habits of European res-
idents, access to clean water through public infrastructure was not
extended to native populations until four decades after its original
installation (1910–1920), when the inauguration of new colonial
government policy turned its attention to the development of na-
tive residents (see Cote, 2002). This original and initial fragmenta-
tion between populations, urban space, and water supply
continued along with the gradual development of the city’s arte-
sian water supply network. Throughout 1870–1920, the increasing
‘advancement’ of European urban residents was embodied by their
continuing transition to superior technological systems of supply,
treatment, and distribution. Following the construction of the ser-
ies of stand-alone artesian wells and reservoirs where water was
filtered, aerated, and treated to uniform quality, from 1890s to
1920, European households developed small piped networks
around the reservoirs, creating ”spider-web” like concentrations
of piped systems within European neighbourhoods that allowed
water to be piped directly into the home (Maronier, 1929). In con-
trast, throughout these same years, native residents remained reli-
ant upon the numerous rivers and channels running through the
city, continuing to select water sources, and corresponding type
of use, according to the ‘traditional’ properties of colour, taste,
and smell (Van Breen, 1916). Thus, river water, and traditional
treatments and tastes were coded as native; artesian water, piped
technologies, and scientifically informed preferences were coded
as European. This coding of urban water sources and technologies
supported the colonial government’s authority – and rationalized
its decision to provide for only Europeans.
Given the colonial government’s decision to provide for only
European residents, the continued use, and preference, of un-
treated surface water by native populations for drinking, bathing,
and washing was interpreted to reinforce the superiority and ad-
vanced knowledge of the European population and led to the pro-
duction of a discourse linking ‘undeveloped’ native bodies with
surface water, disease, and contamination. Although left with no
practical alternatives, the fact that ‘‘natives take pleasure bathing,
washing and defecating in streaming water” demonstrated ‘‘their
insensitivity to cleanliness and order” (Van Leeuwen, 1920, p.
198), and the recorded distaste of the native population for arte-
sian water (Van Breen, 1916) – a water supply that required tech-
nologies to aerate and cool after it was pumped – was used to
affirm their evident lack of modernity, and their status of non-cit-
izens within a modernizing urban landscape. Rationalizing the
government’s differentiation between urban waters for different
urban populations, the native population remained reliant upon
the ‘traditional’ and ‘unscientific’ properties of water (colour, clar-
ity, taste, and smell) to determine its quality, whereas a ‘modern’
citizen (a member of the ‘public’ for whom the artesian water sup-
ply system was intended to serve) was defined as one who saw
water through a microscope, one who possessed a scientific ratio-
nality and hence came to appropriately ‘value’ a clean water sup-
ply. In contrast, and conveniently re-rationalizing the racialized
colonial hierarchy for a more Liberal era of rule, those who demon-
strated ignorance of science and a lack of concern for the health of
their bodies by continuing their habits of using untreated surface
water were not yet considered citizens of the modernizing colonial
state.
Of course, in the first decades of the 20th century, a status of
non-citizenship within the colonial city was not a wholly undesir-
able status for native residents. In the Netherlands Indies (as well
as in other colonies) natives often preferred to evade the increasing
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M. Kooy, K. Bakker / Geoforum 39 (2008) 1843–1858
number of municipal authorities and regulations around hygiene
(see Cobban, 1988; Karsten, 1958; Yeoh, 1996). Despite the classi-
fication of artesian water as ‘superior’ by the colonial government,
from the perspective of the ‘unscientific’ native residents (and in-
deed many European residents as well), water from flowing
sources remained highly preferable. Indeed, artesian water, given
its ‘blood warm’ temperature, yellow colour and sulphurous gas
odour, required extensive treatment to become palatable even to
European residents (Maronier, 1929; Van Leeuwen, 1917).
3.2. Hydraulic modernity: the development of the spring water
network (1910s–1945)
The second colonial intervention into urban water supply
emerged after the adoption of a new mentality of ‘Ethical’ govern-
ment by the Dutch authorities in 1901, and concluded with the
construction of a new water supply system delivering mountain
spring water through 53 km of iron pipe into the city’s piped distri-
bution network. Seeking to address the increasing anti-colonial cri-
tiques calling for a more ‘ethical, and humane’ government of the
East Indies (Gouda, 1995), the 1901 ‘Ethical Policy’ laid out inten-
tions for new relations between the population and the state.
The state repositioned itself as a parental ‘caretaker’ of the native
population, still authoritarian in nature, but now with the ‘devel-
opment’ of the native population into modern, self-productive cit-
izens at the heart of its policies. The new priorities, purposes, and
political strategies of government were embedded in the changing
rationalities around urban water supply. A central contradiction
embedded within the city’s new piped water supply system was
the need to modernize the native population while affirming the
superior modernity of the European rulers. These contradictory ‘di-
verse finalities’ of the colonial government were reflected in the
selection of different technologies of provision used to supply dif-
ferent kinds of urban populations with different quantities and
qualities of water at different cost prices.
The transition between the ‘inadequate and antiquated’ artesian
water supply system and a modern, centralized, high pressure,
spring water supply network took the better part of two decades
(1900–1920). Colonial chroniclers gloss over the protracted debates
between the relative costs and benefits of the two technological sys-
tems (pumped and treated artesian water versus piped mountain
spring water), and describe the technological shift as an inevitable
achievement and a notable ‘break’ with the past eras of water sup-
ply, despite the fact that it was built within the existing piped distri-
bution network of the artesian predecessor (see Maronier, 1929;
Eggink, 1930). Intended as a powerful symbol of a more ‘Ethical’
colonial government, the modern spring water supply system
promised the achievement of the elusive goal of development.
Water production capacity increased to over 350 L/s, reservoir size
grew from 780 m3 to 20,000 m3, the city network was extended
by over 150 km (Smitt, 1922), and best of all – the water from the
pipes could be used ‘straight out of the tap’ without need for purifi-
cation, or cooling, as was the case for artesian water. The planned
provision of 90% of European households with a supply of 140 L/ca-
pita/day (Van Breen, 1916) enabled a new kind of life, ‘‘imparting to
the Batavia house a more European character. . .as most bathrooms
have nowadays a shower from which the fresh water from the tap
may be showered over the body” (Batavia, 1937, p. 70). Based upon
scientific knowledge, demonstrating technological mastery, and
facilitating a modern urban lifestyle, the spring water network sym-
bolized the emergence of a new colonial government, and solidified
the visual modernity of the now securely racially ‘European’ urban
citizen, whose domestic practices and ‘urban identity’ came to mir-
ror middle-class urban lifestyles in the metropole (Van Doorne,
1983; Mrazek, 2002).
