The Urban Design of a Balinese Town: Placemaking Issues in the Balinese Urban Setting$ T

Habitat International 25 (2001) 559–575 The urban design of a Balinese town: placemaking issues in the Balinese urban setting$ T. Nirarta Samadhi* Department of City and Regional Planning, National Institute of Technology (ITN Malang), J1. Bendungan Sigura-gura No. 2, Malang 65145, Indonesia Received 20 November 2000; received in revised form 9 February 2001; accepted 20 April 2001 Abstract This research considers the role of indigenous institutions and conceptions of space in the urban design process for producing culturally appropriate designs for Balinese towns. Employing a pluralistic approach (The Image of the City, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1960; Planning a Pluralist City: Conflicting Realities in Ciudad Guyana, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1976; House Form and Culture, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1969, Human Aspects of the Built Form, Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1977), a case study of the town of Gianyar, Bali, Indonesia explores the popular accounts on the operative indigenous conceptions of space in contemporary Balinese urban settings. This exploration aims at providing a ground for reconnecting urban design proposals with their cultural context, thus promoting the spatially expressed localism originating from the diversity of cultures which is currently undermined by the highly standardized process of the Indonesian planning system. In particular, for the town of Gianyar, such an exploration provides a set of placemaking issues which is useful in devising urban design guidelines for achieving a town with more pronounced cultural identity. The research concludes that to achieve culturally appropriate places, the design process has to acknowledge the Balinese Hindu psycho-cosmic concept as the core principle in the design of Balinese townscapes. As such, the existing indigenous cosmic territory, which accommodates the relationship between human (microcosm) and environment (macrocosm), along with its adat law and institution, has to be incorporated in contemporary urban design processes. As a result, urban spatial organization, structure and form will significantly reflect the Balinese cultural identity. r 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Bali; Culture; Cosmology; Pluralistic; Placemaking $An earlier version of this paper was submitted to the World Congress on Environmental Design for the New Millennium, Seoul, South Korea, 9–21 November 2000. *Corresponding author. Fax: +64-341-553-015. E-mail address: [email protected] (T. Nirarta Samadhi). 0197-3975/01/$ - see front matter r 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 1 9 7 - 3 975(01)00024-8 560 T. Nirarta Samadhi / Habitat International 25 (2001) 559–575 1. Introduction The current situation of urban design in Indonesia is characterized by a highly standardized process imposed by the currently operating planning system. The extent of standardization in the planning process has been such that it significantly justifies the claim that there is predictable uniformity in the documents of urban designs from Indonesia’s westernmost town of Sabang in Aceh to the easternmost town of Merauke in West Papua. Thus they lack the dynamics of localism in design that should have been reflected on the account of the existence of local characteristics. The other potentially undesirable influence is mainly the Western oriented urban design training in Indonesian education institutions which is by and large alien to the Indonesia’s diversity of cultures. These unfortunate conditions lead to the utter disregard of the diversity of spatially expressed localism throughout the Indonesian archipelago in the processes, and consequently, the products, of urban designs. Thus, Indonesian towns are designed in a sort of way which makes them detached from local cultures and their spatial expression, and consequently lacking cultural identity. In Bali, one of the world’s favorite tourist destinations, this situation is worsened by the drive to develop the tourism industry, meaning that building designs and their associated amenities are mainly oriented towards the cultural needs and tastes of the paying guests. Inevitably, this planning framework produced culturally alien spaces (Townsend, 1988; Pitana, 1994). In the end, it encourages the desire for traditional cultural heritage to be reflected in contemporary Balinese urban landscapes and promote it globally as their touristic identity. In this respect, learning from tradition is one of the main placemaking strategies to achieve a Balinese town which strongly reflects its cultural images, and hence producing culturally appropriate urban designs. The production of places and placemaking, in this case is advocated as the urban design strategy to cope with the above-mentioned desire. Such a claim stems from the concept of place which renders the existence of distinct characters in a space generated by local culture and its operative customs and traditions (Trancik, 1986). Also from the philosophical notion that place is the man’s existential space which makes him belong to a social and cultural totality (Norberg- Schulz, 1971). Thus, the adoption of place approach in urban design process will give physical space an additional richness by thoughtfully incorporating unique forms and cultural details indigenous to its setting. 2. Tradition and cultural constant The concept of ‘tradition’ is dealt explicitly by Shils (1981) who defines it as ‘that which is handed down’: Tradition y includes material objects, beliefs about all sort of things, images of persons, and events, practices and institutions. It includes buildings, monuments, landscapes, sculptures, paintings, books, tools, machines. It includes all that a society at a given time possesses and which already existed when its present possessors came upon it y (p. 12). This definition emphasizes the continuity of tradition, its persistence in the present time or otherwise it would not be a ‘tradition’. It is also important to note that the concept of tradition T. Nirarta Samadhi / Habitat International 25 (2001) 559–575 561 encompasses material objects as well as beliefs, which is particularly important if one begins to examine the implication for such a definition on the built environment. With respect to architecture and human settlement, tradition may be defined as ‘the passing down of the elements of culture’ (Oliver, 1989, pp. 53–54), where, in the case of urban design, ‘elements’ may refer to patterns and principles for manipulating space into built environments. The need of learning to design and build from others’ experience is espoused by authors as early as Vitruvius, who explains that any building more complicated than the simplest shelter must be the product of both imitation and innovation (Vitruvius, trans. M. H. Morgan, 1960, pp. 38–40). As society’s built environments develop to become more permanent, convenient, and pleasing, it necessarily must be the unmistakable reflection of the group’s shared expectations, or their culture (Parsons in Murphy (1979, p. 26)). People are known to share a system of expectations, therefore they probably also share some guiding principles that are inherent within those expectations. It is this set of essential principles that binds the members of a group and encourages them to commit to living together. As such, tradition establishes patterns and generalities that ensures that a group’s fundamental beliefs are expressed and sustained in and through the built environments and thus preserve the culture of the group. The more clearly the built environment reflects their culture, the more successful those patterns are. Each culture carries within it over time patterns and generalities that unify and specificities that distinguish. These generalities are underlying aspects and features that are evident within the cultural landscapes of a built environment through time, despite contextual changes, and as mentioned previously, are the elements that in part go towards forming a tradition. They are the cultural constants, and are to an extent, unconscious decisions that are taken for granted by the people local to the built environment. In brief, space-manipulating traditions ensure that the complicated task of matching built environment to cultural need is successful and that a society’s environment carries as much cultural meaning as possible. Traditions can and should change constantly to improve the quality of the match, especially when the culture itself is changing. Thus, as long as the essential principles of the culture, hence the cultural constants, are not threatened, existing built environments and traditions can be helpful to comprehend the new or to assist the process of producing them. When there is no cultural and temporal continuity, the built environment loses its ability to perpetuate its cultural familiarity, thus hindering the people’s effort to make sense of their world or to create their existential space, and hence a place. To illustrate these thoughts, it might be very useful to study the example of Bali, where traditions of placemaking seem to survive and, indeed, to have been reinvigorated by innovation despite rapid modernization. This is possible because the Balinese have a clear idea of what is essential in their life, which is the balance of life. The town of Gianyar, once the seat of the ancient Gianyar Kingdom was chosen to be the case to be investigated, and a pluralistic approach (Appleyard, 1976; Lynch, 1960; Rapoport, 1969, 1977) was adopted for the field survey, using questionnaires and

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