Jakarta: Architecture + Adaptation 
edited by Dr. Etienne Turpin, Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow, SMART Infrastructure Facility
Adam Bobbette, and Meredith Miller.
[Bilingual edition in English and Bahasa Indonesian]
(Depok: Universitas Indonesia Press, November 2013)

From 2011-2013, Architecture + Adaptation was a collaborative, multidisciplinary platform investigating the intersections among extreme environmental circumstances, urban poverty, and contemporary architecture and urban design. Relying heavily on situated research, community engagement, and field observation, Architecture + Adaptation conducted intensive site-based research studios to produce both the visual documentation and analysis of environmental pressure and the tools for urban poverty advocacy that promote practices of mutual aid and community resilience. Before joining the SMART Infrastructure Facility’s Urban Livability, Sustainability, and Resilience Research Group at the University of Wollongong, Dr. Turpin coordinated this international research platform, bringing together students from the University of Michigan (USA), the University of Hong Kong (China), Rangsit University (Thailand), and Universitas Indonesia (Indonesia).

This publication brings together the research conducted in Jakarta, Indonesia, additional analysis, and a series of texts from contributors including AbdouMaliq Simone, Abidin Kusno, Rudolf Mrazek, Ms. Herlily, Dodo, Wardah Hafiz, Edi Saidi, and Gradma Della of the Urban Poor Consortium. Through this collection, the book invites readers to consider the possibilities that are opened up to architecture, design, and planning practices when they make a commitment to working for more equitable forms of urban development. By emphasizing the co-dependency of social and environmental justice, Jakarta: Architecture + Adaptation argues that our contemporary urban systems, whether in Jakarta or elsewhere, require new attitudes and approaches to both poverty and pollution in the era of climate change.

About the Book

Jakarta: Architecture + Adaptation is a brilliant work of interdisciplinary, international collaboration at its finest. The contributors bear witness to the fragile, tumultuous lives of water within a globalized hypercity afflicted by radical inequalities in access to vital resources and exposure to life-threatening risk. Above all, this book reminds us that detailed research and intellectual innovation are compatible with the ideals of advocacy, here advocacy for communities that must scramble to survive neoliberal onslaughts against their rightful resources. The book is essential reading for students and activists of the urban impacts of climate change, privatization, urban eco-design, sustainability, resilience and the environmentalisms of rich and poor, all mapped out in thoughtful detail on the body of a major global city.
— Rob Nixon, Rachel Carson Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison & author of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

Jakarta: Architecture + Adaptation is a call to arms seeking to instrumentally deploy design for climate change and environmental justice, issues the future of our planet must address. Jakarta’s relationship to water provides a prescient case study with far reaching applications. The authors are invested in the role research can play as a speculative and projective act; providing agency and on-the-ground impact for those architecture most often ignores yet are most at risk for the effects of climate change.
— Lori A. Brown, Associate Professor, School of Architecture, Syracuse University & editor of Feminist Practices: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Women in Architecture

Contact Etienne Turpin for more information.