1849
Further contradictions beset the project of colonial governmen-
tality. Although the spring water supply network was planned,
built, and operated to optimize water supply to European resi-
dents, the infrastructure was rationalized as necessary for the ‘lift-
ing up’ of the native population. Despite the persistent inequities of
access throughout the operation of the spring water network sup-
ply system, it was the project of modernizing the native popula-
tion, and the need to ‘urbanize’ their traditional habits around
water not considered conducive to the modern city, that provided
the major justification for the construction of a spring water net-
work. The high cost of developing the system meant that financing
the spring water supply system alone was impossible for the mu-
nicipal government (Van Breen, 1916). The rhetoric of ‘developing’
the native population, due to the pressing need to intervene in
‘problematic’ native urban spaces rife with contagious diseases,
was deployed as a strategy to convince the Dutch central govern-
ment to provide capital subsidies.5 After all, if it was ‘‘the intention
of the Municipality to keep the population out of the kali’s [canals]”,
there would naturally have to be an alternative supply provided – a
hygienic supply would have to be ‘‘more easily placed under every-
one’s reach” (Van Raay, 1915, p. 142). Public health professionals be-
lieved that ‘‘the first requirement for improving kampong conditions
is seen as the adequate supply of good drinking water. . .adequate
supply is important because every necessary reduction [in supply
for natives] can lead to the use of suspect water.” (Gomperts,
1916, p. 11), and so the original (1898) plans for the spring water
network which intended supply to only European (profitable) areas
of the city were revised to encourage the central government’s finan-
cial endorsement, and the cost calculations increased from 8.5 mil-
lion guilders to 10 million guilders in order to extend the supply
into kampongs (Van Leeuwen, 1917).6 The involvement of the cen-
tral government in subsidizing municipal public works to address
increasing public health problems in the kampongs was also a pat-
tern seen in the other major colonial cities – Semarang and Surabaya
(Cobban, 1974; Dick, 2003).
Having been identified as a crucial strategy for securing public
health, and an important component of government’s mandate to
develop a modern, productive, and efficient native population,
the spring water supply to native communities was at first pro-
vided free of charge from public hydrants (1922–1926). However,
as the financial health of the newly established municipal water
supply company (1918) became strained by the high costs of con-
struction of the spring water pipeline (as predicted by original
detractors of this water supply system, see Van Leeuwen, 1917),
the colonial government tried to reconcile the contradictions be-
tween their twin goals of profit and development. Justifying a
new system of paid water supply within the kampongs, the gov-
ernment linked the improvement in the economic efficiency of
the city’s water supply company with improvements in native
character. Specifically, water that was paid for would ‘‘gain more
value in the eyes of the population so that it is no longer wasted
in despicable ways.” (Brandenburg, 1924, p. 153), and so charging
native residents money for clean drinking water supply was sup-
posed to encourage their development into more economically
efficient, and rational, users. Establishing a system of paid delivery
that allowed formally appointed native water vendors to sell water
5
The central government financed 7 million out of the total 9 million guilders
required to build the spring water supply system (Eggink, 1930).
6
Designs for the spring water network system were first drafted in 1898, when a
private sector consortium approached the government for permission to operate a
private, for profit supply system to European residents. These original designs were
then used in the second set of designs drafted in 1912 (by the original engineer who
made the plans for the private sector operation), but soon amended to include all
urban residents within its distribution system – native and Europeans, partly upon
the argument that this would make the project more attractive to the central
government, whose financial support was crucial (see Van Raay, 1915).
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1850 M. Kooy, K. Bakker / Geoforum 39 (2008) 1843–1858
taken from the public hydrants at a determined profit margin (Eg-
gink, 1930), the introduction of new economic regulations around
water supply was supposed to circulate a new understanding of
water, and its economic value – a key aspect of a modern mentality
– amongst the kampong population.
Explicitly identified as a transitional technology necessary for
the program of developing the native population, the public hy-
drants combined with a paid water system both embodied and fur-
ther enabled the strategies of colonial government. First, the
hydrants were intrinsically associated with an early stage of devel-
opment; the European population with their modern lifestyles and
privatized domestic habits had ‘grown out’ of the hydrants, and
now literally passed them down to the native population who were
still lower in the hierarchy of development. The extension of spring
water supply to native areas of the city through hydrants did not
occur until after piped network had made this infrastructure
redundant for European areas of the city; only in 1925 could the
public hydrants be transferred from European areas (now con-
nected to the piped network) to native neighbourhoods (Eggink,
1930).
Secondly, although native residents were also supposed to
eventually ‘grow out of’ this technology, their development into
modern – and independent – citizens was not intended by the
colonial government to occur too rapidly. The guidance of the colo-
nial government, and the justification for its continued presence,
was predicted as necessary for many decades to come. Hence,
the differences between native and European populations needed
to remain visible, and the anxiety over sustaining the colonial hier-
archy enforced particular patterns of water provision, accom-
plished through perverse policies of public hydrant pricing.
While contradictory to the ‘Ethical Policy’, the system of paid water
delivery in the kampongs effectively charged more than twice the
per unit cost paid by European residents with a house connection7;
this both guaranteed the continued reliance of native residents on
‘unsafe’, ‘contaminated’ water for washing and bathing, and guaran-
teed a relatively low ‘calculated need’ for the native population, leav-
ing the vast remainder for European residential consumption. It was
based upon the rationality that ‘natives had less need’ for piped
water because of their primitive habits of using a combination of dif-
ferent water sources (Gomperts, 1916), that the design of the spring
water network planned for 140 L/day to be distributed to 90% of the
European households in Batavia, in contrast to an ‘expected’ delivery
of only 65 L/capita/day to only 33% of the native population (Van
Breen, 1916, 1919). Indeed, as the vast majority of piped water from
the spring water network went (as designed) to those with house
connections (Europeans), the public hydrant users were forced to
maintain their economically efficient, traditional habits. As noted
by colonial engineers, following the establishment of the system of
paid water delivery in the kampongs, the use of piped water by na-
tive residents decreased dramatically (see Eggink, 1930). And,
although these new pricing policies, and the reversion of water use
habits they enforced by financial necessity, was at first resisted by
a native population resentful of having to pay for water, the tamper-
ing with meters and acts of what colonial authorities termed ‘van-
dalism’ (Maronier, 1929) were able to be controlled. Colonial
control over the piped water supply infrastructure was presumably
aided by the relatively low numbers of hydrants and low density
of network pipes concentrated in the native areas of the city, a situ-
ation unlike the current inability of authorities to control the wide-
7
Native water vendors were charged the same volumetric costs for water as
‘connected’ households (30 cents/m3), and – being allowed to sell the water at a
determined profit margin – meant that native households who used vendors paid
60 cents/m3 (approximately 1 cent for 18 L) – two times the price paid by those with
household connections (Heetjans, 1923).
spread illegal connections endemic within the contemporary city
(JWSRB, 2007).
