Surviving Existence through a Built Form: The Advent of the Daseng Sario

Indonesia’s new decentralization policy, which began in 2001, granted each of its 480 local cities the right to manage their own fiscal and development policies (Miller 2013, 838; Patunru, McCulloch, and von Luebke 2009, 6; Sondakh and Jones 2003, 296). Among other things, this new policy targeted the acceleration of urban development in eastern Indonesia to overcome the long-standing retardation of physical, economic, and social developments that the region had suffered under the unequal ‘developmental’ version of the New Order regime (Silver, Azis, and Schroeder 2001; URDI 2005; Vickers 2005). Many city governments, including that of Manado, have begun to