A study project to understand the nature of Urban Migration that shaped our cities.

MISA is an urban study project aiming to understand the nature of Urban Migration, what triggers people’s movement, how it affected the social conditions, and the consequences of excessive influx/outflux to a city. Focusing in Surabaya as the main site due to it’s peculiar phase of modernization, alongside other cities across Java, and from few cities in Honshu island, Japan.

Background of Project
 
We are a witness of “second explosion of Asian cities”. Since the early part of colonial era, cities in Indonesia have gradually grown with influx of new labor power, especially from rural area. And today, since massive economical growth has stared, major cities such as Jakarta and Surabaya are absorbing large influx of new labor power from other secondary cities. This phenomenon of “urban migration”, that can be understood as hybrid of “regional” and “inter-regional” issue, is bringing critical problems on community of Kampung. In order to understand facts of problems in diverse dimension and to draw out potentials of local community to solve them, this project focus on the “gap” of communication in between newcomers and local community at some Kampung in central area of Surabaya.
 
Most of newcomers are the youth and are working at service sector such as hotels, shopping malls, restaurants and so on. They are dwelling at minimum size of space for sleep in "Kos-kosan (privately-owned dormitory)" in Kampung, at near to their workplace. A critical fact is that they are living in the city but “not living in the community". Both newcomers and local community could potentially be the weaker of city since their life is totally depending on a provision of opportunities of urban economics in both quality and quantity, and apathy in between them is maybe the most negative factor to push themself to the social isolation and brink of collapse. This issue that creates diverse struggles in city has already been manifested in cities in advanced countries, and we must urgently discuss it in order to develop appropriate methodologies to prevent possible problems and to re-empower “urban community”.
 
 
Concept 
 
Urban study project of MISA, titled “Comprehensive Study of Impact of Urban Migration for Major Cities in Indonesia”, is now working on the new grant program of API (Asian Public Intellectuals) Collaborative Grant of The Nippon Foundation.
 
A primal aim of our project is to study impact of urban migration in diverse dimensions of urban environment, and to develop a possible methodology to connect two different sides of people -urban immigrants and local community- in Kampung (urban settlement) in Surabaya, based on our strong interest for “massive urbanization and transformation of notion and form of public space”. In this project, meaningful and valuable suggestions for re-formation of present condition of community has been developed through cooperative works with collaborators from different background and local residents, and these are widely proposed in public toward the purchase of appropriate living environment in Asian cities. 
 
Along with studies by each collaborator, we are trying to develop several creative ideas and techniques such as editorial design, documentary movie, info-graphic design and urban sketch (landscape mapping), to re-assemble diverse discussion and discoveries into “public media”.

Main Collaborator of MISA:

Kenta Kishi (Architect, Tokyo)

Mad Cahyo (Architect, Surabaya)

Bintang Putra (Socio-economic Activist, Surabaya)

Junko Sato (Socio-Anthropologist, Tokyo)

Ichsan Harja (Architect, Bandung)

Daiki Nakagawa (Architect, Tokyo)

Supported by:

API (Asian Public Intellectuals) Collaborative Grant of The Nippon Foundation