Abstract
This paper investigates how to balance soft approach (public participation) and hard approach (hard infrastructures in urban mitigation planning in the context of vulnerable coastal areas due to land subsidence and flooding in Kampung Kemijen, Semarang, Indonesia. The city needs a new approach in long-term multiscale urban mitigation planning with minimal social conflict to solve the environmental issues & to survive climate changes. Despite its cross-scale planning complexity, the striving communities capably encounter these problems. The demonstrated local adaptive mechanism provides opportunities for addressing the city’s problem such as simple adaptive measurements, establishing socio-economic activity & community initiatives. Following the concept of socio-ecological resilience (Depietri et al., 2013) and community-based interventions for disaster recovery (Goulding, 2017), this paper tries to utilize the local adaptive mechanism with aim to improve the recent urban planning which often overfocusing on hard infrastructural strategies (hard approach) and excluding public participations (soft approach) through strategic mitigation framework which balances the two approaches. It is initiated by involving public participation in the development process, analysing their mechanisms, behavioral patterns and translating the information into tangible strategies that is applicable on micro scale. It integrates multiscale stakeholders and planning strategy to tackle the environmental issues through proper infrastructure investment. As the results, the strategies promote self-sustaining lifestyle towards future climate challenges by empowering socio-economic opportunity among vulnerable communities while recovering the ecological-environmental settings of the city with the end goal of improving the well-being of the people. The strategies offer flexible implementations in real condition and able to be replicated to other kampung with similar vulnerability typologies, focusing on the development process instead of the end result, expanding its resiliency in dealing with future challenges.
