The Politics of Urban Space and Housing in Decolonizing Indonesia (1930-1960) PDF

Under Construction The Politics of Urban Space and Housing during the Decolonization of Indonesia, 1930-1960 By Freek Colombijn With the assistance of Martine Barwegen 2014 This hardback was origi...

Under Construction The Politics of Urban Space and Housing during the Decolonization of Indonesia, 1930-1960 By Freek Colombijn With the assistance of Martine Barwegen 2014 This hardback was originally published in paperback by KITLV Press, Leiden, The Netherlands, in 2010 under ISBN 9789067182911. Cover illustration: Creja ontwerpen, Leiderdorp. House under construction in Kebayoran Baru (front page Sociaal Spectrum van Indonesië 3(1) 1949). Library of Congress Control Number: 2013951262 ISSN 1572-1892 ISBN 978-90-04-25864-8 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-26393-2 (e-book) Copyright 2010 by Freek Colombijn This work is published by Koninklijke Brill NV. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect the publication against unauthorized use and to authorize dissemination by means of off prints, legitimate photocopies, microform editions, reprints, translations, and secondary information sources, such as abstracting and indexing services including databases. Requests for commercial re‐use, use of parts of the publication, and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV. This book is printed on acid-free paper.  Contents Abbreviations ix List of figures and tables x Preface xiii i introduction 1 decolonization 6 Urban space and ethnicity 13 Housing 19 Methodology 21 six portraits, one story 24 conclusion 26 ii A political and spatial history of indonesian cities 29 the dutch colonial period 30 the Japanese period 36 the indonesian revolution 46 the postcolonial democratic experiment 54 runaway urbanization 65 conclusion 69 PArt one UrBAn sPAce: rAce And sociAL cLAss iii race, class, and spatial segregation 73 ethnic divisions in colonial times 77 the case for racial segregation 82 social class divisions 85 the housing market 92 race, social class and spatial segregation 96 Live histories 97 conclusion 100 vi Contents iV Life in the kampongs 103 Kampongs: chaos or order 104 Living conditions in kampongs 111 social composition of kampongs 117 indigenous and european types of houses 123 Urban planning 133 conclusion 138 V Land tenure 141 Formal and informal forms of ownership 143 Local diversity and spatial patterns of land tenure 156 insecurity of land tenure during decolonization 164 conclusion 177 PArt tWo HoUsinG: insecUritY And oPPortUnitY Vi Housing in the kampong; the contest between dwellers and 183 the government strategies of kampong improvement 184 Boon or burden of kampong improvement 194 the size of the investments 199 squatting: the spread of mushrooms in the wet season 207 1950-1954: ad hoc moves against squatters 211 1954-1956: concerted actions 215 After 1956: facing the facts 221 conclusion 224 Vii the housing crisis during the years of turmoil 229 Housing shortages 231 the crisis in Jakarta 241 tensions between the Army and the civil government 249 tensions between the civil government and private property owners 253 tensions between corporate enterprise, the military, and the state 258 the Housing Allocation Bureaus 263 conclusion 273 Viii Post-war reconstruction and the recommencement of urban planning 277 A Japanese-indonesian think-tank 279  Contents vii reconstruction of eastern indonesia 281 Post-war urban planning 288 Kebayoran Baru 297 conclusion 307 iX construction; Public housing and the private sector 311 the building sector 313 real-estate developers 317 company housing 320 Private house owners 322 Public housing in colonial times 325 the end of the nV Volkshuisvesting corporations 333 Public housing in independent times 336 the balance sheet of public housing in the 1950s 343 the rise of the concept of self-help housing 348 conclusion 352 X strategies of landlords and tenants 355 the composition of the rental sector 356 Housing agencies 363 How landlords and tenants reacted to fluctuations on the rental market 368 the rental market after 1945 373 the rent tribunals 379 Forum shopping 384 conclusion 388 Xi conclusion 393 A landscape of chaos 393 ‘race’ and class 396 Becoming a developing state 402 three ugly legacies of the housing crisis 405 surviving the chaos 407 national integration 409 the politics of housing during the long decolonization 411 Appendix 1. Population figures of indonesia’s major cities 413 Bibliography 417 index 463  Chapter iii Race, class, and spatial segregation Urban society in indonesia was stratified along ethnic and class lines, with gender and age divisions criss-crossing the ethnic and class divisions. the ethnic and class stratification took on visible form in the residential pattern in cities.1 Part one of this book, and this chapter in particular, starts from the working hypothesis that under the impact of decolonization, changes in the social status system were reflected in a changing residential pattern. one commonly held view is that ethnic or ‘racial’ categories formed the main division in colonial urban society in southeast Asia.2 t.G. McGee (1967:139) sums up this position: ‘the major element of the colonial city was the mosaic of ethnic quarters – the tightly packed shophouse areas of the chinese, the spacious low-density “compounds” of the europeans, and the rural-like villages of the indigenous population scattered around the fringes of the city’. McGee argues that the ethnic-based residential pattern persisted into the 1960s, but became blurred when multi-ethnic middle-class suburbs began to appear. others assert more strongly that after independence class divisions began to predominate over ethnic differences. in 1973 Hans-dieter evers (1973:130) wrote: ‘the colonial “european city” and “native quarter” is frequently replaced by culturally and socially equally differentiated upper and lower class districts’. Abidin Kusno (2000:132-3, 152-3) has recently reiter- ated the same point, which i dub the ‘from-race-to-class-segregation’ thesis. throughout the first half of the twentieth century (the late-colonial period in indonesia), residential patterns based on ethnicity and class were interwo- ven with changes in the urban ecology. new kinds of neighbourhoods, among them suburbs and squatter settlements, were occupied by specific social groups. Modernization created new positions for an emergent, non-european middle class of civil servants, military, professionals, and businessmen. they 1 As a matter of course, age and gender divisions became visible in households, but not at the level of the city as a whole. 2 ethnic differences were habitually perceived as racial, that is hereditary and phenotypic differences. i use ‘race’ here only to convey something inherent in the colonial discourse, not as an explanatory factor. 74 Under construction demanded new neighbourhoods, the Western-type suburbs. indigenous neighbourhoods, called kampongs (or kampung in indonesia), were built by rural immigrants without much of a formal education. Kampong residents occupied interstices in the city core and drove the old colonial elite and new middle class away from the centre into new Western-type suburbs. suburbanization was triggered by an elite desire to be geographically sepa- rated from the masses (evers 1973; McGee 1967:139-41; Wertheim 1956:140- 52). Although the stream of migrants and the concomitant suburbanization engendered a more complex residential pattern, evers (1975:781) maintains that in colonial times ‘people of the same ethnic group but different socio- economic status tended to reside in close proximity’. the from-race-to-class-segregation thesis postulates that residential pat- terns were invariably strongly influenced by changes in the social status system. the shift from a segregation based on race to a segregation based on income had already begun before 1942, was reinforced during the Japanese occupation, and accelerated after independence by several simultaneous processes (evers 1975:780). Firstly, the most prominent change was that many europeans left the scene, and their houses were occupied by indigenous and chinese people. secondly, new elite and middle-class neighbourhoods were built in which different ethnic groups came together. the well-to-do resi- dents of chinese descent who settled in these new neighbourhoods left their own ethnic quarters, in which a more homogeneous poor and traditional chinese population remained behind. Likewise, indigenous kampongs lost some of their higher-status residents to the new middle-class neighbour- hoods. thirdly, these elite neighbourhoods were economically homogeneous, because many domestic servants who initially had lived on the premises in villas chose to leave and set up independent households in kampongs. Fourthly, slums inhabited by squatters emerged, in which ethnic background was not really an issue (evers 1975:780-3; Jackson 1975:48; McGee 1967:139- 41; nas 1986a:7). this process of from-race-to-class-segregation, postulated by evers and McGee for the whole of southeast Asia, has been confirmed by local studies in indonesia, for example for Palembang, Padang, and the Kotabaru neighbourhood in Yogyakarta (colombijn 1994:219-20; dedi irwanto 2005:36; Farabi Fakih 2005:22-3). in contrast to this from-race-to-class-segregation thesis, Howard dick (2002a:411) has raised the question of whether ethnicity really gave ‘rise to socioeconomic differentiation in the first place’, because the strict division between lower-class kampong residents and the middle class still (or again?) existed in the 1970s and thereafter, long after the colonial ethnic division between indigenous and european residents had become a distant memory (see also Abidin Kusno 2000:109-19). My supposition is that in colonial times social class (and more specifically income) was already a greater factor in resi-  III Race, class, and spatial segregation 75 dential patterns than was racial category. the reason is simply that a person of, say, european ethnic background may have had plenty of pretensions, but if he did not have a substantial income, he could not have afforded a house in an elite neighbourhood. As we shall see in the next chapter, the first person to remark on the importance of a colonial urban stratification based on class differences was the town planner thomas Karsten, who had designed class- based neighbourhoods since the 1910s (Flieringa 1930:165; Karsten 1936). if Karsten’s view that income had already had a big impact on residential choices in colonial times is correct, the transition from racial to class segre- gation after independence cannot have been at all pronounced. Although Karsten did not live to see indonesian independence, his analysis of urban society supports the ‘class-segregation-throughout-decolonization’ thesis. in this analysis, decolonization is taken to be a process which had begun long before and continued after the actual Proclamation of independence. A brief excursion to other countries casts further doubt on strict racial segregation in colonial times. colonial ethnic segregation was certainly far from unique to indonesia.3 in the Moroccan cities of rabat and casablanca, the Arab and French colonial quarters were separated by thoroughfares 250 metres wide. these boulevards had a dual function: as a cordon sanitaire, preventing the spread of disease from the medina to the european quarters, and to facilitate the rapid movement of French troops. French town planning envisaged modern european garden cities and the simultaneous protec- tion of traditional Arab architecture in the medina. this radical system had Mediterranean roots stretching back to ancient egyptian towns, but was also to be found in other parts of Africa – Madagascar and dakar – and in saigon as well.4 Also in British, Belgian, and Portuguese African colonial cities, the principle of ‘sanitary segregation’ separated european neighbourhoods with a high amenity level from poorly serviced indigenous quarters. to give one example, in elisabethville (Lubumbashi) in the Belgian congo, european and African neighbourhoods were planned separately from the beginning; even so, the whites apparently did not consider this segregation stringent enough and in 1921 an African neighbourhood was flattened to increase the distance for sanitary and safety reasons. the width of the cordon sanitaire was ideally the maximum range of the flight of a mosquito which could poten- tially transmit malaria.5 in nineteenth-century British india, europeans lived in indigenous quarters until the white population retreated to large canton- 3 nor was ethnic segregation unique to colonial and postcolonial cities; think of north American and european cities. 