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Cities Without Maps - Kota Tanpa Peta is an artistic mapping project for two Kampungs, Ratmakan and Jagalan, along the Code River (pronounced cho-day), Yogyakarta, Indonesia which was produced as part of an Asialink residency, 2008.

Ratmakan and Jagalan are areas, typical of many of the new urban communities in Indonesia, which have hitherto existed without a map based on any Cartesian principles of perspective and scale. Beginning the process of making a map – for a place which exists relatively happily without one -presented us with the challenge of reinventing what a map is. Do we just map the geographic space or do we map other social aspects which constitute this physical space? For example, how does a map reflect issues such as how many people live in each house or how space is used differently by men and women, older or younger people? What purpose does a map represent for a community who has shaky legal ownership ofthe land they live on, and who navigate between houses based on long term memory of which families have lived there? How do we map things like the numerous ghost stories which collect in a community built on a former grave-yard and which provide traces of the lives of past residents? How do we include the numerous social maps inked directly onto the body through the strong tattoo culture in Kali Code?

Kids drawing workshop, July 6th, Jagalan Kampung, Kali Code. Kids from the area drew pictures of their houses and their occupants which were placed on a giant map.

This project is a mapping of the community, in collaboration with some of its members, where we view space as a combination of both its physical and social aspects. We decided that a map is not just a two dimensional object but a more complex representation of the various connections which make up a specific location. This project has been generated out of drawing and mapping workshops and discussions in the local area and video documentation of interviews with community members about their relationship to the area.

Our map, drawn from memory, of Kali Code.

Kali Code is a unique and contradictory place: it exists as a semi-squatter community but its houses are relatively well established and not always under threat of immediate eviction; its community has greater freedom over the construction and design of their own immediate living space but are also subject to government repression, corruption and neglect. While most houses are self designed and constructed several blocks of apartments have also been built along the river by developers and some residents live within these more regulated living spaces. During this mapping project building was underway for a new block of apartments and several houses in the squatter community were marked for demolition.

Kali Code is home to poor people and also those who choose this place so that they can live without society judging them for personal choices over sexuality, marital status or other indicators of dissent such as tattoos. It is a somewhat permissive space relatively autonomous from other more formal city spaces where young people come to nongkrong (hang out) and set up houses together. But Kali Code is also a densely packed and highly communal (self) regulated space with a porous boundary between public and private life and many obligations for community participation and responsibility.

Animation still from Cities Without Maps - Tanpa Kota Peta

Part of our inspiration in this project is Mike Davis's book Planet of Slums which explores how the majority of people in the world live outside formal economic and government structures. While these "slums" have many social problems and exist in states of genuine poverty they can also generate important examples of community based architecture, social planning and autonomy. These aspects link into our ongoing interest in researching the structures of urban communities and the "free", "public" or "communal" spaces people continuously create within them.

This mapping project challenges the notion of the "monolithic metropolis" by looking at the various gaps and striated spaces that exist within city life and the ways in which these spaces will always conflict with attempts at spatial homogenisation and/or gentrification.