Mapping Resilience: Inside the Workshop on Empowering Resilience in Sinking Cities

On Thursday, 8 August 2024, twenty-one specialists gathered at the Ashley Hotel in Menteng, Central Jakarta, for a workshop that placed one of the city's most pressing and least easily solved challenges at the centre of the table: what does it mean to build resilience in a community that is sinking?

The event marked the formal launch of "Empowering Resilience in a Sinking City," a joint project between the Resilience Development Initiative (RDI) and King's College London, funded by the British Academy. Its focus is Penjaringan, a densely populated sub-district of more than 300,000 residents in North Jakarta — situated on the Javanese coast, highly diverse in ethnic and religious identity, and home to some of the city's most vulnerable communities. Penjaringan faces an acute convergence of hazards: coastal flooding, accelerating land subsidence, and the widening gaps in the data needed to respond to either.

The project is structured around three working packages. Dr Ramanditya Wimbardana leads Working Package 1, focused on capacity building, community engagement, and co-production for urban policies. Working Package 2, led by principal investigator Dr Zahratu Shabrina, is developing a community-informed Decision Support System, a platform that integrates local knowledge with data science to improve flood prediction and response. Working Package 3, led by Dr Emma Colven, is preparing a public art exhibition in collaboration with local artists, with the aim of amplifying marginalised voices and making the project's findings legible beyond the institutions that typically receive them.

The workshop on 8 August was the project's opening move, a soft launch and validation session in which the team presented the project's background, research objectives, and methodology to the government agencies and organisations whose cooperation the work will depend on.

The room was deliberately assembled to reflect the project's interdisciplinary ambitions. Of the twenty-one participants, eleven came from government, including representatives from Bappeda DKI Jakarta, BPBD, PUPR, Sumber Daya Air, Diskominfotik, and Jakarta Smart City, while four academics, three NGO practitioners, two artists, and a journalist completed the group.

The presence of artists Irwan and Tita alongside engineers, planners, and data scientists was not incidental: the project is premised on the belief that flood risk in Penjaringan is not only a technical problem, but one of how communities see themselves and are seen by others, and that art has a role to play in changing both.

Registration opened at 8:30 AM to the sound of traditional music before Hoferdy Zawani formally opened proceedings at nine o'clock. Dr Shabrina then presented the research background and objectives, laying out the case for why Penjaringan and cities like it require a new kind of tool — one that draws on community knowledge as much as on satellite data and hydrological modelling.

A sequence of expert presentations followed, each contributing a different layer to the picture. Heri Andreas spoke from an academic perspective before Adithya Dido of Peta Bencana presented on the crowd-sourced disaster-mapping platform that has become a vital reference during Jakarta's recurring flood emergencies. After a short morning break, Dinar Adiatma addressed OpenStreetMap's role in open geospatial infrastructure, and Lilis Chodijah presented Jakarta Satu, the city's integrated data platform. Dr Yudhistira Nugraha of Diskominfotik spoke to governance and policy, while Ryan Rizky Muharam of Jakarta Smart City described the city's broader digital infrastructure ambitions. The afternoon brought four more speakers, Andhika Ajie of Bappeda, Dr Michael Oktoviyanes Sitanggang of BPBD, each examining the challenge from the vantage point of their own agency. Each pair of presentations was followed by open Q&A, and the sessions were consistently substantive.

Jakarta Smart City's Jianly Bagensa similarly indicated support, and the representative of the North Jakarta government expressed willingness to actively participate in providing input and to help ensure that the research yields value not only for the academic record but for the community directly.

Following a group photograph and lunch, the day moved into its most collaborative phase: two 45-minute workshop sessions, led by Zara and Emma, with facilitators and notetakers distributed across the room. Participants worked in groups through the questions the morning had raised, drawing on the technical expertise of academics and agency specialists, the ground-level knowledge of NGO practitioners, and the observational perspectives of the artists and journalists present. The sessions were, in many respects, the day's raison d'être: a structured space for the cross-sector exchange that the project's methodology requires but that rarely happens spontaneously.

Closing remarks from Zara, Emma, and Dityo, and a final word from Hoferdy Zawani on behalf of RDI, brought the formal programme to a close just after five o'clock. The RDI and KCL teams are now managing data and conducting analysis across all three project objectives. A hackathon and public art exhibition are planned for 2025, as the work moves from research into the public domain. While the project is rooted in one sub-district of one city, its designers are clear about its broader ambitions: the findings and tools developed in Penjaringan are intended to be applicable to coastal and sinking cities worldwide, wherever communities face growing flood risk with insufficient data and insufficient voice.