BUILDING AND MAINTAINING CITY IDENTITY On The Basis Of Local Community Involvement

Abstract

Abstract— In a crisis of city identity, an effort to build city identity is required by involving local people to participate in building their cities. The roles of city development planners and managers are not only to formulate the future plan of a city physically and the spacing that is deterministic, rational, and functional but also to direct the involvement aspects of the space agents. It is realized that identity city development based on local wealth will involve more the roles of the people, and it is related to the social and culture of the people. Consequently, it is required a plan requiring patience and a long period. The things related to culture are not visible shortly for people out of the concerning community because the cultural things are focused on mind. Therefore, the solutions for problems occurred in a community require a qualitative understanding. Through the qualitative approach, it will be able to reveal the cultural meanings so that the solutions and the development efforts on the basis of understanding cultural meanings of a community will be more meaningful positively for their life than providing them ready-made goods made by planners or program providers. A planner should free their minds of an idea that physical planning will result understanding to people or sense of community. The explanation emphasizes that in planning and development do not start from merely physical arrangement but it emphasizes more in the existence of the local community. Keywords : city identity, sense of community, local community A. THE DESTRUCTION OF CITY WITHOUT IDENTITY: LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE In the efforts of arranging space and Indonesian territory management, it has been composed the Territory Lay-Out Plan beginning from National level to City, Regency, and even Sub District. However, in fact, most of the plans made steeply are just plans without proper realization. There are some problems faced in the plan implementation, but the protruding ones are the law enforcement and the lack of community involvement. The reality shows that between the plan composed and the reality in real life has wide difference. Moreover, people aspirations are not accommodated well. However, city space engineering wanted has human dimension that should have started from the perspective of “space engineering in the context of human life” in order that the effects are able to encourage the emergence of Edi Purwanto, Lecturer at Department of Architecture, Faculty of Engineering, Diponegoro University, email : edipurw4nto@yahoo.com, phone : +62247470690. human social design and has dignity. The approaches of city space planning and designing in Indonesia, so far, frequently apply the pattern of top-down and lack of involvement the elements of community as the agents of city space (bottom up). Even, sometimes it was conducted by pitching upon theories from western cultural or literature treasures, and then applied. As the results, the theory adoption is sometimes inappropriate with local situation because the theories applied emerge from sosio-spatial situations that are significantly different with the handed local problems. City space planning and designing are not merely based on the approaches of objective-positivist without considering the subjective-phenomenological reality felt by space agents as the users. The objective reality of city space is actually only a little part of the whole reality that is rich of subjective responses from the human occupying it in a series of human-space dialectic process lasting continuously in a long term. Thus, the approaches of city space development that is getting sharper and more meaningful need to be applied through subjectivephenomenological approaches in order to dive and to earth until the bottom and the root of the problems through continuous dialogical process and based on the attitudes of cautious, wise, and smart. So far, Jane Jacobs have actually cried out the paradigm of planning, which is too technocratic and deterministic, through her books, particularly the books published in more than thirty years ago, The Death and Life of American Cities (1962). In this book, Jacobs shows the process of city planning and designing is based too much on technical-mathematical considerations and tends to result a less human environment with no identity. She offers the approaches of city planning and designing that is more humanistic giving attention to the available social capital aspect. Next, according to Jacobs (1962), a city should “have something offered to everyone because a city is created by everyone”. With nothing to offer to everyone, a city is just like a labyrinth that makes anyone gets lost and feels alienated. On the other hand, the life destruction of American cities was, one of them, caused by the city planning system based on efficiency. The streets were made in grid pattern, the buildings were built in uniform shapes, and all in square, causing the people live separately. When the industrial revolution occurred in America in 1760-1863 caused the increase of urbanization level that it increased the population in cities and added problems in the cities like communication. The problems of communication caused high mobility so that it required the availability of facilities to support the activities, such as railway stations, offices, hotels, markets, shopping centers, and so forth that changed the city structure. The rapid changes with the nonexistence of balance in city facilities created slum area, which is now