4 Wright 1997; see also Betts 1969; coquery-Vidrovitch forthcoming; rabinow 1986:259-61, 1992. 5 Lagae 2006; see further coquery-Vidrovitch forthcoming; Fobanjong 2006; Freund 2007:78- 82; Harris 2009; Kimani 1972; nwaka 1996:125. 76 Under construction ments after the Mutiny of 1857. in British india, where the colour barrier was possibly stricter than in the netherlands indies, eurasians were placed in the indigenous category (King 1985:22; shaw 2006). these descriptions show that racial segregation in African colonial cities, and perhaps in india as well, was far stricter than in indonesia. nevertheless, in African colonial cities, ethnic mixing of people from a similar social class did occur. Arabs and Jews were permitted to live in the european districts of rabat and casablanca, provided they adopted modern, urban (that is, Western) culture. in elisabethville (congo), Portuguese and Greek traders who interacted with the black population were referred to as ‘blancs du sec- ond rang’; they lived in their own neighbourhood with indians, Pakistanis, and Arabs, in close proximity to black neighbourhoods (Lagae 2006; Wright 1997:330). in other words, non-europeans with a middle-class culture lived among europeans, and lower-class europeans with Africans and Asians. Adducing this evidence, i see a difference between a ‘from-race-to-class- segregation’ thesis and a ‘class-segregation-throughout-decolonization’ the- sis.6 in studies on indonesia, neither thesis has so far been thoroughly tested by empirical study, not even the from-race-to-class-segregation thesis, which is the predominant view in urban studies today. racial or ethnic segregation in colonial times is usually accepted as received wisdom, on the assumption that it does not need to be scrutinized. class segregation in post-independence cit- ies is generally not given a second thought, until the emergence of new towns and gated communities in the course of the 1980s.7 My greatest concern in this discussion is the lack of empirical evidence for the colonial part of the from- race-to-class thesis, as i believe this is the most questionable part. in this chapter i begin to assess the validity of the from-race-to-class-seg- regation and the class-segregation-throughout-decolonization theses. When weighing up the evidence in support of ethnic or class segregation, i shall construct the argument step by step, making a detour into the meaning of ethnic boundaries, income figures by profession, and prices on the highly fragmented rental market, before reaching the core argument about race, class and spatial segregation. When i speak of segregation of classes, social class is not understood in a 6 it should be noted that the works from which i have distilled these two views are less oppositional than the terms ‘from-race-to-class-segregation’ and ‘class-segregation-throughout- decolonization’ suggest. not only did McGee, evers and Wertheim, as we have just seen, sketch a process subtler than a simple ‘from-race-to-class-segregation’ (and they refer directly or indirectly to Karsten’s work), but Karsten for his part did not perceive colonial society purely in class terms. the explanatory Memorandum of the town Planning ordinance, of which Karsten is considered the principal author, speaks of a ‘struggle’ (strijdperk, emphasis in the original) between four funda- mentally different groups: indigenous, chinese, european, and eurasian (Toelichting 1938:80-1). 7 cowherd 2002; Leisch 2002; silas 2002; djoko sujarto 2002.  III Race, class, and spatial segregation 77 Marxist sense of a group with a specific relation to the means of production, but as a grouping of people with a similar income or wealth and a concomi- tant consumption pattern, lifestyle, or tastes. A social class can also be char- acterized by such distinctive values as, according to Weber, individualism, materialism, and rationalism in the case of the middle class. in the modern- ized sections of society, educational qualifications increasingly determine both income and lifestyle.8 Ethnic divisions in colonial times one issue that permeated colonialism in indonesia and elsewhere, leav- ing traces long after independence, was ethnicity. ethnic distinctions in indonesian cities, as in other southeast Asian cities, predated the arrival of european merchant ships, but the rigid legal distinction between indigenous people, Foreign orientals, and europeans was not developed until after the dutch state assumed responsibility for the territorial possessions of the bankrupt dutch east india company in 1799. in the early nineteenth century, Governor-General H.W. daendels and after him Lieutenant-Governor t.s. raffles introduced the idea that it was fair to have separate law courts for indigenous and european people, so that each could be governed by their own legal principles. the dualism was formalized in 1848, when a new civil code and other laws came into force applicable to european citizens only. this civil code required a precise definition of who was considered european, hence subject to the civil code, and who was non-european. Article 109 of the regeringsreglement of 1854, which served the colony as a constitution, provided this definition. initially the non-european category included both indigenous and chinese people. Gradually a finer distinction was drawn between indigenous people (in the definition of a legal catego- ry), so-called Foreign orientals (Vreemde Oosterlingen; chinese, Arabs, and indians) and europeans.9 the apparently rigid juridical tripartite division was in fact permeable, for example for indigenous individuals or Foreign orientals who applied successfully for admission to the european category, illegitimate children by a non-european wife acknowledged by the european father, or a non-european woman who married a european man. in 1899 the whole group of Japanese residents was transferred from the category of 8 Bourdieu 1986; chaney 1996:3-13, 56-70; Giddens 1992, 2002:80; robison 1990; robison and Goodman 1996; tanter and Young 1990; for indonesia: Mackie 1982:128. 9 A formal category of Foreign orientals was not included in the regeringsreglement until the revision of 1906, promulgated in 1920. in official publications the term landaard was preferred to ras. 78 Under construction Foreign orientals to that of european, followed by turks in 1929 and thais in 1938.10 the question of which group a person belonged to had formal consequences for which civil code was applied in legal affairs, the kinds of taxes levied, elections (seats were reserved for each of the three racial cat- egories, with an over-representation of europeans and Foreign orientals), the kind of primary education a child was eligible for, and numerous other state policies.11 Heather sutherland (2008) warns that the hardening of ethnic boundaries was not just a matter of european arrogance, but also sharper self-definition within the chinese and indigenous communities. the legal differentiation was gradually cancelled again during the first half of the twentieth century. in practice many indigenous, chinese, and Arab children were found in european primary schools. criminal law was unified in 1918. the corvée labour imposed on indigenous people was terminated in 1941 (Fasseur 1992:230). Under Japanese rule, the racial hierarchy was for- mally abolished, but de facto merely replaced by a racial ideology maintaining Japanese supremacy (Muhammad Abdul Aziz 1955:166-75; Brugmans et al. 1960:176-91); moreover, separate regulations continued to apply to eurasians, chinese and, of course, the interned europeans.12 the abolition of legally imposed ‘racial’ categories was only fully achieved after independence, after the Japanese had left the scene. the tripartite legal division was discriminatory, but did not explicitly state that one racial category was superior to another. nevertheless, in practice the hegemonic ideology put europeans in a higher position, and europeans occupied the top ranks in many multi-ethnic organizations. At the other end of the scale, the indigenous group was the only category subject to corvée labour for public works. two of the first indigenous intellectuals to contest the alleged european hegemony were r.M. soewardi soerjaningrat and tjipto Mangoenkoesoemo, who both wrote with biting sarcasm about the inappropriateness of the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of dutch independence in a subjugated colony (1913), castigating the dutch paternal- istic attitude towards their indigenous ‘children’.13 one serious problem that arises is that we know very little about the extent to which non-europeans 10 ironically, in 1899 there were fewer than 200 Japanese in indonesia, almost all prostitutes or owners of brothels (sato 1994:4). 11 Visman et al. 1942, ii:42-56; Fasseur 1992:218-30; Gautama and Hornick 1972:3-25; Van der Wal 1966. 12 Announcement to Eurasians (In’ōjin ni tsugu), 12-1-2603 (1943); Policies governing the Chinese in Sumatra (Sumatora kakyō taisaku jisshi yōryō), 2602 (1942) (Benda et al. 1965:72, 182- 3); Peringatan kepada bangsa Belanda indo, Kan Pō 2(11) 2603. 13 Anderson 1991:117; douwes dekker, tjipto Mangoenkoesoemo and r.M. suardy suryaningrat 1913; Gouda 1995:1-5, 160; Houben 1996:82-3, 110-2; r.M. soewardi soerjaningrat 1913; Wertheim 1956:136-7.  