Abstract
Amidst the context of bottom-up and collaborative planning euphoria around the world, there has been an increasing interest in planning practices that centred on the active role of civil society. Many governments, private sectors, and non-profits are worked together to promote communities through community-led initiatives at the neighbourhood levels. However, the actual concern is on the capacity of the communities themselves to use their opportunities to consolidate power and make influence against other stakeholders. Given their lack of skills, knowledge, resources, and regulatory supports, communities often fail to negotiate their interests within collaborative decision-making processes with other stakeholders (McGowan et al., 2020). As a result, many governments bring back their power, co-opting and driving the community-led initiatives with traditional directive approaches, and leaving the communities only as the ‘outsourcing executor’ and their social goals to be overshadowed by political and capital motivations (Allmendinger, 2016; Gonzalez & Healey, 2005; McGowan et al., 2020). This paper presents the case study of a housing revitalisation project in Cibangkong, a slum settlement enclave located at the centre of Gatot Subroto, one of the busiest commercial areas in Bandung, Indonesia. A concept of land consolidation that emphasises the role of communities has been prepared as an innovative pilot project to replace traditional slum upgrading approaches. Applying the so-called “Public-Private-People-Partnership (PPPP)”, the existing poor community is promoted as the shareholders with institutional and financial power, so they can work formally and equally with the government and developers. In this paper, we focus on identifying the characteristics of the existing community and examining their readiness capacity to work together with the government and private sectors in the collaborative land consolidation arrangement. This paper uses Participatory Action Research (PAR) as the core methodology. In this method, we conduct a series of field observations, interviews, FGDs, and questionnaire, which involves national and local government officials, developers, academicians, community leaders, activists, and representatives of the poor community living in the area. In addition, to collect data and information on the actual socio-economic conditions of the existing people, the PAR is also used as an interactive method to disseminate the revitalisation concept to the existing community, allowing mutual learning and sharing processes. Whilst the actual research is still being carried out, we emphasise some positive findings at the preliminary stage, which include the mapping of community and its socio-economic segregations as well as the potential alternative roles and contributions of the community within the collaborative-led land consolidation project.
