PetaBencana.id
The Same River, Twice is a two-channel, immersive film installation narrating the story of PetaBencana.id’s disaster mapping project in Jakarta, Indonesia. Focusing on user narratives, perspectives of risk-affected residents, and river ecologies within the city, the film relays the situation of Jakarta as a megacity struggling to adapt to climate change during the tropical monsoon season.
Like many other megacities in South and Southeast Asia, Jakarta resides in a coastal deltaic plain. Traversing the city from north to south, the Ciliwung River defines the central – and littoral – spine of the city. Over the past three decades, the hyper-urbanization of Jakarta has changed the nature of both the river and its relationship to the city. Once a free-flowing urban riparian ecology, the Ciliwung is now largely hidden behind concrete barriers in an attempt to control the river’s identity and movement. Yet in defiance of constraint, the river exerts its desire to reach the sea with in creasing volatility.
An online platform for reporting flood events in Jakarta, PetaBencana.id, has given a voice not only to the city’s residents but to the river as well. In developing an effective method for the civic co-management of flooding in the city, the media torrents about flooding have also uncovered the new figuration of one of the city’s most consequential and original characters, the river.
Through a narration of the context surrounding the PetaBencana.id platform, the video The Same River, Twice, investigates the relationship between the ecological city (by way of its rivers) and the informational city (by way of its data streams) as they are expressed by and through new forms of humanitarian infrastructures.
BIO
Powered by CogniCity Open Source Software, PetaBencana.id is a free web-based platform that produces megacity-scale visualizations of disasters using both crowd-sourced reporting and government agency validations in real time. The platform harnesses the heightened use of social media and instant messaging during emergency events to gather confirmed situational updates from street level, in a manner that removes the need for expensive and time consuming data processing. These verified user reports are displayed alongside relevant emergency data collected by local and government agencies. By integrating localized knowledge from a variety of sources into a single, robust platform, PetaBencana.id is able to provide a comprehensive overview of disaster events, enabling residents, humanitarian agencies, and government agencies to make more informed decisions during emergencies.
Nashin Mahtani is the Project Co-Manager and Lead Designer of PetaBencana.id.
