Bosman Batubara awarded with a Doctoral degree

On 8 June 2022, Mr. Bosman Batubara from Indonesia, successfully defended his PhD thesis and was awarded with a Doctoral degree. Professor Margreet Zwarteveen was his promotor and Dr. Michelle Kooy his co-promotor.

Download the thesis here

This thesis aims to inform critical thinking of and acting on flood events and flood infrastructure development in Jakarta, to call attention to how they are deeply political. It explains how both the occurrence of flooding and the development of flood infrastructure in contemporary Jakarta are partly the result of, and in turn help to create a particular trajectory of Indonesia’s (post-) New Order regime (1965-1998 and 1998-now) uneven urbanization.

Equipped with ‘political ecology of urbanization’ explanatory framework and ‘ecologized dialectical method’, this thesis repoliticizes, and opens possibilities on how to think through and confront, the uneven urbanization of (post-) New Order regime in its relation to the production of Jakarta’s flood events and development of flood infrastructures involving human and nonhuman in the city and beyond, above and below ground.