Differences between urban populations and the urban spaces
they occupied were also ironically reinforced by the extension of
the piped network into a few native neighbourhoods (the ones
adjacent to European areas, and in coveted central areas of the
city), as it facilitated the desired emptying out of the poorer native
population from the city center.8 A program of subsidized piped
water connections for select native neighbourhoods ran from 1926
to 1929, but this upgrade was ‘‘completely western oriented”, and
the water supply services ‘‘reached far higher and therefore far
above the modest environment of the kampong” (Van der Wetering,
1939, p. 308). The infrastructure upgrades dramatically increased
the land values and rents charged by landlords, so that the improve-
ments made to the kampong areas adjacent to European areas, and
in the desirable central areas of the city resulted in poorer families
moving to the outskirts of the city, or to more undesirable ‘unim-
proved’ kampongs which lacked even access to public hydrants.
The changing demographic composition of these ‘improved areas’
– into middle-class housing areas for the small emerging class of
‘modern’ natives and the middle-class racially mixed Eurasians
(Abeyasekere, 1989) – embodied the conflicts contained within colo-
nial policy: the ‘raising up’ of a relatively small percentage of the
Indonesian population entailed creating new divisions of urban pop-
ulations, spaces, and access to services, along the new colonial hier-
archy of ‘modernization’. Instead of encouraging native residents to
increase their use of clean water by increasing access (accomplished
by increasing the number of public hydrants, and decreasing the
price per unit volume), the colonial government managed to limit
access to water supply by the minority of ‘elevated’ native residents.
The vast majority of ‘undeveloped’ native residents still reliant upon
day labour and low-paying wages remained in the unserviced areas
of the city, or moved outside of the municipal boundaries altogether.
While the colonial government rationalized this urban development
according to its discourse of modernity – in reality, they ensured that
access to water supply would remain partly racialized – admitting a
few ‘modern’ native residents into the ‘modern’ areas of the city
while excluding the majority.
Urban water supply in the last decades of the colonial govern-
ment’s Ethical Period embodied the inherent conflicts within this
colonial rationality: the mandate to uplift versus desire to domi-
nate; and the project to modernize but yet retain distinctions
and hierarchal relations between authority and subject. These con-
tradictions provide a partial explanation for how the construction
of the first centralized water supply system intended for eventual
universal coverage facilitated new fragmentations of populations
and urban spaces. In 1929, the European population, comprising
only 7% of the population, consumed 78% of the residential urban
supply,9 this pattern of consumption aided by the fact that by
1930 100% of European residents had access to piped water through
household connections to the network, while only an estimated 5%
of the Eurasian (mixed) and native population had similar access
(Maronier, 1929). This persistent correlation of access to piped water
with identity and colonial authority – despite over 30 years of ‘eth-
ical policy’ – is, we argue, the product of a system of rule that worked
to centralize and modernize water supply, populations and urban
spaces, while maintaining and reinforcing key class and racial divi-
sions between Batavian residents.
8
This spatial trend of urbanization and modernization was a pattern that went
beyond Batavia, as Dick (2003) notes the same processes occurring within the colonial
city of Surabaya – where programs of ‘kampong improvement’ also conflicted with
the need for European housing and commerce.
9
In 1929, 6926 kampong households were supplied with 24 L/s, while 10,392
European households were supplied with 84 L/s. The European population in Batavia
in 1930 was 37,067, while the native Indonesian population was over 400,000
(Eggink, 1930).
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M. Kooy, K. Bakker / Geoforum 39 (2008) 1843–1858
4. Postcolonial transformations: urban water for the ‘ideal’
citizens of an independent nation
4.1. Modernist monuments: postcolonial water treatment plants
(1950s–1965)
The next significant moment in the history of the city’s water
supply infrastructure came after independence, with the construc-
tion of the first large-scale water treatment plants. In 1952, follow-
ing the post World War II victory over Dutch forces, plans for the
construction of two large-scale water treatment plants (Pejompon-
gan I & II) were drawn up. Like the previous eras of urban water
infrastructure, the large-scale water treatment plants were indica-
tive of new relations of rule; a new kind of urban water supply was
produced to flow through the new citizens and spaces of the post-
colonial city. The transition from colonial water supply technolo-
gies – which had secured ‘pure’ mountain spring water and
transported it through 53 km of enclosed pipes – to the postcolo-
nial served to both provide a larger volume of water for the grow-
ing population, but also represented the rescuing of surface waters
(and their users) from the past and their connotations with con-
tamination by treating them through Western technologies,10 rein-
forcing the transformation of colonial Batavia into independent
Jakarta.11 By 1957, the large-scale surface water treatment plant
Pejompongan I was operational, adding 2000 L/s of treated river
water to the network; Pejompongan II (completed in the mid-
1960s) later added another 1000 L/s (PAM Jaya, 1992a).
However, just as the new surface water supply continued to be
distributed through the colonial piped network, the discourse
embedded within previous layers of urban water infrastructure
continued to guide postcolonial patterns of supply. The newly
modernized surface water supply network was still limited to the
now symbolically modern spaces and citizens of President Suk-
arno’s Jakarta.12 While the total volume of water produced for the
city more than tripled, the distribution networks inherited from
the colonial era remained limited to colonial garden residential
areas, which became occupied by the postcolonial elites. Except for
minor exceptions highlighted below, the investment made into in-
creased production capacity did nothing to address the spatial ineq-
uities of distribution. In short, urban water supply in postcolonial
Jakarta came to re-inscribe colonial patterns of provision within
the postcolonial city.
