Voorijder

Mirza Adrian NP

(21 April 2014)

    Setelah beberapa bulan tinggal di Jakarta, saya menemukan sebuah fenomena yang tidak pernah saya temukan sebelumnya di Bandung: Voorijder di jalan. Mungkin karena di Bandung saya tidak pernah lewat jalan utama (dan pastinya aneh juga kalau ada pejabat dengan voorijder lewat di Cisitu - Tamansari) sehingga saya tidak pernah menemukan kendaraan jenis ini di Bandung. Sejauh ini saya merasa bertemu dengan kendaraan ini adalah kejadian paling mengesalkan yang bisa terjadi di kemacetan Jakarta, setara dengan disembur asap Kopaja atau motor 2-Tak. Dengan sirine yang keras dan meraung, kendaraan ini meminta semua kendaraan lain untuk menyingkir demi kelancaran pejabat di belakangnya. Seakan-akan jalanan Jakarta adalah fasilitas untuk pejabat negara dan rakyat hanya menumpang. Tapi dibalik kekesalan itu, saya kemudian teringat pada sebuah buku yang ditulis oleh Tom Vanderbilt berjudul Traffic.

    Dalam buku ini Vanderbilt berpendapat bahwa kondisi lalu lintas adalah cermin paling jujur dari budaya dan kondisi sosial masyarakat karena menurut dia jalan adalah sebuah wahana interaksi sosial yang paling demokratis dimana semua orang berkumpul dan berinteraksi dengan batasan sistem hukum yang formal dan nonformal di antara pengguna jalan. Dalam buku itu Vanderbilt menulis:

The road, more than simply a system of regulations and designs, is a place where many millions of us, with only loose parameters for how to behave, are thrown together daily in a kind of massive petri dish in which all kinds of uncharted, little-understood dynamics are at work. There is no other place where so many people from different walks of life—different ages, races, classes, religions, genders, political preferences, lifestyle choices, levels of psychological stability—mingle so freely. (Traffic, Tom Vanderbilt)

Sehingga perilaku kita berlalu lintas dapat digunakan sebagai bahan analisis untuk membantu kita untuk memahami kondisi Indonesia yang lebih makro.

A Call to Arms: Jakarta Book Cooperative Project

By Mirza Adrian NP

(5 April 2014)

Cicero once said that if you have a garden and library, you have everything. In that case, I feel that Jakarta is an impoverished city since this city has neither garden nor library, only offices and malls.

***

For those of you who have been in Jakarta, you can easily see that the daily routine of this city revolve around getting our way through the traffic from home to work and back every day. For most people, waking up as early as five o'clock in the morning means preparing themselves to face up to three hours of traffic to get to work then work for nine hours before facing the traffic again for another three hours. During the traffic, most people are alone in their car cursing other people around them, while at the same time being cursed by other people around them. The same thing happens on their way home and after they arrive at home, people are all spent and tired. They go to bed to reset the cycle and the next day the whole thing start all over again. This routine leaves no time for meaningful socialization where people actually share feelings and ideas to other people.

Also, the lacks of public space that exist in Jakarta confine people from meeting with different type of people from another group of society or class. For most people in Jakarta, the only public space available to meet up with other people is the mall which is abundant in this city. However, as a public space, the mall is isolated from the outside world. Within the mall, the middle class can spend their time to socialize undisturbed by the poorer part of the society. This stark division and social confinement leads to a narrow point of view that is laden with bias and prejudice which breeds social distrust within our society. By perpetuating our current way of life we are wasting our social capital and create a very unliveable city.

However, I believe that this can be changed. And I would like to change all that by creating a public library. But I am not planning to build an ordinary library. I am planning to make a communal library in the heart of Jakarta in the form of cooperative so people across our society can be involved with the creation of this library. Thus, this library will be a library that is created from the people, by the people, and for the people of Jakarta. I hope that by making a communal library we can increase the amount of meaningful interaction between people to share feelings and ideas with other people from different background, class, and ethnics. I feel that through the increase interaction we can increase the social capital of our society and make Jakarta a more liveable city.