III Race, class, and spatial segregation 79 ever accepted the hegemonic view that europeans were at the top (sutherland 1986). Unsurprisingly, we are much better informed about the thinking of europeans. Abundant examples testify to the superior status which europeans claimed in daily life. the distinction seemed so obvious that many people were not always conscious of it, or simply accepted it without overt resistance. When i once interviewed a former dutch resident about social differences, she answered: ‘there were no differences; we all had servants’. Her unspoken understanding that the servant was an indigenous person – not a fact which needed to be explained to the interviewer – is as telling as her lack of aware- ness that the relationship between dutch master and indigenous servant was actually not self-evident. one dutchman recalled that in his youth, from the european perspective, indigenous people were merely part of the scenery (Lechner 2004:139). even Westernized indigenous employees who had worked their way up in the colonial hierarchy could not shake off the habit of display- ing undue deference. For instance, an indigenous travelling inspector with his own car and driver described his cordial reception by a dutch Assistant- resident and his wife; the story seems to be about two equal colleagues in the civil service, until the inspector writes: ‘even Madam shook my hand’. At the theatre, europeans occupied the boxes, chinese members of the audience sat on long benches in front of the boxes, and indigenous spectators clustered in dark corners behind the europeans. the swiss engineer Hans Liniger (1943:26) attended a performance of The merchant of Venice in such a theatre in Palembang, in which shylock was represented as a shrewd chinese merchant, so that his character could be identified more easily. Audiences could also be segregated by different showing times. in Plaju (Palembang), the Bataafsche Petroleum Maatschappij (BPM, Batavian oil company) showed its indig- enous employees films on saturday night and to its european staff on sunday evening (idaliana tanjung 2005:15). despite all these forms of daily discrimina- tion, the proverbial signboard ‘prohibited for indigenous people and dogs’ in swimming pools and at sports grounds is nonetheless a popular trope in the collective memory, but one for which i have not found hard evidence. it is not difficult to find examples of warm inter-racial relationships, which serve as a counterbalance. different racial categories met, but did not really intermix, at the racecourse and at football matches. Men established partner- ships in business, science, politics, and crime.14 Much more common than the warm partnerships between adult men was the loving relationship between an indigenous nursemaid (babu) and the european children she cared for, or 14 Van den Berge 1998; Petrus Blumberger 1939:37-9; Bosma and raben 2003:310-6; Van der Putten 2001; Van till 2006:205-6. 80 Under construction between a babu and the lady of the house. some caution should be exercised, as this well-known trope in white memory is contradicted by recollections of some nursemaids. contradicting the image of european hegemony, a dutch governess was sometimes employed in a eurasian household (nieuwenhuys 1982:113, 134-7, 140; stoler 2002:162-203). Many were the liaisons, marital or extramarital, between an indigenous woman and a european man, and sometimes between a european woman and an indigenous man. By 1930 18% of the marriages involving a european were mixed (Bosma and raben 2003:330). nevertheless, these counter-examples do not detract from the fact that inter-racial relationships in colonial times were generally hierarchical and aloof. As we shall be dealing with urban space and residential segregation, special attention must be paid to the cohabitation of indigenous domestic ser- vants and the dutch elite. Manuals compiled for european women on how to run a household in the tropics recommended employing between seven and ten servants, or at the very least four. traditionally the servants lived on the premises, often accompanied by their spouses and children. A certain distance was maintained: the domestics’ quarters were at the rear of the house, where the separate kitchen and washroom were also situated. servants only entered the house to work; conversely, the lady of the house did not go to the serv- ants’ quarters, unless a servant was ill. during the early twentieth century, the design of modern houses reduced both the need and the space for domestic servants. the houses were smaller, but had better sanitation, facilitated by tap water and electricity. therefore servants could come in to work during the daytime, but reside in the kampong.15 the distance was increased in other ways too. For instance, the clothes of servants and their masters should not be washed together for fear of contamination (Locher-scholten 1998). these examples are taken from european manuals, but the employment of servants was not an exclusively european prerogative; in other words, the master- servant divide was not identical with racial categorization.16 the above-mentioned everyday examples of a hierarchical relationship between different racial categories should not give the erroneous impres- sion that the boundaries were watertight. not only were the legal bounda- ries between racial categories formally changed now and then, the ethnic boundaries were also permeable in daily practice. Made anxious by these 15 i imagine that the changed design was as much the cause as the effect of a changed rela- tionship between mistress and servant. in Kingston, Jamaica, the elite also moved its slaves and servants out of the house; here the process was explained by the emancipation of slaves and the need to erect another, alternative social barrier (Jaffe 2006:9). 16 the treatment of servants as described was not unique to colonial times either and has continued in indonesia up to the present.  III Race, class, and spatial segregation 81 uncertainties, some people made a strenuous effort to maintain the bounda- ries. Ann Laura stoler and Frances Gouda (see also Heng and devan 1995; Locher-scholten 1997; tan 1999) argue that women should be held especially responsible for upholding ethnic distinctions. race was linked to gender. Maternal concerns about the dilemma of raising children in a european or an indigenous tradition and the virtue of women marrying men of their own ‘race’ were the cornerstones in the construction of ethnic boundaries. Anomalies and blurred cases of european or indigenous status became a growing source of worry to the superior european group.17 White women marrying indigenous men had ‘failed’ to maintain ethnic boundaries and were expelled from the white community, socially and legally. the thought of a white woman having a sexual relationship with a non-white man was horrendous to many conservative europeans. in contrast, the racial catego- rization of european men was permanent; if they had a relationship with an indigenous wife or concubine, it did not threaten their white prestige. the progeny of mixed marriages also formed a potential crack in the wall of european hegemony. eurasians who had a formal european status, but a hybrid culture – not speaking perfect dutch, for instance – formed such an anomaly. eurasians themselves clung to their european status, which placed them above indigenous people in the social pyramid. it appeared impos- sible to maintain the fiction that a european person was affluent ‘by right of birth’, as he or she ought to be in order to uphold european prestige (Gouda 1995:157-93; stoler 1995:1-54, 1997, 2002:22-78). According to stoler (1989), poor europeans also threatened the boundaries of colonial categories. therefore, during the depression the sight of unem- ployed europeans (often eurasians) formed another anomaly, a potentially disruptive group in the eyes of employed, conservative europeans. if pos- sible, they were sent home to remove them from public view. stoler’s point intrigues me, because it is pertinent to my effort to treat ethnicity and class as two separate variables. However, stoler makes too much of the anomalous poor europeans sent home during the depression. close reading of the source to which she refers (de Braconier 1919) shows that the unsightly europeans she is talking about formed a particular group composed of not just any poor europeans. they were soldiers who had been recruited in europe, served their time, and were meant to be demobilized in their place of recruitment, europe. Moreover, her use of a 1919 publication to say something about the depression is not valid, and it is not exact to change the mention in the source 17 Gouda and stoler do not spell out exactly who made up this white group and whether there were sizeable groups of europeans who rejected the ideology of white supremacy. it is not clear from their writings to what extent indigenous people and Foreign orientals shared the ideology of white supremacy. 82 Under construction of ‘over 9,300’ jobless europeans living in kampongs (de Braconier 1919:367) into ‘tens of thousands’ of ‘dangerously impoverished’ europeans (stoler 1989:151). european leaders of public opinion were definitely worried about impoverished europeans in the depression, but for humanitarian reasons, not for the supposed threat they posed to colonial ethnic boundaries. My criticism of stoler’s interpretation of poor europeans, however, does not alter the fact that ethnic boundaries – racialized, legally changed, porous, crossed, and fiercely upheld – existed. they formed the precondition of a socio-spatial divide in colonial times based on ‘races’. The case for racial segregation numerous other authors state with varying degrees of conviction and nuances that racial segregation was the rule in indonesia.18 the notion of racial segre- gation is partly shaped by the historical practice of ethnically inspired topo- nyms. the municipality of Medan provides an example of this discourse. in an indigenous kampong that looked like one large orchard, the streets were named after indigenous fruit trees and here the word djalan (street) instead of the dutch straat was used. discussing some new streets, the administration remarked that a ‘european’ neighbourhood should bear european names, for example of local and regional (dutch) administrators. in the tamil ward, streets were named after indian cities (calcutta, Madras, Bombay, colombo) and chinese shopping streets bore chinese names: Pekingstraat, shanghaistraat, Kapiteinsweg, and Luitenantsweg (the latter two referred to the ranks of for- mal chinese leaders), and Hakkastraat (the name of a chinese dialect).19 the claim of racial segregation has been repeated in recent studies of indi- vidual cities. For example, surabaya was divided by the river Kali Mas; an ordinance of 1843 decreed that europeans should live west of the Jembatan Merah Bridge and chinese and Arabs east of it. indigenous people lived clus- tered around the foreign neighbourhoods. Bandung was divided by the rail- way; europeans lived in the modern suburbs north of the railway and indig- enous residents lived south of it. in cirebon, conduits from the waterworks were constructed mainly to houses of europeans; only indigenous people living in or near the palace area (keraton) enjoyed piped water too. europeans in Yogyakarta built the quarter Kotabaru (literally new town), which was like a fortress protected from indigenous visitors by a railway line and the river 18 dutt and song 1994:162; Frederick 1989:2-3; Gill 1995:81, 206-10; nas 1986a:6-8; Van roosmalen 2004:190-1; rutz 1987:74-82; Van niel 1960:23. 