In the beginning, government investment to increase the capac-
ity of urban water supply by 3000 L/s could have been envisioned
as one of the first steps of a new nation towards the ‘democratiza-
tion’ of urban water. As a result of the damage to the colonial water
infrastructure during the war, the existing system was incapable of
meeting water demands from the rapidly growing population of Ja-
karta, as refugees and new immigrants came to the city in large
numbers. The production of a new source of water to increase
the volume of supply could be interpreted as the first effort of an
Indonesian government to serve its newly emancipated citizens,
simultaneously reclaiming public water, key industries and land
from the colonial owners and its corporations (see Robison,
1986). However, this was not the case; the postcolonial centralized
water supply network was important for its symbolic significance
within a modern Jakarta, rather than its ability to provide the pub-
10
The first large-scale water treatment plants were built by the French water
company, Degremont (PAM Jaya, 1992a).
11
The spring water source did continue to contribute a small portion of the city’s
water supply up until 1994; in 1957, after the completion of Pejompongan I the
colonial spring water supply would have provided between 15% and 30% of the total
production capacity (see PAM Jaya, 1992a for details on water production capacity
over the years).
12
See Leclerc (1993) for a discussion of the politics of Sukarno’s production of urban
space.
1851
lic, and networked water remained limited to certain modernized
areas of Sukarno’s monumental Jakarta. The first postcolonial
investments into the city’s urban water supply reflected Sukarno’s
vision, whereby national greatness would be expressed through
the highly visible, symbolic physical transformation of Jakarta
(Geertz, 1963; MacDonald, 1995). Although not often recognized
as a component of this political program, the geographical location
of the water treatment plants, and the spatialization of networked
water supply that they enabled demonstrate their material and
discursive functions in this new rationality of rule, and reveal the
mechanism by which colonial patterns of supply were inscribed
within the postcolonial city.
By examining the spatial relations between the urban water
infrastructures and the other ‘monumental’ structures of the city
beautiful movement, the significance of the water supply infra-
structure to the project of an internationally modern Jakarta be-
comes visible in a way that its subterranean presence usually
obscures. With the location of the water treatment plants within
the center of the ‘representative’ modern spaces of Sukarno’s Jakar-
ta (Fig. 3) the piped network mirrors the above ground highways
and flyovers built to connect the modern elements of the city, posi-
tioned to channel the increased flows of water to follow the new
flows of international traffic into modern areas of the city, while
simultaneously excluding the vast majority of ‘unmodern’ spaces
and populations thought to ‘lower the status of the nation’ (Abey-
asekere, 1989), from both spatial proximity to, and services from,
the network.13 The significance of the new urban water infrastruc-
ture to the image of the nation was such that the central government
provided all of the money for the construction of Pejompongan I,14
the argument given that Jakarta’s water supply was part of a national
project (PAM Jaya, 1992b). With people from ‘all corners’ coming to
Jakarta (PAM Jaya, 1992b), investments into a centralized water net-
work serving the international centers of the city served the function
of demonstrating a modern nation to the visitors; Jakarta was a
‘‘modern city, with modern ways and urban conveniences” that
(for some) drew the intended comparisons to other world cities,
such as Paris (Van der Kroef, 1954, p. 157, as cited in Kusno,
2000). Supporting the Asian Games complex, Indonesia’s first inter-
national standard hotel (Hotel Indonesia), the high rise development
along Jalan Thamrin-Sudirman, and the new upper-class satellite
city of Kebayoran Baru, the network water supply helped to brighten
the ‘beacon of Jakarta’ as it projected Indonesia upon the world stage
(Kusno, 1997).
The limited provision of piped water outside of this symboli-
cally modern space in the center of the city was therefore not a fail-
ure of the government to invest in public infrastructure, but rather
an integral part of its political strategy. As with the rest of the city’s
monuments that were planned to ‘‘subsume the sober realities of
life in Jakarta” (Kusno, 2000), the investments of the first postcolo-
nial government into Jakarta’s urban water supply were intended
to remind the nation (and Jakarta’s residents) not of what they cur-
rently were, but the kind of identity and urban lifestyles that they
should aspire to. In light of this ‘nationalist’ discourse circulating
through urban water supply, the fact that the majority of the urban
population could not afford to connect to the network, or could not
afford to use the water even if they were connected to the network
13
The construction of the Asian Games complex and adjacent inner-city thorough
fare involved the removal of 47,000 kampong residents, moving them out of the
central areas of the city needed for these modernist monuments and relegating them
to the periphery (Abeyasekere, 1989), where, as seen on the map, the water network
did not yet extend. After the construction of Pejompongan I piped water is reported to
be available to only 12% of Jakarta’s population (Fischer, 1959).
14
The central government later provided 50% of the costs of Pejompongan II, with
the government of Jakarta responsible for the other half of the US $7 million
investment (PAM Jaya, 1992b).
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1852 M. Kooy, K. Bakker / Geoforum 39 (2008) 1843–1858
Fig. 3. Water supply infrastructure and ‘modernist monuments’, Jakarta (source: compilation by authors).
(Fischer, 1959) must be understood not as a failure of government,
but as an embodiment of its rationality of rule.
In this regard, recognizing the Pejompongan I & II water treat-
ment plants as primarily ‘modernist monuments’ illuminates the
ways in which colonial discourses around modernity, urban water,
and citizenship were enscripted into postcolonial Jakarta, and res-
cues them from their obscurity in the history of Jakarta’s public
works.15 Excavating this first layer of postcolonial infrastructure also
allows us to trace the continuing fragmentation of urban space
through water supply, as the tripling of water supply in the desig-
nated modern areas of the city was both produced by and productive
15
Pejompongan I &II were both built at a cost of approximately $7 million US (PAM
Jaya 1992b). However, these investments made under the Sukarno government are
not addressed in either discussions of Sukarno’s ‘monumental Jakarta’ (see Kusno,
2000; Leclerc, 1993; MacDonald, 1995), or the history of public infrastructure in
Jakarta (see World Bank, 1974; Hamer et al., 1986; Chifos and Suselo, 2000). The
familiar argument that Sukarno’s government neglected public infrastructure in
favour of public monuments ignores the construction of Pejompongan I & II as both a
‘public’ infrastructure, and a monument for the modernization of the city.
of postcolonial distinctions between developed and undeveloped ur-
ban spaces and citizens. With the additional 3000 L/s of postcolonial
waters supporting the production of a ‘‘new space intended to be dif-
ferent from both colonial Batavia as well as the surrounding sea of
poor urban neighbourhoods” (Kusno, 2000, p. 52), the piped water
supply circulating through selective areas in the city supported the
intended differentiation between these areas of the postcolonial city.
