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Bus Stops and Toilets: identifying Spaces and Spaces of Identity for Indonesian Street Children
Book chapter   Peer reviewed

Bus Stops and Toilets: identifying Spaces and Spaces of Identity for Indonesian Street Children

Harriot Beazley
Identities and Subjectivities, pp.1-28
Geographies of Children and Young People (GCYP), 4, Springer Singapore
2016
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4585-91-0_8-1
Appears in  UniSC Diversity and Inclusion Research Collection
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https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4585-91-0_8-1View
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Abstract

Human Geography Sociology Cultural Studies leisure activities mental maps street children Indonesia Jalan Malioboro mental maps social and spatial apartheid survival strategies time and space Yogyakarta UniSC Diversity Area - Life Stages
This chapter is an examination of the lives of street children in Yogyakarta, Indonesia during the era of the dictator President Soeharto (1966-1998). The children who participated in this research lived on the edge of society, facing multiple forms of social and spatial exclusion in their everyday lives. Strict state control resulted in rigorously controlled urban landscapes through a 'spatial apartheid' (White, 1996) and the capitalist 'colonisation' of public space as commercial or leisure space (Harvey, 1996). Homeless street children were perceived to be 'out of place', and to be committing a social violation by transgressing what was considered to be appropriate behaviour for children. In the eyes of state authorities and mainstream society, such an offense justified the 'cleansing' of street children from the streets, arrests, imprisonment and in some cases torture and extermination. Public space, however, is an essential means of survival for street children, and during the time of this research it was vital to their very existence that that the children found spaces in the city in which they could survive, even if it was a marginal place like a bus stop or public toilet. The chapter describes how despite their subordination and stigmatisation, homeless street boys constructed alternative geographies by appropriating spaces in the city in which they were able to earn money, sleep, feel safe and form a community. Specifically, the chapter examines the spatial expressions of the street children subculture, the Tekyan, exploring their territorial issues; how they identified with particular areas for different activities; and how their identities, including their sexual identities, shifted in relation to their social and spatial settings. The chapter reveals how the 'fluidity' of these spaces, and the flexibility of the children to shift from one place to another at a moment's notice, ensured their survival (Massey, 1994, Pile, 1997).

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