Bringing creative Economy to Community Resilience towards better Urban Governance: The Case of Semarang City, Indonesia

As a growing metropolis in the north coast Java region, Semarang City has been transforming from a port city to a multifunctioning city. Mercantilism tradition has brought forward the local economy into trade and service dominance, shifting the city to become an important marketplace beyond the peripheral boundaries. Interestingly, the city’s urbanization growth does not follow ‘a common trend’ in Indonesia (and many parts of the world) characterized by modernized urban fabrics with mixed land use. The city is suffered from fragmented physical urban transformation and separated formal and informal economy. The urban sprawling forces are scattered around the city outskirt while the inner city’s development filled up by discontinued commercial properties. On the other hand, there is ‘a new direction’ of urban movement based on the bottom-up kampong revitalization. Instead of encouraging more modernized physical and economic space, these kampong settlements have proposed creative economy from below useful to (re-)organizing the economic space of urban region. This paper aims to examine how the recent urban transformation in Semarang City has been fuelled by creative economy activities through which the kampong settlements promote local community resilience. Desk study method accompanied with focus group discussions and field observations are completed in pursuit of data collection and analysis. The primary data source is taken from the Local Development Planning Authority project on creative kampong development since 2016. The preliminary results show that kampong-based creative economy movement at the urban scale is beneficial to enhancing informal economy and urban settlement development. Participatory governance has been strengthened following income generation in situ even though their contribution to community resilience in the long-term still requires further explorations.