Re-Assembling Semarang City

Abstract

Semarang City is located in the northern part of Java Island, Indonesia. As an important port city, Semarang’s urban fabric is closely related to its infrastructure: water and traffic networks. However, since the 1980s, the acceleration of Semarang urban growth has not been supported by proper foundations. The characteristics of the coastal area were hardly taken into account in urban development. Consequently, flood risk and, in particular, rob phenomena or tidal flood became the chronic problem of Semarang City. Consequently, environmental degradation and infrastructure destruction have continued to occur in the Semarang coastal area. Moreover, community life is always threatened by inundation risks. With Semarang as a backdrop, this research aims to address the gap on soft and hard approach in urban mitigation resilience planning in concept from both social and ecological resilience perspective and positioning urban design (both from architecture, landscape, and planning) by exploring the local adaptive mechanism in the chosen coastal Kampung Kemijen, in Semarang, Indonesia. This research derived from the socio-cultural perspective, trying to explore more on the local level and how it can be translated and integrated into the larger scale urban mitigation planning. The objective of the strategic framework, which is based on the socio-ecological principles, the actions which try to integrate the soft and hard approach in urban planning, and both of the design framework and strategies outcomes will be implemented on the design elaboration. The Strategic Framework’s goal is to develop a general understanding and possibilities of balancing the soft and hard approach in urban mitigation planning from the human scale through to the city scale. The project tries to read the relationships between three scales of planning: the city of Semarang, the coastal area (on the district scale), the kampung, and most importantly, to the human scale. The projects at some point are very site, time, and contextually specific. Therefore, the people’s participation and the high concern of climate and ecological-based planning are very important. In the end, This research demonstrates the strength and quality of the soft approach through local adaptive mechanisms in urban planning. Public participation is an important aspect when dealing with the urban planning issue in the Indonesian context. The normative urban planning in Indonesia tends to exclude public participation, whereas utilizing the local adaptive mechanism might contrive a new way of urban mitigation planning, which can be enforced for longterm planning.