Diversity and Opportunity in a Good City Making, Learning from Informal Settlement in Yogyakarta-Indonesia

The Greek thinker Aristotle ever tried to explain cities phenomenon by mentioning that a good life can be founded in the togetherness of city living. Nevertheless, today’s fact there is no city has ever meant the good life for all its inhabitants. It becomes harder and harder to define a good life inside the city, as well as looking what makes a good city in current perspective. Cities are now seen at best as a great social problem and at worst as utopian city solution that yet never come. That makes sense that the concept of making good city is debatable, and somehow it is very subjective. Starting with an explanation of the period when a good city notion emerged, this essay will try to analyze in a very brief manner the discourses between physical and non-physical strategies to develop a good city notion. Afterwards, it will be extended to the role of opportunity to build a future good city. The opportunity will be in line with the concept of the right to the city, which originally based on Henri Lefebvre’s Theory (Lefebvre, 1996). Staying back to the musing between what is good and what is bad, this essay is trying to investigate what is reasoning behind good or bad and how to solve it. Then, it will be navigated to how people can deal with the bad condition of the city and solving their problem as a part of their right. The notions of a good city, however, belong to the residents. What city needs the most was a most intricate and close-grained diversity of uses that give each other constant mutual supports (Jacobs, 1961). The cases of Kampung Code in Yogyakarta, which was the winner of Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 1992 will be highlighted to be an example of how people are dealing with their bad condition, struggling on their right and taking the opportunity given.