19 Gemeenteblad 2 Gemeente Medan 1931, no. 249; Gemeenteblad 2 Gemeente Medan 1938, no. 146; Hind 1051 Medan 1945.  III Race, class, and spatial segregation 83 code. the 1938 telephone directory lists only europeans living in Kotabaru. indigenous people from adjacent neighbourhoods came there just to work as domestic servants or gardeners.20 segregation can be traced in part to the historical quarter system (wijken- stelsel). in pre-colonial times different ethnic groups were obliged to live in separate quarters of port cities. the dutch east india company, Voc, adopted the quarter system, which was formalized by the colonial state in the early nineteenth century. the quarter system obliged chinese people to live in a chinese quarter in places where such a quarter existed (and they did exist even in small towns), but, conversely, non-chinese were not forbidden to live in the chinese quarter. the ordinance on restrictive choice of residence for Foreign orientals was repealed for Java in 1919 and the rest of the Archipelago in 1926. this abrogation did not, however, encourage chinese Figure 8. chinese quarter of Batavia, circa 1930. source: KitLV, special collections nr. 5246. 20 eva nur Arovah 2005:37; Barker 1999:98; Farabi Fakih 2005; timoticin Kwanda 2005:448; rita Padawangi 2006:32-3; Voskuil et al. 1996:47. 84 Under construction residents to abandon the chinese quarter en masse.21 Probably because of the quarter system, chinese quarters were ethnically the most homogeneous of all urban neighbourhoods (Figure 8). For instance, of the 124 plots with a known owner in the chinese quarter of Makassar (in 1945), only two named owners (a dutchman and a haji) did not bear a chinese name.22 Given this evidence gleaned from historiography and contemporary works, the case for racial segregation in colonial indonesian cities seems to have been conclusively made. nevertheless, when the same works and other sources are scrutinized in greater detail, they reveal scattered but ample evidence to the contrary, in two ways: first, class differences within ethnic groups could be important and, second, ethnic groups lived in far more mixed communities than has hitherto been recognized. in other words, spa- tial segregation based on social class was indeed already very significant in colonial times. in the example of piped water in cirebon just mentioned, a difference existed within the indigenous group between the well-to-do who could afford piped water and the others who could not. in the alleged white enclave Kotabaru in Yogyakarta, the presence of a Hollandsch-inlandsche school (His, dutch-language school for indigenous children) suggests the presence of an indigenous elite in the neighbourhood (eva nur Arovah 2005:38; Asti Kurniawati and dwi ratna nurhajarini 2005:24). the chinese neighbour- hood in Makassar, despite the overwhelming chinese ownership of land, also provided space for indians. Houses at the beginning of tempelstraat (temple street) were inhabited by well-to-do chinese; hence the residence pattern was characterized as much by income as by ethnicity. in yet another neighbourhood (behind the roembiaweg) both chinese and indigenous traders lived mixed together.23 the quarter system (wijkenstelsel) for Foreign orientals exempted appointed heads (with the rank of majoor, kapitein, or luitenant), members of the board in charge of orphans and property in trust (wees- en boedelkamer), members of the municipal council, former civil serv- ants, and all others of good repute from the obligation to live in designated quarters (Staatsblad van Nederlandsch-Indië 537/1910 and 538/1910). After the 21 cator 1936:31-5; Furnivall 1944:241; Moerman 1932:53; Visman et al. 1942, ii:53. 22 opgave namen van de eigenaren van de perceelen gelegen aan de tempelstraat, attached to letter Ketua and Wakil Ketua Persatuan Warga cina Perantauan cabang Makassar Hua chiao chung Hui to Wakil Burgemeester Makassar, 27-11-1945, Arsip Makassar 1945-1950 50. 23 teng tjin Leng, summier rapport omtrent den handel van chineesche zijde en het chineesche Kamp, 6-6-1946, Appendix 4 of survey stadsplan, attached to letter ir. n.J. Meyer, Planologisch Bureau Makassar, to ir. Kipperman, directeur Gemeentewerken Makassar, 8-3- 1947, no. 1233/207, Arsip Makassar 1945-1950 38; n.J. Meyer, Hoofd Planologisch Bureau negara indonesia timoer, rapport over de herziening van de voorlopige detailplannen voor de chinese Kamp te Makassar, december 1948, Arsip Makassar 1945-1950 41.  III Race, class, and spatial segregation 85 elite had left, the population remaining in the chinese quarter must have been drawn predominantly from middle- and lower-class backgrounds. W.J. cator (1936:340) concluded that, because of the many exemptions and the large number of chinese who lived clandestinely outside their designated quarter – in 1890 30,000 Javanese villages had chinese inhabitants – the quar- ter system had failed to separate chinese people from other groups. the hilly tjandi area in semarang attracted both europeans and rich chinese residents. in surabaya many indigenous people lived in the neighbourhood designated for chinese and Arabs; what characterized these areas was not ethnicity, but a professional specialization in earthenware and brass-work. in Bandung many indigenous and chinese middle-class civil servants and well-to-do traders settled in the modern suburbs north of the railway. in a number of middle- sized Javanese cities the large chinese quarters were split into a neighbour- hood for the well-to-do and one for the poor.24 even in the Voc era, despite strict regulations, control of settlement in Batavia and Makassar was an illu- sion, and the residential pattern was far more mixed than suggested by Voc regulations (raben 1996; sutherland 1986:47-8, 2008). interviews with elderly residents in Medan, Bandung, surabaya, and Makassar undertaken by Martine Barwegen and myself confirm that ethnic segregation was not as important in colonial times as is generally assumed. Many conversations took the following course. When asked about their former neighbourhood, respondents often remarked that they lived in a european street, a chinese quarter, or an indigenous kampong. When urged to specify who their neighbours were, the picture greatly diversified. Perhaps a person allegedly living in a european neighbourhood did indeed state that the neighbour on the left was european, but the neighbour on the right was indigenous, and across the street lived two chinese families. We shall shortly explore the idea of spatial segregation based on social class by analysing the composition of the housing market. Before we can do this, however, we shall first explore the meaning of social class, or class for short, in colonial and independent indonesia. Social class divisions the study of the comparative influence of ‘race’ or social class on place of resi- dence in colonial times is marred by the fact that both factors were strongly related to each other. the radical critic of colonialism Frantz Fanon (1977:31) even asserted that ‘[i]n the colonies, […] you are rich because you are white, 24 claudius 1935:26; Gill 1995:207; soerabaja 1921:33; Voskuil et al. 1996:47. 86 Under construction you are white because you are rich’. Although this is an overstatement, in practice it is indeed hard to distinguish between a social differentiation based on ethnicity and one based on income, because ethnicity and the opportunity to earn a certain income were strongly related to each other. therefore, the deviant cases, the middle-class indigenous and the poor european, are espe- cially enlightening. recent studies of social class in indonesia have focused on the emergent indigenous middle class, because of their potential of demo- cratic resistance against the oppressive dutch and new order regimes. the earliest indigenous elite in urban centres consisted of bureaucrats, who were rooted in feudal society and held power by virtue of birth; in Java they were called priyayi. the next indigenous group that (metaphori- cally speaking) rose ‘above’ the urban poor were Muslim traders. Unlike the indigenous bureaucratic elite, who occupied a unique position in the social fabric, indigenous traders shared their position with chinese, Arab, eurasian and other businessmen. the social structure became more complex in the early twentieth century when a small group of Western-educated indigenous people began to gain prominence. For their employment these formally edu- cated indigenous people were highly dependent on the state, but their pros- pects for moving up the ladder was hampered by european and eurasian civil servants. their frustration fed the nationalist movement. nevertheless, the colour barrier should not be overstressed: during the depression edu- cated indigenous people outstripped uneducated eurasians in taking middle- rank jobs.25 during the Japanese period, the racial hierarchy was reversed and a white skin, the former sign of superiority, became a symbol of the outcast. Highly educated indonesians were promoted to middle and top ranks in the bureauc- racy. during the indonesian revolution, the colonial prerogatives enjoyed by chinese and eurasian people, and indigenous feudal rulers – based on race or tradition – were swept away forever. the indigenous, professional mid- dle class consolidated its leading position in the state apparatus, but the top ranks in Western companies remained an unassailable bastion until 1957. When firms had taken the trouble to prepare indigenous staff members for executive positions, their trainees often left to join government service upon the completion of their training.26 this sketch of the changing status system and the political potential of the emergent indigenous middle class, interesting as it is, does not tell us to what 25 Petrus Blumberger 1939:58; dick 1985:71-2; Frederick 1989:20-8; Gouda 1995:172; Houben 1996:87-8, 116; ingleson 1988:292-6; Lev 1990; Mackie 1990:115; sutherland 1979; Wertheim 1956:135-52, 1978:135-8. 26 dick 2002a:152-5; Kahin 1952:30; Van de Kerkhof 2005:196; Lev 1990:28; Mackie 1990:115; Meijer 1994:354; robison 1996:79; Wertheim 1956:152-66, 1978:139-40.  III Race, class, and spatial segregation 87 extent people from the same class lived together or were segregated by ethnic divisions. By and large the sketch ignores non-indigenous members of the middle class, although in an analysis of residential patterns the chinese and europeans are as important as indigenous people. Moreover, the extant lit- erature tends to reify classes, while i attempt to disaggregate data and look at residential patterns at the level of individual households. in order to be able to analyse the link between social class and urban space, it is essential to steer away from an analysis of whole classes and to focus on incomes instead.27 in the following analysis of real incomes, upper class, middle class and lower class form points on a continuum of income distribution and should not be considered discrete categories. in government and business, europeans took the lion’s share of the highest paid jobs. According to figures from major cities in Java from the mid-1920s, there was a huge income disparity: the average european salary was nine times indigenous income; chinese also earned more, but less than double, what indigenous urban residents earned.28 the possibility that indigenous, chinese and europeans workers may have received different wages for the same work should not be ruled out,29 but dis- crimination weighed far more heavily on the unequal chances of entering the 27 Howard dick, in contrast, argues that income (expressed as occupational category or household expenditure) is not a reliable indicator of middle-class membership. What char- acterizes the middle class is a certain mode of consumption: the ‘privatization of the means of consumption’; that is, middle-class people withdraw physically or socially from the obligation prevalent in kampongs to share personal property with others (dick 1985:75-6, 2002a:155-7). the advantage of dick’s approach is the proximity to the daily life experience, but the analysis of class and residence as two separate variables is precluded by his equation of suburbs with middle- class lifestyle (and kampongs with lower classes). 