THE SIGNS show their presence in the space of the city. By “they” I mean the functions necessary for urban exchanges. The advertisement for final paper consultation encountered in the environs of the university in Yogyakarta, for example, refer to the service of writing up one’s final paper (disguised by the term “consultation”) present in the city. Translation services, private math lessons, and a range of other services show their presence by signs on the electrical poles, mailboxes, and street-side trees, as well as through leaflets or photocopied posters in the food stalls that the students commonly visit.

Today, advertisements for such services usually provide information about the mobile-phone numbers that can be contacted, instead of the address. It can very well be that the person providing the service does not live in the neighborhood where the advertisements are found, as such ads and leaflets are distributed in many places around the city. The ads do not point at a person’s name, but rather at a certain function or role in the city.

The presence of mobile phone numbers on those ads show the timespan in which such ads are profusely produced. These ads are not older than ten years old. As mobile phones provide anonymity, the function or the skills advertised are shoved to the fore.

We recognized their presence through the signs.

A phone book or the Yellow Pages is full of signs: names, addresses, and phone numbers. The book is useful to help people orient themselves in a certain locality or city. The phone book or directory is getting thicker by the day. The bigger the city, the thicker the book. It means that our dependency on the signs provided there is also getting stronger.

All of this is replacing one’s direct experience with the urban space. We would not be left drifting about in the city as we try to find a particular address or venue, as we would have adequate information to find certain services.

But who will be able to have their names printed in the Yellow Pages or directory? Naturally, only those using the formal telephone network by the state-owned Telkom will be listed. The book does not provide a list of mobile phone numbers that are often appear and disappear without any knowledge about the owners. Mobile phones are expanding rapidly in line with the offers given by a range of providers competing to give the cheapest service possible.

There are other means of operation outside the formal signs of presence.


VISUAL SIGNS IN THE CITY
In 2000, a seminar was held to commemorate the publication of a book by Kevin A. Lynch forty years back, Image of the City (1960). The book had been warmly welcomed all over the world, academically as well as in the practical fields. Indeed, in reality, many cities in the world have been built using Lynch’s theories, and many students use the book’s jargons in recognizing the elements that form the identity of the city: the path, node, district, landmark, and edge. Physical development receives the priority, with the assumption that the image and the identity of the area can be shaped through such physical development. Visuality, imageability, and mental maps are the proposed concepts, with the view that the modern humans, just like the primitive humans, will always need visual references amid the expanse of the space. The question is: who forms the visual references? Which forces create them?

People do not always understand the city from the mere physical appearance. A Batak student from North Sumatra coming to Yogyakarta, for example, will first try to find the address of a fellow from the same ethnic group, and if he or she wants to have a more comprehensive information, the student can go to Bang Ucok’s diner, the lapo, to obtain a range of information about living in Yogyakarta. The diner, serving food typical of the Batak ethnic group, is one of the nodes that help one to understand the network of fellow Batak people in Yogyakarta. (A similar story can be said of a student from Papua who comes to Yogya: people will suggest that he or she come to the dormitory built by the regional government of Papua.)

One understands the problem of city orientation as a wayfinding issue. A means or technique for someone to orient him or herself in the sea of spatial coordinates of the city, enabling him or her to move from one place to another.


A CULINARY MAP, A CULTURAL MAP
The lapos or diners serving the typical food of the Batak ethnic groups are found in increasing number in Yogyakarta. It is not only Bang Ucok in north Yogya who has started such enterprise. There are many other diners, either claiming to be “a relative” to Brother Ucok or otherwise, all forming a kind of hierarchy with Bang Ucok as the point of reference, whether in terms of taste, price, or the variety of its menu.

There is usually a big room with large tables. Often songs from Tapanuli are played on end. There are calendars in Batak alphabets, family pictures, a range of cassettes of Tapanuli songs on sale, a number of posters calling for a clan reunion, or an invitation to a graduation Mass, invitations to youth groups at the Churches, and offers to transfer boarding contracts. There are an array of communication means among members of the Batak ethnic groups, along with the sub-ethnic groups.

The diner is akin to a place of reunion for people of a kin. For the newcomers, such sites as the diner is useful for a point of orientation in the urban space that is still alien for them. Meanwhile, for the old patrons, this is a place for reunion, to meet old friends. And the alumni will invariably visit the place every time they come to the city.

The diner does not serve food for daily consumption. The menu does not offer food usually taken three times a day. The students—especially those with limited means—come to such diners perhaps only once or twice during their studies; only in special occasions.

The alumni who return to legalize their diplomas, for example, will come here to treat their juniors or fellow boarders, to celebrate with them. The fellow boarders are not necessarily Batak people—but certainly not Moslems. Non-Moslem people outside the Batak ethnic groups—Javanese or Chinese, for example—also visit the diner.

It means that the diner has actually undergone a more advanced process of meaning formation: from a common diner, then treated symbolically as a site of identity in an alien and unknown place. This is a free site, a place where one can enjoy the food that people outside his or her community consider “inappropriate.”

