Perpustakaan Digital ITB

ABSTRACT Urban flooding disproportionately affects residents of cities in the Global South, but the local knowledge of these residents tends to be largely excluded from formal disaster management or development policy. This thesis examines this gap between decontextualized institutionalized knowledge in flood governance and the dynamic localized knowledge of a community affected by urban flooding in Kota Bandung, Indonesia. Bandung is experiencing strong urbanisation and increasingly intense rain patterns, and struggles with urban flooding because of it. The city has deep Dutch-colonial institutional legacies and functions within a strong centralised system of governance in Indonesia. The central research question of this thesis asks how local urban knowledge can inform foundational components of local-level action plans for flood resilience in Kota Bandung. The main theories used in this thesis are critical knowledge theory, postcolonial disaster studies, and resilience theory. These establish that knowledge, disaster, and resilience are not neutral objective concepts but are, like Kota Bandung, shaped by historical power relations. The theoretical concepts used as primary analytical lens are Wardekker’s (2021) framing typology on resilience and the concepts of scientisation and omission derived from the work of Agrawal (2002). Methodologically, this thesis rests on deductive policy coding, which was applied to four Kota Bandung development and disaster management policy documents, and exploratory fieldwork in the shape of an open survey, which was done with fifteen residents of RW8/RW6 in Kelurahan Pajajaran, a flood-prone neighborhood in Bandung. The policy coding revealed a dominant cluster of scientific frameworks with Western roots, technocratic understandings of disaster, and a short-term system resilience focus across all four documents. Local urban knowledge, when present in the policy, was scientised through decontextualization rather than fully integrated in its place-based relevance. The open survey findings revealed an embodied early warning system, household micro-engineering methods, and community-led gotong royong collective action as the main resilience mechanisms existing almost completely outside formal governance. This thesis concludes that a local-level action plan should not attempt integration of local knowledge into the existing technocratic policy framework as this carries a high risk of scientisation. Instead, it should include three foundational components: formal institutional recognition of existing practices, institutional support in developing and implementing a community-based early warning system, and centering RT/RW leadership in any future local level action plan design process.