28 Booth 1988:326; Lindblad 2002:141-2. When we include rural areas, the income disparity is far larger, because indigenous people were heavily over-represented in the agricultural sector where low incomes were earned. on average (in urban and rural areas combined), a european earned 61 times what an indonesian earned (in 1939) (Booth 1988:329). 29 in 1913 the state decided that civil servants from different ‘racial’ backgrounds would receive the same remuneration for the same job. At the same time, the state maintained three (later two) pay scales for different jobs. this meant that when the majority of employees in a certain job were indigenous, that job would be placed in the indigenous pay scale; all new civil servants employed in that job, regardless of their ‘racial’ background, would receive the salary indicated on the indigenous pay scale. naturally the Association of eurasians, ieV, strongly pro- tested against placing a whole job category in the lower indigenous pay scale, as eurasians were often hardest hit by such financial demotion (Fasseur 1992:230-1; rijken rapp 1930:30; Visman et al. 1942, ii:54, 58; Wertheim 1956:47). it is conceivable that practice did not always follow the law, and that indigenous people in the higher pay scale received lower remuneration for the same work than their european colleagues did. i do not know of anti-discrimination rules for salaries in the private sector, but it is just as well to remember that few of the better educated indigenous people sought employment in the private sector. differences between ‘racial’ categories certainly existed in army pay and widows’ pensions until the end of dutch rule. 88 Under construction better-paid professions. insofar as a tiny indigenous middle class had devel- oped by the end of dutch colonial times, its members were predominantly active as salaried employees, mostly as civil servants. Formal education was the variable explaining the relationship between ethnicity and income. the government’s professed hiring policy was that function depended on educa- tion, not ethnicity, but european children in the colony had a far better chance of completing their formal education than did their indigenous peers,30 not to mention the advantageous position of dutch competitors on the labour mar- ket who had been to school in europe (Kahin 1952:29-33; Visman et al. 1942, ii:13). the worst discrimination was therefore related to enrolment in schools, less in regard to employment, and still less in terms of unequal remuneration for the same task. educational levels, however, cannot fully explain the small window of opportunity open to indigenous people in colonial times to enter the higher echelons: indonesians with the required education for government jobs felt that they were discriminated against during job interviews, because of their appearance, demeanour, mastery of dutch, and height. Western companies were much more reluctant to employ indigenous people in higher ranks than was the state, and job advertisements openly asked for a ‘full-blood european’ (Bosma and raben 2003:304; Kahin 1952:33; Visman et al. 1942, ii:86-7, 91-5). the indigenization of the top ranks of the private sector had to wait until the late 1950s. the unequal chance of getting the better-paid jobs would not have made such an impact on ethnic income disparity if the difference in income between jobs had not been so very large. real incomes, not average incomes per ethnic category, are important here for three reasons: First, to discover how large class (income) differences were; second, to analyse how income differences resulted in different prices on the housing market; and third, to map the spa- tial segregation of the different classes. it is therefore imperative to pay ample attention to wages. Unfortunately, very little has been published about real incomes in the urban economy. i therefore fully agree with the lament that theoretical discussions of the middle class lack solid, sociological statistics (Mackie 1990:96; tanter and Young 1990:11). the few colonial studies on incomes which have been unearthed by historians are cited over and again; this parroting is of itself indicative of 30 in absolute figures, however, indigenous people dominated schools; the percentages of indigenous and european persons completing their education in 1939 were: primary european education 55% and 28% (the remaining 17% taken up by Foreign orientals); lower secondary school (MULo and 3-year HBs) 47 and 34%; higher secondary school (HBs, AMs, lycea) 26 and 59%; tertiary education 49 and 25%. there were also more indigenous people who could read and write dutch than europeans with this skill (Visman et al. 1941, i:60-6).  III Race, class, and spatial segregation 89 the dearth of reliable data. Meijer ranneft and Huender (1926:2, 10, 196-7) published a survey of 405 indigenous households in urban Java in 1925, for which apparently only male breadwinners were interviewed. A civil servant earned on average 1.7 times more than a regular worker in a factory or other company, 2.5 times more than an artisan or independent small trader, and 6.5 times more than a daily coolie (kuli).31 these incomes stood in the same pro- portion at the end of the depression (Booth 1988:334; Van Laanen 1979:135- 6; Wertheim 1956:111). incomes even varied considerably between coolies. research among coolies employed by the municipality of Batavia in 1937 found that unskilled coolies enjoyed a modal income of 30-35 cents per day, and skilled coolies more than 100 cents.32 At the end of Japanese rule, 1945, the maximum wage of an unskilled forced labourer (romusha) in Jakarta and surabaya was set at 50 cents and the minimum wage of an experienced skilled forced labourer at 260 cents (sato 1994:169). the point here is that the income differences within the indigenous category were as large as the differences between indigenous, chinese, and european categories. in other words, the various ethnic groups were divided internally by class lines. Although the extant literature convincingly shows the huge differences in income, it is not fully adequate for my purposes. the first problem is that the data come from colonial times and are restricted to indigenous workers. the second, and more important, objection is that only data about lower and middle incomes are given, there are none about the upper end of the income scale. these gaps in knowledge are filled here by raw data collected in the municipal archive of Medan, summarized in table 4. While these figures admittedly come from only one city and have minor methodological flaws (to be discussed shortly), i nevertheless think they are as reliable and as valid as the much quoted Meijer ranneft-Huender survey of 1925, and the survey of Batavia coolies in 1937. the credibility of the Medan data is enhanced by other similar, but less comprehensive, datasets.33 the Medan data are also important because of the richness of detail: the figures are broken down by profession. table 4 was compiled from different sources – at the risk of comparing 31 in indonesia ‘coolie’ is not a derogatory term, as it is in the West indies. 32 Living conditions 1958:93; Abeyasekere 1989:94; Bijlmer 1986:156-7; Van Laanen 1979:137-8; see also dros 1992:128-9, 139-40. 33 these other sources are a report about day labourers in Jakarta (stelp 1954:7-11), the state pay scales (Staatsblad van Indonesië 2/1949), an overview of ten civil servants’ salaries, from clerk to engineer, in 1936 (Hart 1936:59), and salaries for the lower echelons in Padang from 1930 to 1933 (various bezoldigingsbesluiten, Arsip Padang, Box i). these other incomes are less important (because of inflation) for their absolute values than for the relative differences between the jobs, mentioned in one source. Formal salaries of civil servants were much levelled down during the Japanese period (Kan Pō 2(28) 2603). table 4. Gross monthly income of various occupations (unmarried workers) in guilders, 1942 and 1948 occupation 1942 1948 decision 23/1948 apprentice craftsman 8.30 28.60 [unskilled] coolie; dog-catcher; assistant 13.00-16.00 laundryman; ironing woman; female domestic servant (baboe); assistant cook; repairman; servant (bediende); assistant doorkeeper; watcher laundryman; cook; clerk (completed 17.00-20.00 inlandsche school); assistant overseer (ondermandoer); assistant motor mechanic; broom-maker; white washer; apprentice draughtsman house-painter; assistant toekang (carpenter, 24.00-28.00 42.90 fitter, turner); bricklayer; assistant motor mechanic; debt collector (rekeningloper); laboratory assistant doorkeeper; steel-bender; overseer (mandoer); 29.00 –34.00 114.40 toekang; motor mechanic; driver chief overseer (hoofdmandoer); senior 37.50-46.80 148.72 toekang; senior motor mechanic; chief cook foreman (werkbaas) 56.00 stock clerk (magazijn klerk) 72.50 87.50 nurse; clerk (commies); controller by-laws 220-360 380 (verordening controleur) senior nurse; chief clerk (hoofdcommies); 380-400 380-415 kashouder office head (kantoorhoofd); market admini- 450-500 strator (administrateur pasarbedrijf) technical engineer; building inspector; 625-630 head of department (referendaris) Head Municipal Agrarian office, town 725-850 clerk (gemeentesecretaris) director Municipal Public Works; Mayor; 850-1100 825 superintendent of Public Health (Directeur geneesheer) sources: Letter djaidin Poerba to Hoofd tijdelijke Bestuursdienst, 23-2-1948, no. 896; ontwerpverordening aanneming en dienstvoorwaarden van werkkrachten op maand- of dagloon (including Besluit tijdelijke Bestuursdienst 28-1-1948, no. 23, Loonregeling daglooners, Loonregeling maandlooners), appendix to letter Walikota 27-4-1948, no. 1854; Verklaring burgemeester Medan 8-5-1948, no. 2005; Letter djaidin Poerba to Personeelscommissie Adviesraad stadsgemeente Medan, 5-7-1948, no. 2830; Letter A.J. Paling, gemeentesecretaris, to Vertegenwoordiger directie indische Pensioenfondsen, Medan 7-10-1948, no. 2562; Letter K. rangkuti to Kementerian dalam negeri, 26-2-1952, no. 2152/PA-2, Arsip Medan.  