Indonesia Conference Directory

Portal, the semi-permanent gate that usually closes at night is an object can be found in the corner of almost any kind of residential streets in Jakarta. One of the characteristics of these gates is that they proliferate in wealthy as well as poor neighborhoods. Although only a few have paid attention to the existence of the practice of gating itself in the city (Kim, 2002; Simone, 2014), indiscriminate spread of security zone in an urban setting is said to be caused by an increase in sense of insecurity that does not recognize class (Blakely and Snyder, 1995; Hishiyama, 2010), and particularly in Jakarta, riot in May 1998 is assumed as the trigger of the emergence of this fortress spatial patterns in all over the city (Colombijn, 2016 p. 15; Kim, 2002; Taddie, 2009). However, the emergence and the initiative behind this practice is still unclear in many aspects especially since such observation failed to recognize that the practice of gating is also closely related to neighborhood associations (RT/RW) that spread universally as a lowest administrative unit and may exercise informal authority over the matter of local security in their territories. This paper tries to shed a light on the hitherto unclarified trajectory of the proliferation of the Portals, which also predicated upon two distinctive yet parallel socio-political transformation in grassroots level, namely 1). the decentralization of local security that enable the dynamic formation of alley-level authority, and 2). the intensification of daily transportation in the city that bring the disruptive material and immaterial flows into residential realm.