Kirjahaku

This is a remarkable study of urban society in one of Indonesia's main port cities. It views the city from below based on the experiences of the people who occupy its alleyways, riverbanks and muddy roadsides, a group that has had little say in the making of policy or the writing of Indonesia's history. The setting is a crowded low-income neighbourhood (kampung) that lies between the Surabaya River and the city's main southern boulevard.Using rich ethnographic description, Robbie Peters describes kampung residents struggle for survival in the shadow of Indonesia's tumultuous economic growth and political reform, and how they have subtly contested the efforts by the state to control the movement and settlement of people, limiting its ability to construct an urban citizenry that excludes newcomers.

Surabaya, 1945-2010 presents the recent history of one of Indonesia's great port cities as viewed from a crowded low-income neighbourhood (kampung) called Dinoyo. By following the lives of Dinoyo residents over three generations, it provides a new perspective on landmark moments in the country's modern history, including the war for independence, the destruction of the Communist Party, the petrus anti-crime campaign, neighbourhood improvement projects, the fall of the New Order and the rise of democracy, as well as more recent government campaigns to fight terrorism and promote urban renewal.During several long periods of residence in the kampung, Robbie Peters gathered richly detailed information about the responses of its residents to the tumultuous process of political reform and economic growth. He shows how their informal economy adapted to the forces of urban change, and how their neighbourhood-based social institutions promoted a 'participative' citizenship that resisted state attempts to shape a more exclusive citizenship that restricted the rights of newcomers to the city.Residents of urban neighbourhoods such as Kampung Dinoyo make up a substantial proportion of Indonesia's urban population and their kampungs a significant proportion of urban land, yet they rarely appear in historical accounts of the Indonesian city. Peters' account of urban life as experienced by one group of kampung residents is a unique contribution to the literature on one of Asia's largest and most complex countries.Shortlisted for the European Association for Southeast Asian Studies (EuroSEAS) Humanities Book Prize 2015.

Surabaya, 1945-2010, presents the recent history of one of Indonesia's great port cities as viewed from a crowded low-income neighborhood (kampung) called Dinoyo. By following the lives of Dinoyo residents over three generations, it provides a new perspective on landmark moments in the country's modern history, including the war for independence, the destruction of the Communist Party, anticrime campaigns, neigh-borhood improvement pro-jects, the fall of the New Order, and the rise of democracy, as well as more recent government campaigns to fight terrorism and promote urban renewal.