III Race, class, and spatial segregation 91 apples with oranges, or better, of putting all the fruit together in one bowl. the data about the better-paid jobs (starting with stock clerk) are salaries paid out to real persons known by name. remarkably, this dividing line almost coincides with the lower limit of earnings liable for paying income tax, set at ƒ 75 per month (Visman et al. 1941, i:45). the other wages, mostly for manual work, are taken from a list of standard daily wages. in 1948, the tijdelijke Bestuursdienst at Medan set new wages for craftsmen (tukang), overseers (mandur), and drivers (decision 23 of 28 January 1948). An undated list with standard wages for 33 daily labourers and nineteen jobs paid monthly sala- ries is attached to decision 23/1948.34 i have multiplied the daily wages by 26 (working days per month) to obtain earnings per month.35 in this way i constructed a table of monthly earnings for 78 jobs in total; this information has been condensed in table 4.36 the overwhelming conclusion to be drawn from table 4 is the enormous 34 Besluit tijdelijke Bestuursdienst Medan, 28-1-1948, no. 23 and ontwerpverordening aan- neming en dienstvoorwaarden van werkkrachten op maand- of dagloon, both attached to letter Walikota 27-4-1948, no. 1854, Arsip Medan. note that the new wages for apprentices, assistants, full and senior craftsmen, overseers, and drivers mentioned in decision 23/1948 are on average 2.7 times higher than the wages in the attached list (for comparable jobs). this is in line with national policy, by which low wages were tripled in 1949 (Staatsblad van Indonesië 2/1949). 35 it was customary to pay wages on holidays, but there was still a controversy about whether wages had to be paid out on sundays too, especially if six days of wages was insufficient to cover a family’s expenses for a whole week. i have assumed sundays were not paid. Letter Vertegenwoordiger sociale Zaken bij recomba voor noord sumatra to Burgemeester Medan, 22-1-1948, no. Md/6/148, appendix to letter Walikota 27-4-1948, no. 1854, Arsip Medan. 36 A flaw of table 4 is that it mentions only basic wages, whereas in practice incomes were composed of different components. For example, low-income groups probably compensated their minimal earnings with urban subsistence activities, multiple wage earners per household, informal sector activities, or keeping one foot in a home village. Moreover, all wage earners received substantial allowances. For example, according to decision 23/1948, an unskilled daily labourer would earn ƒ 1.37 a day. in addition, he received an allowance for food: ƒ 0.15 for himself, ƒ 0.10 for his wife, and ƒ 0.05 for each child under 16. He was paid only for the days he worked – six days a week – but received the allowance for all seven days of the week, because his income was not enough to maintain his family throughout the week. in contrast, workers who had a sufficient income would receive the food allowance only for the days they actually worked. Hence, the monthly income of a coolie with a wife and two children would amount to about ƒ 47, a quarter of which consisted of his food allowance. A skilled craftsman would receive ƒ 0.20 per day for every child from his third child upwards, over and above the food allowance. note that the remuneration system did not take account of the possibility of a female daily worker (Besluit tijdelijke bestuursdienst Medan, 28-1-1948, no. 23, Appendix to Letter Walikota 27-4-1948, no. 1854, Arsip Medan). in January 1948, the principal clerk (hoofdcommies) at the municipal secre- tariat, A.B. schlette, earned a basic salary of ƒ 380, supplemented by ƒ 59.15 transitional payment scheme, ƒ 52.79 child allowance, ƒ 210.00 family allowance, and ƒ 66.10 price compensation. After subtracting pension and taxes, his net income was ƒ 628.38 per month, more than half derived from allowances (Verklaring burgemeester Medan 8-5-1948, no. 2005, Arsip Medan.). the data about an unskilled coolie, a skilled craftsman, and the principal clerk suggest that the higher the rank, the larger the allowances. 92 Under construction income disparity. Before decision 23/1948 came into force, top incomes were over 60 times higher than the lowest incomes; the more common office jobs (nurse, clerk) brought in ten times more than a skilled craftsman (tukang). decision 23/1948 was followed by a national revision of pay scales37 which was meant to protect the lowest income groups against inflationary high prices, and it had an important levelling effect, even though income distribu- tion remained heavily skewed. this inequality resulted in totally different housing for the various income classes. The housing market income is so closely connected with the kind of house a person occupies that, conversely, the kind of house is an indicator of prosperity (nolan 2002:137). Because of the extremely skewed income distribution, the rental market was also divided into several categories of houses (and rents). each category had its own market of supply and demand. shortage of houses in one category might coincide with abundant supply in another category. the finding that the housing market was fragmented into cheap and expensive houses is nei- ther surprising nor is it unique to indonesian cities. Yet the point is important, because here it is corroborated by hitherto unavailable historical evidence. contemporary accounts break up rents into more or less discrete catego- ries.38 cheap houses without brick walls, sometimes referred to as ‘indig- enous houses’, fetched rents up to ƒ 20-30 per month.39 Very cheap houses in Medan, Bandung, semarang, Malang, and surabaya went for between ƒ 1.00 and ƒ 6.00. dwellings rented for ƒ 1.00-2.00 were usually meant for single coolies, but could be inhabited by couples.40 rents implicitly or explicitly deemed suited for (european?) residents who were middle-class but not rich fell in the range of ƒ 20-80.41 Municipalities did not feel responsible for 37 on 1 January 1949, the lowest wages, up to ƒ 25, were tripled; a salary of ƒ 380 was raised to ƒ 590, ƒ 825 became ƒ 1075 (Staatsblad van Indonesië 2/1949). 38 since contemporary accounts did not, of course, use the same figures consistently, the choice of where exactly to draw the boundaries between different categories of rents is somewhat arbitrary. Moreover, i have ignored the fact that costs of living vary from city to city and from time to time; in other words, converted into rice prices, a rent of, say, ƒ 10 in Medan in a certain year (and month) would not mean exactly the same thing as a rent of ƒ 10 in surabaya. roughly, however, the boundaries used in table 5 give an accurate picture of how contemporaries per- ceived different categories of housing. 39 Gemeenteblad 2 Gemeente Medann 1933, no. 72; Gemeenteblad 2 Gemeente Medan 1937, no. 186; Soerabaiasch-Handelsblad 2-2-1935; Flieringa 1930:165. 40 Gemeenteblad 2 Gemeente Medan 1933, no. 72; Gemeenteblad 2 Gemeente Medan 1938, no. 163; Soerabaiasch-Handelsblad 15-1-1930; tillema 1913:52. 41 Gemeenteblad 2 Gemeente Medan 1937, no. 186; Gemeenteblad 2 Gemeente Medan 1938, no. 10;  III Race, class, and spatial segregation 93 table 5. Percentage distribution of rental values of houses in Malang (1937) and Medan (1948) Monthly rent in guilders Malang Medan 10-30 12 20 >30-50 5 4 >50-80 3 3 >80 1 1 total 100 100 n for Malang = 20,077; n for Medan = 525. sources: Van Liempt 1939:48A-49A; daftar roemah2 Gemeente jang dioeroes oleh Gemeente Woningbedrijf, Medan 18-3-1948, appendix to Penetapan 184/1948 Wali Kota Medan, djaidin Poerba, 23-3-1948, Arsip Medan. rounding off percentages may produce a column total that is slightly more or slightly less than 100%. providing housing for the upper class, that is, houses which rented for ƒ 80 or more. real-estate developers built houses starting with a rent of ƒ 75; they made a distinction between houses for ordinary well-to-do (up to ƒ 120-125), and the truly rich for whom a rent of ƒ 150 presented no obstacle.42 in short, in the late colonial period, lower-class houses cost up to about ƒ 30 per month (the cheapest less than ƒ 10), middle-class houses ƒ 30-80, and upper-class houses ƒ 80 or more.43 A survey of houses in Malang (in 1937) gives the distribution of all houses over the various rental categories (table 5). the percentage distribution is very similar for municipally owned houses in Medan in 1948. the municipality of Medan kept these houses for all its employees, from the lowest coolie to the mayor. so many people were employed in all ranks of the Medan civil service, that its social composition must have been roughly equal to the social compo- sition of the urban society at large.44 By far the largest percentage of houses fell in the cheapest category. in Malang one third of all houses had rents of ƒ 2.00 or less, in Medan one third of all houses rented for ƒ 5.00 or less. Soerabaiasch-Handelsblad 14-1-1935, 8-2-1935. 42 Gemeenteblad 2 Gemeente Medan 1933, no. 72; Gemeenteblad 2 Gemeente Medan 1938, no. 10; Soerabaiasch-Handelsblad 25-3-1930). 43 these categories can be recognized in the typical rents that H.M.J. Hart (1936:58) gives for four income categories: ƒ 6, ƒ 22.50, ƒ 60, and ƒ 150. the Burgerlijke Woningregeling 1934 (Staatsblad van Nederlands-Indië 147/1934), which set rents allowed for different levels of civil servants, also had similar categories. 44 Because of rent control, post-war inflation does not greatly disturb this comparison with the pre-war data from Malang. 94 Under construction table 6. Percentage distribution of monthly rents of houses, 1930-1940 Monthly rent in guilders data set n 0-10 >10-30 >30-50 >50-80 >80-120 >120 Batavia, housing agency niVA, 1934 127 - 7.1 29.9 40.2 20.5 2.4 surabaya, housing agency Van Vloten, 1935 908 0.3 13.4 31.9 32.6 16.3 5.4 surabaya, Soerabaiasch- Handelsblad, 1930-1940 91 - 3.3 9.9 16.5 17.6 52.7 Makassar, Makassaarsche Courant, 1930-1940 27 - 11.1 33.3 29.6 25.9 - Medan, Deli Courant, 1930-1940 31 - - 9.7 25.8 35.5 29.0 n = number of houses sources: niVA 1934; Van Vloten 1935; Soerabaiasch-Handelsblad January-March 1930, 1935, 1940; Makassaarsche Courant January-March 1930, 1935, 1940; Deli Courant January-March 1930, 1935, 1940. the fragmentation of the rental market was embodied in the various chan- nels for marketing rented houses (table 6). Houses for let that were adver- tised in newspapers (Soerabaiasch-Handelsblad, Deli Courant, and Makassaarsche Courant) were predominantly found in the most expensive categories.45 one article from the Soerabaiasch-Handelsblad (25-3-1930) refers to houses with rents of ƒ 80-125 as ‘cheap’, revealing that from the perspective of the reader- ship of this newspaper houses at the upper end of the range of rents were considered ‘normal’. the housing agencies nederlandsch-indisch Verhuur en Administratiekantoor (niVA) in Batavia and Van Vloten in surabaya pub- lished a catalogue of houses for rent once a fortnight or once a month. these housing agencies targeted a slightly cheaper section of the market, but the small difference in focus was not necessarily a difference in marketing strat- egy. the catalogues consulted stem from 1934 and 1935, right in the middle of the depression, when rents were at a low point. Given the dutch language used in the newspapers and the catalogues, both these media reached mainly literate people – not necessarily only europeans – with middle-class and upper-class dwellings. the lower end of the housing market is conspicuously absent in these media, and the majority of urban residents had nothing to 45 our sample of advertisements consisted of the months January, February and March in the years 1930, 1935 and 1940.  