Divisions established between the undeveloped kampong and the
modern city were reinforced by the consistent exclusion of kam-
pongs from network access, leaving the majority of low-income res-
idents in Jakarta to continue their reliance upon open wells and
surface waters (Argo, 1999).
In contrast to the undeveloped kampong, where absence of
piped water remained the norm, substantial investments were
made to both rehabilitate and expand water supply into upper-
class residential areas of Jakarta. Recognizing certain kinds of res-
idential areas of the city as part of the ‘modern’ Jakarta (those
that were planned, formal, and demonstrated rational spatial
arrangements along orderly roads), the old colonial neighbour-
 Author's personal copy
M. Kooy, K. Bakker / Geoforum 39 (2008) 1843–1858
hoods in the central areas of the city were laid with postcolonial
pipes, and new neighbourhoods in the South were, upon con-
struction, immediately included within the ‘modern strip’ of the
city linked together through the network water supply. Kebayo-
ran Baru, the satellite town originally planned by Dutch post-
war government in 1948, had already been fitted with 17 km of
network pipes prior to Independence, but altering the original
plan to provide piped water to households through deep ground-
water wells, the neighbourhood was to become integrated –
materially and discursively – to Sukarno’s modern Jakarta. Like
the new highway built to connect Kebayoran Baru to the central
area of the city, the extension of the centralized water supply net-
work enabled water from Pejompongan I to be channelled into
the ‘modern urban dwellings’ (see Fig. 3). In contrast, the mi-
grants streaming into Jakarta during the 1950–1960s settled in
open spaces on the periphery of the modern city, with an increas-
ing density gradually creating ‘‘vast block interiors that became
the sites of the unserviced urban kampong” (Cowherd, 2002, p.
173), as investment into public hydrants did not accompany the
investments into piped networks for modern residential areas.
Therefore, in continuity with colonial patterns of provision,
where, despite their intentions to extend a more universal supply,
networked water remained limited to a particular kind of modern
urban population, the postcolonial urban water supply also re-
mained limited to the ‘modern’ areas of the city.
Similarly, scholars of the postcolonial period have recorded the
ambivalence of low-income residents to the provision of these
modern public services (Crane and Daniere, 1997; Krausse,
1978; Susantono, 2001). While the displacement of thousands
of low-income residents thought to mar the image of the modern
postcolonial city was physically enforced in the project of ‘Beau-
tiful Jakarta’, the movement of low-income migrants to the spatial
periphery was also the result of an accepted trade-off between
accessing public services and escaping the regulation and surveil-
lance of municipal authorities. It is not until the late 1960s that
surface water quality in Jakarta began to noticeably decline – ren-
dering it unpalatable according to the sensory assessment of local
residents. Until then, residents continued to practice the tradi-
tional habits of combining a variety of water sources for different
purposes (drinking, washing/bathing, cleaning) (Argo, 1999).
Therefore, while life in the unserviced kampongs forced entailed
much higher per unit volume costs for drinking water, it was also
an accepted strategy to enable the pursuit of informal, ‘undevel-
oped’, livelihoods and lifestyles banned in other urban locations
(Abeyasekere, 1985; Cohen, 1974; Jellinek, 1991; Papanek, 1975).
4.2. Lubricating capital: water for ‘development’ under the New Order
(1965–1995)
The violent transition to the New Order era government in 1965
inaugurated both a new vision for the nation, and fundamentally
different relations between the state and society (see Bourchier
and Hadiz, 2003; Siegel, 1986). As in previous eras, the transition
to a new mentality of rule was reflected within new rationalities
of urban water supply. Channelling the shift from the ‘Old Order’
to the ‘New’, the role of urban water supply within the city moved
from supporting ‘symbolically modern’ areas to facilitating eco-
nomic growth; Jakarta’s new status as the ‘gateway for trade and
industrial development’ (Argo, 1999) guided both the growth of
the network into certain ‘productive’ areas of the city, and began
a more ‘economically rational’ management of network water as
an economic commodity.
This new rationality of urban water supply both maintained and
exacerbated the previous (post)colonial patterns of provision: lay-
ers of New Order infrastructure continued to benefit selectively
targeted areas of the city, and the majority of the city’s poorer res-
1853
idents continued to rely upon non-networked water supply, given
the barriers to access set-up by government policies.16 From 1965
to the late 1980s, the rehabilitation of existing infrastructure, and
the construction of an additional large-scale water treatment plant
increased water supply production capacity threefold, but after three
decades of development, the provision of piped water supply still
only extended to less than one-quarter of the city’s population (Por-
ter, 1994). Production capacity consistently exceeded distribution
capacity; in other words, although investment was made in water
treatment, corresponding investment was not made in the distribu-
tion networks, and in 1990 the water supply system only delivered
40% of the potential volumes of treated water (JICA, 1997).
The key element of the political platform of the New Order was
to bring discipline to the national economy and enable economic
growth after the chaos of Guided Democracy.17 This priority was
also extended to the management of urban water supply in Jakarta.
Tariffs for piped water had risen by over 400% (Grant, 1964) because
of the inflation rates during the previous period of ‘Guided Democ-
racy’,18 and having no record of actual consumption or number of
customers with which to collect tariffs, the Ministry of Public Works
was often unable to pay its employees (PAM Jaya, 1992b). Bringing a
‘New Order’ to the management of Jakarta’s network water supply, a
regional water supply company was established in 1968,19 signalling
the fact that water supply to Jakarta was no longer a ‘national pro-
ject’, but a local government owned business mandated to support
regional economic growth, and generate profits, while providing
for the welfare of Jakarta’s residents through the provision of clean
water. Water was now an economic commodity that should be paid
for by those who directly benefited (the consumers), and the pro-
gram of ‘meterasasi’ rolled out throughout the 1970s – installing me-
ters, registering customers, and reforming the new tariff structure –
demonstrated the new sense of ‘New Order’ in PAM Jaya’s
operations.20
However, while bringing a necessary reform to the manage-
ment of piped water in the city, the ‘dual functions’ of PAM Jaya
to ‘‘increase welfare of the people, and to take part in carrying
out the national and regional economic development” (PAM Jaya,
1992c, p. 63) began to generate the same contradictions evident
in both the colonial management of the spring water network,
and the current contemporary private sector management pres-
ently operating Jakarta’s water supply.21 An emphasis on generat-
ing profits (legal and illegal22) meant that PAM Jaya was often
unwilling to extend the network into poorer neighbourhoods23
16
In 1994, Azdan (2001) records that over 60% of the upper income population had
direct access to network water supply through household connections, while only
10% of the kampong residents were directly connected. See also Cestti et al. (1994),
Porter (1994) and JICA (1997) for network coverage statistics.
