Kampung in Jakarta goes green to fight eviction

Jakarta

BRIGHTLY coloured wooden and brick houses line a clean riverside path amid trees and vegetable gardens, a tranquil scene in the normally chaotic Indonesian capital Jakarta.

Residents have transformed the "kampung", as traditional neighbourhoods are known in Indonesia, into a model of clean and green living in an effort to fight off the threat of eviction.

Tongkol kampung was once much like many other down-at-heel riverside communities found across the overcrowded, traffic-choked metropolis of 10 million, blighted by dilapidated housing and strewn with rubbish.

But a series of controversial evictions of waterside neighbourhoods in the past two years, a…