III Race, class, and spatial segregation 95 look for in the newspapers or catalogues of housing agencies. niVA and Van Vloten did not offer one single house with a rent of less than ƒ 7.50. the fragmentation of the housing market was thrown into sharp relief during the depression of the 1930s, when various segments of the rental market responded quite differently to the downward pressure on prices. Yet, although the supply of houses could move in opposite directions for each category, the movements were not independent of each other. changes in demand or supply in one category flowed over into the next. For instance, as the depression deepened, more people who had suffered a loss of income abandoned their elite housing, moved in together, or searched for cheaper houses. Whereas 900 houses with high rents stood empty in surabaya, there was a growing demand for houses in the lower-middle-class category (Soerabaiasch-Handelsblad 14-1-1935, 2-2-1935, 8-2-1935). in Medan the vacancy rate of middle-class houses owned by the municipality rose from 10% in 1930 to 40% in 1934. the municipal housing corporation could not respond to the changed market conditions as flexibly as the private sector; renters of upper- class and middle-class municipal houses moved to cheaper private housing (Deli Courant 24-1-1935). By 1937, however, the housing crisis had passed its lowest point. Upper-class houses were in demand again, so that new villas were being built once more (Gemeenteblad 2 Gemeente Medan 1938, no. 10). in contrast to the houses at the top end of the market, cheap rental hous- ing remained in high demand throughout the depression, in response to the downward movement of tenants. compared to prices in general and rents of large houses in particular, rents at the lower end of the market remained com- paratively high (Deli Courant 18-2-1935; Gemeenteblad 2 Gemeente Medan 1933, no. 72, 1934, no. 92). People who were unable to build and were dependent on the lowest segment of the rental market often lived in squalid circumstances. in Padang, for example, a single unemployed eurasian man lived alone in a shelter with a crack a hands-breadth wide in the roof. the inside of his house was papered over with old copies of the Sumatra Bode in an attempt to give it a decent appearance. He paid ƒ 3.50 per month. Another example was a shed which had been split into four rooms, which each fetched ƒ 2.00 per month; all in all five adults and eight children (all indigenous people) lived in the rooms, sharing a door 1.3 m high. the children played together on the 1.5 by 0.5 m veranda. A third building was split into eight windowless rooms sepa- rated by corrugated-iron walls, which did not reach the ceiling; the monthly rent was ƒ 2.00 per room. A middle-aged european woman was among the people living there (Sumatra Bode 23-11-1933). An annual rent (including costs of maintenance and municipal property tax) was considered ‘reasonable’ if it was a tenth of the value of the property. the buildings just described were estimated to have cost ƒ 100, so that the monthly rent should have been about ƒ 0.80 and not ƒ 2.00-3.50 (Sumatra Bode 1-12-1933). 96 Under construction A very important detail in the above description of squalid living condi- tions is that indigenous, eurasian, and european residents lived side by side. class (or income), not ethnicity, determined residence. the same mixing of people of various ethnic backgrounds was encountered at the upper end of the market. For example, in the early 1930s, when not everybody was yet convinced of the severity of the depression, a shortage existed for the cheaper elite houses (ƒ 80-120 per month) in surabaya, because young, pros- perous chinese residents with a modern lifestyle had penetrated this seg- ment of the market (Soerabaiasch-Handelsblad 25-3-1930). After a particularly severe earthquake, chinese residents of Padang left their shop-houses in the chinese quarter and moved to middle-class villas built of wood (where many europeans also lived); they feared their two-storey, brick shop-houses would prove a death trap in the next earthquake (Sumatra Bode 10-1-1929). Race, social class and spatial segregation the data on income of different professions and rents of houses, as presented in the preceding sections, make possible a quantitative analysis of residential patterns to answer the following question.46 do people live together with people from the same ethnic background or the same income group, or nei- ther? in order to compare ethnic and class segregation quantitatively, ideally we need a dataset of many houses containing information about the ethnic background and income of the occupants, and the location (neighbourhood), with data preferably on different cities and on before and after independence. such a dataset does not exist. Working with Martine Barwegen, i have, however, made a tentative quan- titative socio-spatial analysis based on whatever smaller datasets of concrete addresses we could lay our hands on. in the analysis, the occupant’s name was used as the indicator of ethnic background. the profession of the occupant or the amount of rent of the house was used as the indicator of the person’s income. Addresses were plotted on maps, which are as contemporaneous as possible with the other data used.47 the final step was to compile cross-tabu- lations of neighbourhood and the indicator of ethnicity or income. the most important outcomes of these cross-tabulations were: the association between income and neighbourhood was as strong as that between ethnicity and neighbourhood; ethnic segregation did not diminish between 1930 and 1960; 46 A longer version of this section has appeared in Urban Geography. i am grateful to three anonymous reviewers of Urban Geography who made very stimulating comments on a draft. 47 For Bandung: Bandoeng Guide Map 1946; Batavia: niVA 1934: map after page 32; surabaya: Gemeente Soerabaja 1940; Makassar: Kota Makassar 1950; Medan: Gemeente Medan 1933.  III Race, class, and spatial segregation 97 income segregation did not increase between 1930 and 1960 (colombijn and Barwegen 2009). in short, the class-segregation-throughout-decolonization thesis seems to describe the residential-spatial pattern in indonesian cities at least as well as the from-race-to-class-segregation thesis, and perhaps better. is, however, this weighing up of ethnic segregation against class segrega- tion not merely splitting hairs? in the 1950s eshref shevky and Wendell Bell proposed a social area analysis in which they compared urban areas along three dimensions: economic status (or class), family structure, and ethnic- ity. in some cities the three dimensions varied independently of each other, but in other cities two or even all three dimensions came together as one factor (Abu-Lughod 1969; Berry and rees 1968/1969; shevky and Bell 1955). Applying this old idea, could it be said that class and ‘race’ essentially over- lapped in indonesia? the answer is no. the deviant cases – well-to-do indig- enous and chinese residents, and poor europeans – show that ethnicity and class in indonesia should be treated as different dimensions. Live histories the experience of individual persons sometimes differed markedly from the generalizations made on the basis of the quantitative, aggregate data present- ed above. stories told to us by individuals and details on where they lived, or ‘live histories’ as i call them (rather than ‘life histories’), put flesh on the bones of the analysis.48 About 20 people were interviewed by Martine Barwegen and myself.49 the nature of this qualitative methodology rules out ‘hard’ data about the degree of segregation, but the personal narratives provide an understanding of what segregation meant to the persons concerned. one conclusion drawn from these live histories is that the composition of house- holds was often more complex than a nuclear family, whose members would presumably have belonged to the same ethnic group and the same social 48 i prefer the term ‘live history’ to the more general term ‘life history’, because the interviews focused on the housing situation; the alternative habitation style lacks the diachronic aspect of a live history. 49 interviewees were selected by the criterion that they were old enough to have known colonial times from personal experience. they were interviewed in Medan, Jakarta, Bandung, surabaya, and Makassar. the elderly residents were tracked by chance (strolling in old neigh- bourhoods and asking around for the oldest people) and through such networks as Lansia (an organization for elderly people in Makassar) and a reunion of the HBs-5 secondary school in Bandung. We attempted to find people from various ethnic and class backgrounds, but, because of another research question, special attention was paid to eurasians. the latter group was found with the help of Halin (a dutch nGo supporting needy eurasians with indonesian citizenship) and the snowball technique. 98 Under construction class. the interviews therefore challenge the tacit assumption that single- ethnic, single-class nuclear families form the appropriate unit of analysis, an assumption that underlies much of the literature on residential segregation. People pass through a number of living arrangements in their lives, of which the nuclear or extended family is just one. take the story of charlotte Pieters,50 a widow in a brightly coloured dress, interviewed at the age of 73, who introduced herself with a coquettish twinkle in her eye as ‘a eurasian girl’ (een Indisch meisje). she was born on a plantation to a Javanese mother and a dutch father, the eldest of seven children. during the Japanese occupation her father was interned and her mother fled. Her Javanese grandmother took the abandoned children to her house in Medan. initially the grandmother adopted the children and cared for them in her own home, but later she lodged them with the salvation Army (Leger des Heils), where the elder girls, elder boys, and little ones were put in different groups. After the Japanese surrender, when her father came to the salvation Army (her mother had died), charlotte and her sisters felt alienated from him and persuaded him to leave them with the salvation Army. At the age of 18 she had to leave; she took a job at a maternity clinic run by an Ambonese couple. the maternity clinic employed 30 young staff members, all lodged at the clinic; charlotte shared a room with five other young women. At the age of 20, she married a Mandailing (Protestant) driver, and from then on for a long period she fitted into the model of the nuclear or extended family. At the time of the interview she still lived in her own house with one childless daughter and eight grandchildren of two deceased daugh- ters. other common arrangements mentioned during interviews were to live with one’s parents, to sublet rooms, or to become a boarder. the occupation of houses was often transient. Pak Paulus, a roman catholic man from Manado (north sulawesi), who in the 1950s had lodged with his Muslim parents-in-law in Makassar, recalled that the number of residents fluctuated between ten and fifteen, because the house was ‘like the Makassar bus station’, with family members coming and going all the time. the other side to this fluidity was that people moved regularly. An extreme case, per- haps, is ibu Lily, who moved eight times in a decade. she is a chinese who migrated from surabaya to Makassar in 1938, because she had married a man from there. After a year, the couple moved house to a street with only chinese families. during the war, Lily and her husband moved to a road on the inland edge of the city, deemed safer than the seaward side. they subsequently moved temporarily to a large house, where many members of the extended family gathered because it seemed safer. After this house was bombed, the 50 charlotte Pieters is not her real name, nor are those of the other persons presented in this section.  