Space of Maintenance: A Situated Understanding of Maintenance Practices in Jakarta Contested Neighbourhoods

This PhD by Design thesis investigates the spatiality of maintenance in the contested urban neighbourhoods of Jakarta, Indonesia; and how it informs design. Discussion of maintenance has been largely neglected in the current urban and architectural discourse due to perception of maintenance as backstage activity. Yet, driven by the 2015-2016 massive evictions happening in Jakarta, the thesis argues that maintenance research is increasingly urgent in a disputed context where access to spaces and resources are limited.
Current maintenance discourse highlights the importance of a situated understanding of maintenance. The thesis employs practice theory to explore the spatiality of maintenance, arguing that such framework enables investigation of actors’ complex in doing maintenance across spatial settings. The thesis objective is to creatively make this experience more visible and by doing so construct the spatiality of maintenance.
The thesis investigates two case studies with different conditions of maintenance and different context of contestation. The first case study explores waste practices in Kampung Pulo, a riverbank neighbourhood without access to waste collection services. The second case study explores clearing out practices in Pesing Koneng temporary market, a locally organised space outside the Pesing Koneng neighbourhood. The fieldwork employs a combination of qualitative methodologies for data collection; conducting observations, visual documentations, and semi-structured interviews that build the maintenance narratives. Based on these data, this PhD by Design research conducts creative explorations as a form of analysis that situates maintenance in space. Titled as PLATES, these explorations become a form of design portfolio that are integrated with the text.
Based on these narratives and creative analysis, the research conceptualises the spatiality of maintenance. The thesis points out the actors’ territoriality of maintenance; and the mixed, subjective, and partial ways the maintenance process is performed. It addresses connections between waste types to its potential space of disposal, highlighting traces that creates challenges of maintenance in space. This thesis then discusses how the knowledge of maintenance spatiality expands design methodologies for contested context, proposing a practice based spatial inventory and situated research creative methodologies.