Living on the edge: identifying challenges of port expansion for local communities in developing countries, the case of Jakarta, Indonesia

Abstract

A port–city interface can be characterized as an area of conflicts between port development and city land-uses. Unfortunately, most research is limited to a technical and managerial perspective on port development and focuses less on the impacts on the communities in the area. This paper offers a new direction to acknowledge the impacts of port development on the community by borrowing from literature on rural–urban fringes, as there are similarities between the port–city interface and the rural–urban fringe as areas with conflicting interests. The port community is divided into the community of interest and the community of place. Based on this, a set of implications arising from how the community might experience the impacts of port development is presented. These implications are operationalized in a case study of the expansion of Tanjung Priok Port in Jakarta, Indonesia. The findings are differentiated for the four most prominent communities that are vulnerable to the impacts, namely fishermen, port workers, seafood processors, and industrial and other types of workers. They are likely to experience two indirect effects of the port development, namely resettlement and loss of livelihoods. This shows how vulnerable the communities living on the edge of the new development are, mainly due to their livelihoods’ dependency on the blurry boundaries between port and city.