17
See Hill (1996) and Robison (1990) for further discussion of New Order economic
policies.
18
Inflation rates during the last year of Sukarno’s rule ran at 1500% (Cowherd,
2002). See Robison (1986) for further discussion on economic policies under Guided
Democracy.
19
PAM Jaya (Perusahaan Air Minum – water supply company of Jakarta) took over
responsibility for the city’s water supply system from the Ministry of Public Works,
the government ministry which had built and was operating the first two water
treatment plants. PAM Jaya changed from a ‘regional company’ to the ‘local company’
of the government of DKI Jakarta in 1977 (see PAM Jaya, 1992b).
20
During the program of ‘meterasasi’, illegal consumers were ‘legalized’ and the
actual number of customers were registered for the first time. Following the
installation of water meters, consumers began to be billed according to the volume of
water consumed; the average household water tariffs jumped from the previous flat
rate of Rp 100–200/mth to Rp 2000–3000/mth (PAM Jaya, 1992b).
21
See Bakker (2007) for a description of Jakarta’s current private sector contract.
22
See Cowherd (2002) for a discussion of the culture of New Order government and
the ‘informal’ profits of public services.
23
World Bank (1974) , Taylor (1983) and Kreimer et al. (1995) record how the ‘basic
needs’ development programs in the 1970s and 1980s intending to provide ‘water for
the poor’ through public hydrants were often frustrated.
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1854 M. Kooy, K. Bakker / Geoforum 39 (2008) 1843–1858
(Taylor, 1983), preferring to limit the provision of piped water with-
in profitable urban areas, where the user-fee schemes used to fi-
nance network extension meant that costs could be ‘recovered’.24
The discriminatory social policy of PAM Jaya during this period is
thus best reflected in its own admission that it was ‘‘best situated
to serve well established, formal areas comprising concentrated
groups of users, rather than newly developed and widely scattered
areas [i.e. kampongs]” (Argo, 1999, p. 71), a reality corroborated in
the most recent Master Plan for Jakarta’s water supply which records
the absence of a poverty reduction strategy in guiding network
extension until the 1980s (JICA, 1997).
The role of PAM Jaya as a tool for ‘regional economic growth’
is most evident within the first (and only) major infrastructure
investment of the New Order prior to World Bank involvement
in financing Jakarta’s water supply infrastructure (1990–1997).
As the only large-scale water treatment plant built over a 20-
year period,25 Pulogadung, and its accompanying (limited) net-
work, was built to serve the similarly named Pulogadung Indus-
trial Estate, an area of the city that Suharto had targeted for the
initiation of the New Order strategy of industry-led economic
growth.26 Prior to the completion of the new Pulogadung water
treatment plant (finished in 1982), the provision of piped water
into this area in east Jakarta was accomplished through upgrades
to existing infrastructures, securing a ‘temporary’ delivery of
water for industrial use through pipelines and booster pumps.
An upgrade in the capacity of Pejompongan II (2000 L/s) was fin-
ished in 1973, and part of this increased capacity was then trans-
ported into the eastern Pulogadung Industrial Estate, an area of
the city then outside of the existing network (see Fig. 3, illustrat-
ing the massive pipeline extending from Pejompongan II into the
Industrial Estate). The installation of booster pumps in 1976 sup-
plemented the pipeline, allowing for 770 L/s of the additional
1000 L/s to be pumped into the industrial area (PAM Jaya,
1992a). With completion of Pulogadung’s own water treatment
plant giving the industrial estate its own capacity of 1000 L/s,
the cross-city pipeline became obsolete, although it is still embed-
ded in the city as an artefact of this era. Given that the focus of
industrial activity had already spilled over into surrounding re-
gions of Jakarta by the late 1970s (Castles, 1989), and the indus-
trial demand for a (relatively expensive) piped water supply has
never been significant,27 the subsequent developments of Puloga-
dung are surprising. For, while capacity was actually increased
from 1000 to 4000 L/s in 1987, the distribution of this (under uti-
lized) water supply outside the immediate vicinity of the indus-
trial area did not seem to be a priority. As reported by the
24
The use of ‘user-fees’ to finance network extension meant that house connections
were unaffordable for the majority of the population. The cost of a household
connection in 1975 was Rp 100,000 ($200 US), this excluded the ‘additional fees’
required for meter rental, deposit, and actual monthly tariffs. In comparison, the
average income in Jakarta at that time was only Rp 15,000/mth (approximately $36
US), and the 80% of the city’s residents living in kampongs earning much less than
that amount (KIP, 1976; Perpamsi, 1975a).
25
Pulogadung was the only large-scale water treatment plant built during 1970–
1990s; over this time period the population of Jakarta had increased by almost four
million, but the other large-scale treatment plants and network extension outlined
within the 1972 Jakarta water supply master plan were deferred until the World
Bank’s ‘PAM Jaya System Improvement Program’ (PJSIP), which ran from 1990 to
1997. See JICA (1997) and World Bank (1998) for more details on the infrastructure
under the PJSIP program.
26
There were 76 factories located in Pulogadung Industrial Estate by 1975, see
Castles (1989).
27
The high commercial tariffs for piped water, coupled with the unsuccessfully
regulated exploitation of alternative water sources providing a much cheaper supply,
have led to a preference of non-networked water by industry (see Azdan, 2001). The
actual percentage of total water from Pulogadung in the 1970–1980s used by
industries in the Industrial Estate is unknown, as consumption volumes per consumer
are not recorded until the 1990s; a general estimate of industrial consumption
usually assumes it to be 1/3rd of total water supply production (JICA, 1997).
Jakarta government, ‘‘In 1991, the full production capacity of
Pulogadung was not used because the distribution pipes were
not yet installed” (DKI Jakarta, 1991), and in the late 1990s the
networked water supply in eastern Jakarta was still limited to
industrial areas (Argo, 1999). This limited extension of the Pulog-
adung network accords with the general lack of network exten-
sion done throughout the 1970–1980s; the ‘first stage’ of the
1972 Master Plan planned for the installation of 550 km of distri-
bution pipes but this is recorded as ‘incomplete’ in 1988, and it
was reported again in 1991 that these pipes were not yet installed
(JICA, 1997).