Similarly with the diners or food stalls serving food from certain ethnic groups—the diners serving Balinese food, for example. There are two Balinese diners in the environs of the only Balinese temple in Yogya. Such sites show how the urban space is not understood as an homogeneous space. There are sites with greater intensity. There are venues to help us orient ourselves, providing the means of smoother exploration into the city. The different mind maps—composed by different groups—enrich our experience of living in the city.

Another diner is not merely for people of a kin, not merely for people of Sundanese or Kuningan origin. It is smaller, does not require a large kitchen, and due to the quick service, the dining place is also smaller: customers come and go quickly. There is no need to make the diner a place for hanging around, for intimate chats to nurse homesickness.

“Rica-rica” is the name of a food typical for North Sulawesi. In Yogyakarta and Surakarta, the diner usually also serve “jamu satay”. The two names are merely the means to provide a disguise to the food made of pork or pups. The customers and cooks in such diners do not only come from North Sulawesi—they can be anyone. The food has been detached from its original ethnicity.

Sometimes those stalls, those nodes where people orient themselves, do not employ visuality to be recognized. Some of them are hiding behind such euphemism as “jamu satay” or “rica-rica.” The signs are presented in certain ways, not with obvious visuals. Sometimes they find it better to hide.

Unlike the Batak lapo, for which we would need directions from old customers to find it (because those Batak diners rarely have signboards), the boiled noodle Indomie food stalls can be recognized easily from the yellow banners with the Indomie logo in front of the stall, and from the typical Sundanese names such as ‘Kabayan,’ ‘Katineung,’ or acronyms such as ‘Perades’ (Perantau Desa—village travelers), and others.

What will they do if the noodle stall turns out to be very popular? Will they turn it into a restaurant with special and remarkable appearance?

“No, I’d better open another branch in another place for my unemployed nephew. Anyway, there are no restaurants serving mainly boiled Indomie, right?”

Ten years ago he opened his food stall around Gejayan; three years ago he opened another stall for his nephew around Semaki Street, and now he is seen assisting another nephew on Sagan Street. Their network has thus expanded, according to the scale desired by those instant noodle entrepreneurs in order to expand their market.

The food stalls—although they never grow big—rarely move to another location. They maintain the spirit to survive; they calculate the strategic value of their site. People recognize them not because they have special, remarkable designs, or because they are visually significant; rather, people know them because they have a special function in urban living: a node of communication among members of the society.


POSTERS AND URBAN SIGNS
Posters and leaflets are often anonymous, providing messages without any clear references to the sender. This is also true for the leaflets attached to the electrical poles or street-side trees. The electrical poles are used merely because they “have no masters,” just as the trees: places with no owners, because “owned by the state” is identical with “owned by nobody.” That is how we treat public facilities—just like how we treat public phones, public toilets, park benches, and other facilities and spaces in the city.

The small posters often seen in the area where I live offer the service of mending clogged up toilet ditches. The services of septic tank pumping and digging wells are the specialty of people from Blawong, south Yogya. Similarly, the expertise of “gurah” or throat cleaning is the specialty of people from Girilaya. They promote their expertise everywhere, by distributing leaflets at the cross roads, providing their mobile phone numbers on the electrical poles and street in every housing complex in Yogyakarta. The information is distributed all around Yogyakarta, while “the place of practice” is fifteen kilometers in the south.

Spatially, the phenomenon of signs of entrepreneurship is akin to the phenomena of the posters: referring to an activity taking place in a place other than the place the sign is posted. Such mechanism has existed for a long time in many cities in the world. And the electrical poles or posts have been the target where the leaflets or posters are attached.

The ads have been produced easily and cheaply using photocopy machines, print screens methods, and, lately, digital prints—one production mechanism that has become the mode of choice for producing urban texts, replacing the usual mode of handwriting and stencil printing. The existence of the photocopy machine plays a role in producing the texts whose radius of distribution keeps on expanding.

Such mechanism is similar to the mechanism of the radio, which transmits similar messages everywhere, caught by receivers in many looks, shapes, sizes, and colors. The difference is that the person sending messages in the posters can maintain his or her anonymity, undetectable due to the absence of a transmitting radio, unlike the broadcaster with a particular address. Also, the receiver can have a variety of designs, creating therefore a distinct industry while in itself the machine is merely a receiver and articulator of messages.

If the visuality of the signs that create the characters and mental maps of the city is important—following Kevin Lynch—what are the roles of the forms, sizes, places, colors, and patterns of the signs in image building? How significant are their roles in building the identity of the place?


CONTENDING FOR A PLACE
An interesting phenomenon occurs as an area is increasingly urbanized: the commercial facility spills over to the street. The edges of the linear urban space suddenly become a place of contention, a commercial area.

The curb is an area of tension that is sometimes as narrow as the hedge, sometimes as wide as the footpath. Herman Hertzberger calls the bordering area between the private and the public zones ‘the third space,’ an in-between space. An area that gives color to the visage of the city. It is where people place the signs of their presence. And because the network of streets in the city is slow to increase, there is greater intensity on the edges. Situating signs there becomes a kind of contention of interests.

All signs that help us to wade through the complexity of the city exist on the edge of the road; on the edge of the “public space” and simultaneously, therefore, also on the edge of the private space. The signs (boiled noodle food stalls, tire repairs, posters, leaflets, etc.) exist in the in-between space, which therefore has such a high tension.

