Public housing in post-colonial Indonesia: The revolution of rising expectations

Abstract

Public housing can show us important things about Indonesia in the 1950s, because seemingly technical, neutral planning decisions were in reality highly political choices. Public housing was restarted on a massive scale in Indonesia in the early 1950s, but the building volume soon fell off because of financial constraints. This limited success raises the questions of what happened to public housing during the decolonization, which groups were reached, what the size of the public housing sector was, and why public housing soon failed to live up to the high expectations of the political leaders, and perhaps the general public too, after Independence.