Urban Farming in Indonesia: The Soil of the Kampung and a City Tilled by Togetherness

Urban agriculture in Indonesia is often said to have "begun with a single tweet in 2010." The community-gardening movement Indonesia Berkebun, called into being by the architect Ridwan Kamil, was indeed a symbolic starting point of the modern urban-farming boom. But that was the spark, not the firewood. The firewood had been stacked far longer. The pekarangan homegarden, where vegetables and fruit trees are grown in the houseyard, and gotong royong, the mutual aid in which a whole neighborhood pitches in together. The modern movement is better read not as an invention from nothing, but as the moment when the wind of social media blew over embers that had long lain in this country's living culture.

The vantage point of this piece is history and culture. Why is Indonesian urban farming so strongly bound to the "kampung" and to "the whole neighborhood turning out"? Why does the alley itself — the lorong, the gang — become the stage for a garden? Why did the order run the way it did, with a movement begun by citizens later chased by municipal and central institutions? None of these can be answered by a one-step account of policy. The long memory of houseyard farming, the social norm of mutual aid, rapid urbanization and its environmental burdens, and the governance frame of decentralization — only by unraveling this layered backdrop in turn does the present landscape come into focus.

To anticipate the conclusion: Indonesian urban agriculture takes "self-generation from below" rather than "design from above" as its starting point, and has grown as a device that bundles several values — food security, the renewal of community, environmental improvement. It cannot be measured by yield alone, for it holds within it neighborly cohesion, children's learning, and even a response to urban ills such as flooding and waste. That very characterization is a product of the culture this country has long cultivated — the homegarden and mutual aid. What follows reads that history along its timeline.

This database currently holds about eight cases from Indonesia. The breakdown gathers several cases in the capital, Jakarta, while extending beyond Java's major cities to Bandung in West Java, Surabaya and Malang in East Java, Yogyakarta in Central Java, and Makassar in Sulawesi. From a nationwide movement, to municipality-led integrated programs, to alley-scale neighborhood gardens, to public spaces for children — the breadth of actors and spaces is the first thing that tells you about this country. That it resists a single template is the result of citizen-born movements and government institutions growing up separately, in each locale.

Turn to the dates and the cases spread widely, from 2005 to 2021. The oldest lineage traces to the "vegetable village" in Yogyakarta that emerged around 2005; then the nationwide movement of 2010 to 2011, the environmental kampung of Malang in 2012, the alley gardens of Makassar in 2014, and, around 2020 against the backdrop of the pandemic, efforts in Bandung and Jakarta raising the banner of food security. This temporal spread shows that what accumulated was less a single policy wave than different occasions layered, one upon another, atop a cultural substrate. The fuller lineage is explored in the "History" section of the main text.