Providing a political complement to the country’s program of
industrial economic growth, investments were also made to
continue network water supply into upper-class residential
areas. For, while network extension throughout the entire city
was not an economic or political priority for the government,
ensuring the continuation of ‘public water supply’ to the eco-
nomically mobile and politically obedient ‘citizens’ of the New
Order was part of the government’s program.28 Partially subsi-
dized by the central government,29 an expansion of the capacity
of Pejompongan I & II water treatment plants30 went to benefit
the ‘upwardly mobile’ residents of the modern neighbourhoods
that were left over from the colonial and early postcolonial eras
(Menteng, Kebayoran Baru, Kuningan). Primary pipelines laid
down in the late 1960s-early 1970s indicate the water flow di-
rected into these upper-class neighbourhoods (Fig. 3) and the
modern strip of high rises, luxury hotels, and developments along
the city’s center thorough fare intended to service these resi-
dents. Meanwhile, despite the fact that 90% of the kampong pop-
ulation was recorded as being without access to piped water
(KIP, 1976), network growth outside the central area of the city
only continued into more high-income residential neighbour-
hoods. Pondok Indah, the first ‘gated community’ built in Jakarta
by the developer Ciputra and his New Order financier (Salim)
was one of the few new areas of the city in the 1970s where
the network was extended. The installation of primary pipelines
to direct urban water supply further southwards into this new
area of residential development mimicked the development of Ja-
karta’s first upper-class residential development – Kebayoran
Baru – and the pipelines delivering water South of the water
treatment plants were extended further southwest to channel
water into the gates of Pondok Indah (Fig. 3). Advertised as a
‘residential enclave’, Pondok Indah is defined as purposefully dis-
tinct from its surrounding neighbourhood, and its spatial exclu-
sivity was enhanced by its status as an ‘island of services’
amidst surrounding non-networked areas of Southern Jakarta
(Fig. 3).31
In stark contrast to the neighbourhoods of New Order citizens
(those enrolled in the trajectory of upward economic growth),
the urban kampongs remained largely excluded from the New Or-
der’s promise of development (see Kusno, 2000; Jellinek, 1991).
Although in the 1970s the kampongs housed 80% of Jakarta’s pop-
28
The New Order investment into the public infrastructure network for the elites
did, however, tail off in the late 1980s, when the growth of ‘new towns’ and gated
residential communities in the 1990s encouraged the middle-upper class to abandon
public infrastructure networks in favour of privatized services.
29
Contradicting the new ‘economic rationality’ of urban water supply, which
decreed local financing and payment by users, the central government continued to
subsidize major investments into production oriented infrastructure (not distribu-
tion), by providing local government with low interest loans from international
development funds. Upgrades to Pejompongan I & II were financed from loans from
the Japanese government, who drew up the 1972 Master Plan (PAM Jaya, 1992b).
30
Pejompongan I was expanded in 1967, and Pejompongan II was expanded in 1973
(see PAM Jaya, 1992a,1992b).
31
Cowherd (2002) describes how this spatial exclusion was ensured by the
construction of a golf course and the re-routing of a river, making Pondok Indah
appear on the map as an island fortress surrounded by a moat.
 Author's personal copy
M. Kooy, K. Bakker / Geoforum 39 (2008) 1843–1858
ulation, and comprised 65% of its land area, 90% of its residents did
not have access to piped water supply, leaving them to build their
own shallow groundwater wells, or pay up to 1/5th of their
monthly income for water from public hydrants (KIP, 1976; World
Bank, 1974). And, while a program of kampong improvement be-
gun by Jakarta governor Ali Sadikin32 did include water supply as
a primary component of upgrades, the decade long program
(1966–1977) produced only marginal improvements in the access
of lower income residents to piped water (Abeyasekere, 1987; Tay-
lor, 1983). Public hydrants were still a rare occurrence in kampongs
in the 1970s (Argo, 1999), and those that were built charged higher
tariffs than individual households, replicating the original colonial
counterintuitive cross-subsidies whereby the public hydrants pro-
viding water to the poor had tariffs higher than the house connec-
tions of the middle and upper classes.33
The low priority placed on the provision of piped water in the
first decade of kampong improvement was partially rationalized
as a policy to discourage rural migrants, who were blamed for
over-taxing the city’s public services (KIP, 1976), but it was also
a result of PAM Jaya’s reluctance to serve these areas of city (see
Taylor, 1983), as coordination with PAM Jaya to extend piped
water supply into poorer neighbourhoods did not much improve
after the ‘closed city’ policy was relaxed in 1976, and the prioriti-
zation of piped water provision within KIP increased after it was
taken up by the World Bank (see Kreimer et al., 1995). As a result
of these decades of consistent exclusion from piped water services,
there has been a continued growth in what are now termed ‘small-
scale independent water providers’ (SSIWP) (see Kjellen and
McGrahanan, 2006; Snell, 1998; World Bank, 2006; WSP-EAP,
2007). Serving a captive market (given the declining quality of
alternative water sources, like rivers and groundwater) of Jakarta’s
unserviced low-income areas, these independent informal water
providers (or ‘water mafia cartels’, as they are termed by authori-
ties) have grown parallel to the postcolonial expansion of the cen-
tralized networked system. In 1974 the World Bank estimated that
40% of unaccounted for water lost during distribution was due to
illegal connections (World Bank, 1974). In 2006, a six month cam-
paign against illegal connections by the private sector water supply
company responsible for services on the western half of the city
only managed to locate 1% of the estimated total number of
40,000 (Jakarta Post, 19 January 2007). Coupled with the recent le-
gal growth of autonomous, decentralized piped network systems
drawing from deep groundwater wells, the ‘splintering’ of the city’s
water supply system continuing parallel to the expansion of its
centralized system has also been the result of residents who were
either physically or discursively unable to formally access the city’s
network supply.
4. Conclusions: splintered urbanism
The ‘splintering’ of Jakarta’s water supply is not a recent phe-
nomenon. Rather, this paper has demonstrated that access to water
supply, and the physical network, have been ‘splintered’ since the
inception of networked water supply in the colonial period. The di-
rect and indirect exclusion of the majority of Jakarta’s kampong
residents from piped water was articulated with both colonial
and postcolonial practices of governance that reinforced the spatial
32
KIP began as a local government initiative in 1966, 50% of the costs of
improvements were paid for by the Jakarta government, and the other 50% were
paid for by the residents of the improved kampong. In 1974 the World Bank took up
KIP as a national development program, and funding came from the Bank and the
Central government (see Karamoy, 1984; Darrundono, 2000).
