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AP. Wulandari^*1 and

W. Farida

*²

Paper presented at Asia Pasific Ecohealth Conference, Melbourne:

Deakin

University

, December 2, 2007.

ABSTRACT

The slum settlement growth has become an important issue in

Indonesia

recently. The complexities of problems caused by slum settlement areas are due to physical, cultural

(skeptical culture behavior)

and social environment

(social norms)

. Slum areas are mainly located at the riverbanks. Poorly equipped with good quality of housing standard and sanitation, poor people use the river water for all their daily purposes. In addition, they also dispose their solid waste and wastewater directly into the river. Thus, the cultural change will have a greater impact toward physical environment.

The Indonesian government proposes Policy Guidance on Slum Settlements that introduces social housing with better accessibility, healthy environment, affordable price and safety guarantee related to rental payment. This paper describes the importance of policy guidance to overcome the slum settlements at the riverbanks. The method includes qualitative analysis of comparison study of three cities

(

Bandung

,

Surabaya

and

Jakarta

)

. On the other hand it has a significant relevance to environmental and health issues since affordable social housing in form of rental storey houses

(flats)

, which well equipped with good quality house condition and sanitation, would change the horizontal living culture at the riverbanks to the vertical one at the land areas. Thus, the government, private sectors and community involvement becomes an important factor to make the social housing implementation become successful.

Keywords: slum settlements, social housing, cultural change