If there is an assumption in urban historiography that every epoch will produce a governing regime appropriate to its time, Indonesia is perhaps a fine case in point. In 1950, soon after the transfer of sovereignty from the Dutch to the new republic, the Indonesian government convened the Congress of Healthy Housing for the People (Kongres Peroemahan Rakjat Sehat) in Bandung. The political leaders of the newly independent Indonesia were aware of the housing gap in colonial rule and regarded peroemahan rakjat (people's housing) as one of the major goals of the Indonesian revolution. In 1952, during the second congress in Jakarta, Vice-President Mohammad Hatta indicated that this goal ‘won't be realised in two years. It won't be completed in ten or twenty years. However, in forty years or in half a century we will be able to fulfil our wish, if we are committed and make effort with confidence’ (Hatta 1954: 254).

Yet, by the 1970s, with the violent death of Sukarnoist socialism and the rise of Suharto's New Order, the notion of peroemahan rakjat (with its association of the state's mass housing program supported by community self-help, which Hatta (1954: 257) called ‘auto-aktivitet’ and ‘gotong-royong’) had eroded into a failed utopia of the past. The new political regime, encouraged by international development agencies such as the World Bank, preferred to enable the private capital market to determine the prices of land and housing. This shift at once ensured urban development would be, above all, an arena for business interests. For the next several decades, the Indonesian city was governed by an urban growth coalition that consisted of the president and other government elites, the military and business groups. By the mid-1980s, fuelled by neoliberal ideas of deregulation and privatisation, it was clear the government's urban development program was being driven by the short-term interests of capitalist modernisation, not by any long-term vision of social planning for the public, as was perhaps envisioned by Hatta.