33
Until the early 1980s, household tariffs were 25 Rp/m3 for the first 15 m3/mth;
public hydrants and water trucks paid Rp 60/m3, more than double the tariff of
households, and more than even small businesses (who paid 50 Rp/m3) (Perpamsi,
1975a,b,c).
1855
and social fragmentation of the city. In each period, the division of
urban spaces, and the city’s inhabitants, into categories of ‘modern’
and ‘non-modern’ served specific political-economic ends: the
reaffirmation of Dutch sovereignty and racial superiority, as con-
cretized in the provision of artesian, and later networked water
supply solely to colonial neighbourhoods; the success of Sukarno’s
postcolonial ‘guided democracy’ as emblematized in water treat-
ment plants serving as ‘monumental architecture’ connecting elite
areas of the city; and the economic might of New Order govern-
mentality which emphasized the build-up of productive capacity
as a ‘lubricant’ of capital accumulation, and an increase in effi-
ciency of networked urban services for the city’s high-income
elites.
Fragmentation of the network is not, as we have explored, so-
lely due to ‘splintering from above’. Throughout both colonial
and postcolonial era, residents whose identity as non-citizens pre-
cluded formal access to piped water have developed their own
alternatives: the splintering of water supply has been enacted from
‘below’, as well as from ‘above’.
This is of particular relevance in the current political-economic
conjuncture, in which neoliberal strategies of water supply gover-
nance have been widely implemented, and have been blamed for
inequities of access to water supply. This perspective is misrepre-
sentative, at least in the case of Jakarta, where discrimination
and consequent disparities were well entrenched prior to the initi-
ation of the private sector participation contract for Jakarta’s water
supply system in 1998 (Bakker, 2007). Indeed, some strategies of
the private companies now running Jakarta’s water supply system
have led to greater network integration, plugging formerly stand-
alone treatment plants (designed for elite neighbourhoods) into
the city’s centralized distribution system.34 Ironically, the formal
privatization of the city’s water supply network has led to ‘public’
infrastructure being made more available to the wider population
of urban residents.
Nonetheless, the private sector providers have had no greater
success than their public sector counterparts at altering Jakarta’s
highly differentiated patterns of access to water supply. Poor
households continue to represent less than 10% of the total cus-
tomer base.35 Indeed, the tariff structure imposed by the municipal
government provides important disincentives for the private sector
concessionaires to increase service to poor households, most impor-
tantly through setting volumetric prices in the lowest tariff bands
below marginal costs of production, and below the volumetric rate
charged by the concessionaires to the government, thereby creating
a cost-recovery disincentive for connecting poor households (Bakker
et al., 2006).
In short, private sector participation has to some degree altered,
and from some perspectives diminished previous spatial and socio-
economic patterns of differentiation of access, but certainly did not
create them. The ‘splintering’ of networks is not (solely) due to
neoliberal interventions.
The spatial and social fragmentation of supply continued to be a
pattern of growth under private management, but was not signifi-
cantly increased, and certainly not caused by the introduction of
34
These treatment plants, developed during the late New Order period, had
abandoned the centralized network system entirely: the mini-treatment plants
produced very small volumes of water for the completely separate piped networks
within segregated high-income housing estates (Pam Jaya, 1992b), while the large-
scale treatment plant (Cisadane) was developed in conjunction with a large new town
development (Bumai Serpong Damai – BSD) outside of Jakarta’s geographical
boundaries.
35
From 1998 to 2005 (the latest year for which data is available), poor households
represented less than 10% of the total customer base of the private concessionaires
(PAM Jaya, Laporan Evaluasi Kinerja Tahunan (Annual Report Evaluation), various
years).
 Author's personal copy
1856 M. Kooy, K. Bakker / Geoforum 39 (2008) 1843–1858
the multinational private sector to the management of the city’s
water supply system.
These findings suggest that we should be cautious about univer-
sally applying the splintering urbanism hypothesis. In particular,
we should question the degree to which the ‘modern infrastructur-
al ideal’ was applied universally (rather than selectively, as in Ja-
karta’s case). Indeed, Jakarta’s successive urban ideals were
predicated upon differentiation between citizens and divisions of
urban space, rather than seeking to overcome fragmentation.
Moreover, we should be cautious about assessing the causal mech-
anisms underlying patterns of fragmentation and differentiation of
access to water supply systems.
Deploying a conceptual framework of postcolonial governmen-
tality allows us to explain this seemingly paradoxical behaviour
through reference to the interrelationships between the discursive
construction of subjects, the material provision of infrastructure,
and the creation of urban space. In advancing this framework, we
are not arguing that it should be universally applied to cities in
the South. Nor, indeed, are we disputing the utility of the splinter-
ing urbanism thesis in general; it offers a useful framework for
analysing the multiplicity of changes that are going on with respect
to urban infrastructure in many cities.36 Rather, we would argue
that the assumptions implicit in these conceptual frameworks must
be repeatedly evaluated, and not simply transposed from one set of
cities to another, or from one type of infrastructure to another. We
suggest (perhaps heretically) that the phenomenon of fragmentation
and differentiation of urban infrastructure, and its relationship to
public or private providers, is much more ambiguous for water sup-
ply consumers than has been acknowledged in the academic litera-
ture, and call for more cosmopolitan analyses of ordinary cities in
order to expand our understanding of our ontologies and epistemol-
ogies of ‘splintering’ versus ‘splintered’ urbanisms.
Acknowledgements
Olivier Coutard, Joost Cote, Michael Leaf, Abidin Kusno, Claire
Benit, Denis Bocquet, Jon Rutherford, three anonymous reviewers,
and participants in the ‘Placing Splintering Urbanism’ workshop
(Autumn, 2005), gave helpful comments on various incarnations
of this article. Funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Re-
search Council of Canada, and the University of British Columbia’s
Hampton Fund is gratefully acknowledged. Invaluable assistance
was provided by research assistants Endah Shofiani and E.J. Marti-
jn, water supply professionals in Jakarta, staff at local and interna-
tional NGO offices, and archival staff at the colonial archives in
Amsterdam and Leiden.
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