The high-tension area is like the skins of the onions: layers upon layers creating a continuum from the private to the public and vice versa. The footpath on the side of the street is now also accompanied by food stalls, providing a scant space for human movements.

While the middle of the street is already used for crossing, the side of the street becomes a place of contention for vendors. The pavement becomes the victim, and more than that, the body of the street has been occupied as well. We see this during the Lebaran holiday some time ago. We heard about the clogged up transportation on the roads on the northern coasts of Java due to the spillover markets: markets whose activities overflowed to the street, blurring the boundaries between the private and the public.

In the cities, the telephone-credits vendors have become bolder, placing their posters in the subsequent layer, occupying the street. The temporary sites or stalls push their advertising posters to the street, trying to better catch the attention of people moving on the street.

People call the high-tension region the site where “the informal sector” operates. Such naming signifies that the area is outside the reach of the regional regulation, and the parties that shape the area indeed want to avoid the regulations.

Does the area truly have no master? How does one explain the fact that several months ago the pavement lined up by food stalls suddenly narrowed, leaving only a curb of twenty centimeter wide? Who has “eliminated” the nodes where students meet at that fragment of the street?

The problem of the signs of the city is also the problem “where” the signs are present, who controls the location or the site? Do you want to avoid the place? Do you want to find a “safer” place?


MOBILITY IN THE CITY
The city is invariably seen as emerging only after the humans have settled. See, then, how a range of professions and functions are done in mobility. Take the food stall, for example, which at night is able to turn the area in front of the truck garage into a place of encounter for so many people. It means that the site, the location of the food stall itself, is required by a lot of people. With time, the meaning changes: during the day for the garage, at night for the food stall.

There are many such places in the cities. There are temporary activities that re-interpret the location, enriching its meaning with time. Interestingly, such meaning enrichment only occurs in particular sites, not in just any location, in just any site.

The occupants of such sites are not only from the group that merely wishes to survive, but also from the network of big corporations who have realized the potentials that the site provides. One big bread company in Yogyakarta has an armada of wagons; each wagon occupying a certain designated point in the city in the evening. The site, which originally has no meaning, now has another label: the site for the “Diva” bread company, although the wagon only comes there at sundown.

It turns out that the name of a site can refer to its occupant instead of its physical structure. The occupants can change: an itinerant tailor, an itinerant barber, a meatball soup stall, a chicken porridge stall, a gudheg vendor, a traditional pancake vendor, a vegetable seller, an itinerant library, a mail wagon, sellers and vendors of old magazines, etc.

Such mobile services have existed for a long time and they are not merely playing the role of the distributor, but also as the producer. Ever since humans first settled, they have required such itinerant services, roving around the city.

The signification, therefore, is not endowed to a particular location in space, but to a “when,” a point in time. The site becomes “Lik Man’s food stall” because at night, a fragment of the street seems to become a vast expanse of eatery, whose mats spread across the pavement. The location is not named using the term of the path or node, as per Kevin Lynch’s terminology, but by an “event” of Lik Man’s food stall, which occupies the site in a particular time.

The structure provided by the city has been enriched by the subsequent layering of meaning. This is akin to mobile telephones’ cases whose colors and patterns can be changed without changing the structure of the telephone. The occupants of the city’s spatial structure still need to connect with the city infrastructure, therefore enriching our experience of living in the city.


PERMANENCE AND TRANSIENCE
Mbak Tum’s gudheg food stall is no longer on Janti Street. The place is now occupied by a vendor of mobile-phone credits. The food stall that only opened in the morning consisted of merely a seat where Mbak Tum the vendor sat, surrounded by a U-shaped wooden desk where the gudheg and an array of meals were served, as well as other means of serving the customers. There were no seats for those who wished to eat on the site; they could decide for themselves where they wanted to eat and chose the nearest niches. At ten, Mbak Tum would have already gone home, leaving a signboard saying that that was where she operated in the morning.

The site, which during the day only had a signboard in sight, never became a restaurant, or a more permanent or formal form of eatery.

For the urbanites, the temporary functions have been accepted as forming a part of the city visage. The urbanites accept such temporality in the daily practice of reading the map of the city. The city map does not have to be signified by monuments for permanence, but also by temporary occupants who come and go.

Are the artistic interventions, which many artists have undertaken so far, made for some form of permanence, or for some form of participation in the daily practices, coming and going at will, dynamically?




MAHATMANTO was born in Klaten and grew up in Surakarta, Central Java. He studied architecture at the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) and continued his research on the thinking of the Dutch architect Henri Maclaine Pont for his graduate thesis in his almamater. He now teaches history of architecture at the Duta Wacana Christian University, Yogyakarta, and is a member of the board of the Indonesian Visual Art Archive (IVAA) in Yogyakarta.



The essay was written for the catalogue of the Festival Tanda Kota (City Sign Festival) exhibition, held by Jakarta Arts Council at the Galeri Cipta II, Ismail Marzuki Art Center, Jakarta, November 2007. The republication of the essay in Karbon online journal is with the permission of the writer.