III Race, class, and spatial segregation 99 extended family broke up again and Lily and her husband moved back to the road on the edge of Makassar. in 1947, they moved again, this time to a main road in Makassar. After a short while they swapped houses with their dutch neighbour, because the neighbour had a larger family and a small house (but an attractive large garden), and Lily and her husband had a small family and a large house. soon they moved for the last time, to a rental dwelling, which they were able to buy in 1971 and then continued to occupy for many years. People invariably knew the ethnic background of their neighbours, but as a rule used finer ethnic denominators than the colonial, juridical tripartite division indigenous-Foreign oriental (or chinese)-european. Betty Latuheru from the introduction is one example in this respect and Fanny another. Fanny remembered all the neighbours of her parents’ home by name. they were: a eurasian policeman married to a chinese girl, three indigenous men (Malay, Mandailing and sundanese), a eurasian man who later moved to the netherlands, and chinese families. Both her parents were eurasian and her husband, who moved in with his parents-in-law for the first two years of the marriage, was Manadonese. Fanny has remained conscious of her european roots, which in her own eyes lent her some prestige over her equally penni- less, ‘indigenous’ neighbours, throughout her life. At the end of the interview, the impoverished widow put on a fine red dress for a photograph and to walk the european interviewer to the main street. on the wall of her living room hangs a tile bearing the dutch text: ‘From both my parents i received a part, from my father the shoulders, from my mother the heart’. As a final example, Pak Paulus lived in a kampong where Buginese, Makassarese, torajas, and chinese had lived mixed since at least the 1950s. the fact that streets were ethnically mixed is a detail that recurred in almost every story.51 in contrast, the social standing of the residents of a neighbourhood was usually homogeneous and, when this was not the case, people sometimes considered the class differences unpleasant. ibu Anny is a chinese woman born into a well-to-do family in Makassar in 1934. she spent her youth in a house with a large garden in tempelstraat (temple street). they were the only chinese family in the street; two opposite neighbours whom she remembered were the dutch police inspector and a dutch lawyer. it was an elite neighbourhood; her grandmother’s sister had built a multi-storey house, something truly exceptional in those days, around the corner. With the immi- nent threat of war the location seemed unsafe because the house was situated only two blocks behind the harbour quay, the most likely site for an invasion. therefore, in 1941 they built a brick house on the Bontoalaweg (Bontoala 51 the exception is the street with only chinese families where ibu Lily lived in 1939, but here the presence of ‘very small and cheap rental houses’ defined the street as much in class terms as in ethnic terms. 100 Under construction road), on the inland edge of Makassar. the family felt uncomfortable about the class differences there, because indigenous people lived down the road. the latter were perceived to be different, not because of ethnicity, but because of their ‘lack of education’. one example she gave was that the indigenous children walked around naked until the age of ten. shortly before the Japanese advance into southeast Asia began, the family fled again, this time to a borrowed house in a little town 15 km southeast of Makassar. However, Anny’s mother could not stand residing in what she considered poor condi- tions. to her mother’s horror, water had to be fetched from the river where buffaloes were also bathed. even before the Japanese arrived in Makassar, the family was back on the Bontoalaweg as the lesser of two evils. Another factor that somewhat homogenized social class in a neighbour- hood was company housing. Pak sudharmo is a Javanese man, born in Malang. His father was employed by the state railways (staats spoorwegen) and the family lived in a company house. His father was transferred several times, so that in his youth Pak sudharmo always lived on the same street, stationsstraat (station street), only in different cities and at different house numbers. during the indonesian revolution, young revolutionaries (pemuda) assumed from the address of his residence that sudharmo’s family were dutch or were collaborating with the dutch. in 1945, their house in surabaya was burnt down by pemuda, simply because his father worked for the (colonial) state railways. Furniture, chickens, and dogs were lost. they fled to Malang, but sadly, the company house in Malang was also set alight by revolutionar- ies in retaliation for the First dutch offensive (eerste Politionele Actie, Agresi Pertama). the house was targeted because it belonged to the state railways, but perhaps also because sudharmo’s parents sometimes played gramophone records of Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach, which created a dutch impression. A recurrent theme in the interviews is that people found accommoda- tion through their social network, including their place of work, which is an important explanation of why similar people live in the same neighbourhood. the aforementioned Paulus, to cite one case, arrived at the police academy in Makassar from Manado in 1954, at the age of 21. He lived in a boarding- house with fellow students the first year, and then took free lodging with his commander, who was also Manadonese. others found a house of their own via their network.  III Race, class, and spatial segregation 101 Conclusion in this chapter i have weighed up the evidence in support of the from-race- to-class-segregation thesis versus the class-segregation-throughout-decolo- nization thesis. Although both views find supporters among historians and urban sociologists, the predominant view sketches a picture of ethnic or racial segregation in colonial times; according to this view, after independence the city became ethnically desegregated and at the same time segregated by social class. the most problematic part of this from-race-to-class-segregation thesis is the idea of the racially segregated colonial city; therefore i have focused main- ly on this. the anthropological notion that ethnic categories – race being one peculiar discourse of ethnic distinction – are constructed, context dependent, subject to change, and in perpetual need of reinforcement already qualifies the perception of colonial ethnic segregation. even if we were to accept ethnic labels as given and immutable, a close reading of most historical analyses and contemporary accounts of ethnic neighbourhoods reveals that people from different ethnic backgrounds often lived side by side. the fact that most people lived in neighbourhoods defined by a certain income level or a certain quality (and price) of house rather than in ethnically homogeneous neighbourhoods was confirmed in some 20 interviews with elderly residents. ethnic mixing was not present to the same degree in all neighbourhoods. ethnically the most homogeneous neighbourhoods were the chinese quar- ters. nonetheless, even these quarters were also defined by class; well-to-do chinese had usually moved out to more affluent neighbourhoods. the reason why social class and not ethnicity determined whether a person lived in a ‘european’ suburb or an indigenous kampong was simple: the huge income disparity. Until 1948 the income of the top jobs paid by the municipal administration was over 60 times that of the lowest jobs; a revision of pay scales in 1948 had a levelling effect, but if, on the other hand, we had also taken salaries paid by the private sector into account, the income dispar- ity would have been even greater. Huge differences were also encountered in the rental market, where large houses fetched a rent 50 times that paid for the smallest dwellings. the effect of the large disparity in both income and rents was that houses in a given rent bracket catered to a narrow income group. other class-related factors played a role in socio-spatial segregation too. coolies in Medan, for instance, preferred to live in the urban periphery, where land was cheaper and plots larger than in the city centre. coolie house- holds could grow their own food on the large plots (Gemeenteblad 2 Gemeente Medan 1938, no. 163). does this differentiation between ethnic and income categories matter? After all, the chance of being able to earn a high income was strongly associ- 102 Under construction ated with ethnic background, europeans earning on average much higher incomes than indigenous people. the important question is: Where did dis- crimination reveal itself in colonial society? racial discrimination was mani- fest in the education system, in the employment policies of both european firms and government, and in different remuneration for the same kind of work. these forms of discrimination resulted in different average incomes for the various ethnic categories. However, discrimination was not an important factor in making residential choices. Poor indigenous, Foreign oriental, and european people lived together in one neighbourhood, as did their well-to- do counterparts. the finding that segregation by income played a strong role in colonial times is important to a better understanding of the post-colonial city. From the viewpoint of spatial segregation, decolonization was characterized by conti- nuity. decolonization in itself was not enough to alter socio-spatial inequality in the indonesian cities. After independence it was a disappointment to some that decolonization did not make a difference in this respect. Brick houses continued to be adjacent to brick houses, and bamboo next to bamboo. there are several potential counter-arguments to challenge the idea that income structured urban space as much or more than ethnicity: the existence of the kampong as a typical indigenous environment, the distinction between what were referred to as ‘indigenous’ and ‘european’ styles of houses, and the formal legal distinction between indigenous and european land tenure sys- tems. these counter-arguments will be scrutinized in the following chapters.