Peneleh

An oasis of peace with large monumental trees is situated behind high walls in the heart of the busy and densely built-up kampong Peneleh. The site is a tangible recollection of the colonial era, when it was laid out as a cemetery for Dutch and other Western residents in Indonesia. At the time the cemetery lay far outside the city, but today it is right in the middle. The surrounding kampong is so densely built up that there is strong pressure to utilise the open space. It has not been in use as a cemetery since the beginning of the twentieth century and has become dilapidated: graves have been plundered and building materials stolen to build houses. Migrants have also taken refuge in the cemetery in the search for a place to live.

In the meantime the colonial past of the country has come in for fresh appraisal. This has led the Surabaya local authority and various Dutch parties involved to take the initiative of joining with Indonesian parties in drawing up a vision for the future of Peneleh cemetery.

Strootman supervised an intensive workshop in Surabaya at the beginning of 2011, in which Dutch experts in the field of cemeteries, heritage, spatial design and sociology worked on this vision for the future in close collaboration with the local authority and two universities of Surabaya.  In that workshop, Indonesian architecture  students and the Dutch experts focused on the main cornerstones of this new perspective, namely a transformation into an area open to the public and a visualisation of the colonial history on this location. Using the input from the workshop, we thematically charted the spatial characteristics, qualities, context and potential of the cemetery. We then translated the analysis into a vision, a concept for the future significance of the cemetery in its surroundings.

The results have been received with great enthusiasm by the Surabaya local authority, which is now taking the initiative for the drawing up of plans. The Dutch team stressed that the transformation of the cemetery into a park offers extra possibilities to safeguard the common heritage. Giving the cemetery a new significance can be a means of conserving it (in this connection Dutch heritage circles often speak of ‘conservation by development’).

An important conclusion of the workshop was that a precise inventory and determination of the value of the cemetery in all its facets and components is needed in order to make the right choice on which features can be scrapped and which reused, transformed and conserved. It is desirable for this purpose that a joint research project is set up by the ITS and Airlangga universities with Dutch specialists.