Texte abrégé de--Géographie--Paris IV, 1972. / Bibliogr. p. 87-88.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Cornell University, 1981. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 268-280).

This thesis is about the everyday cultural practices of communal television viewing by urban kampung people. It challenges the institutional frameworks and constructs about the television audience. To achieve this, the thesis looks at the cultural context of the television set and its uses in urban kampung households and the neighbourhood system. Studies on urban kampung community in Indonesia so far have focused on the socio-economic and cultural practices of the people in relation to state ideological matters (e.g. Guinness, 1989; Sullivan, 1994; Brenner, 1998). This thesis is an attempt to extend the investigation about the cultural practices of the kampung community in relation to media use in the era of competitive private television in the early 2000s. As those kampung people have existentially engaged in fashioning their own lives neither as rural subjects nor urban/ity subjects, their narratives in responding to televised images and representations (of women in particular) shape the particularity of the cultural scene of these marginalized subjects. Taking up their social economic background and the particularities of socio-cultural circumstances of the kampung, this present study takes a close look into the day-to-day communal viewing practice of the kampung female viewers of the most-watched local program on Indonesian television, that is sinetron (television drama). / Extending the argument of Ien Ang and others into the Indonesian context, the thesis concludes that the national television audience as a unified, atomistic and controllable entity, as is institutionally imagined, does not exist. Rather, watching television, particularly among the urban middle to lower class community, is a discursive practice overwhelmingly showing the diverse, particular, and unpredictable attitudes, which challenge the account of 'the audience' that characterises the industry, the state and, ironically, also the intellectual critical knowledge producers.

Urbanism in the discipline of architecture has largely been confined to the analysis of physical appearance of cities. Such an analysis may overlook the crucial issue, which is political, on the spatial formation of a city like Jakarta This formation results from the structuration process of a society where the production and reproduction of society assumes domination from one another. In a dual society, such as in the city of Jakarta, such a process has an implication of the urban form, that is, the dual quality of urbanism. This study examines this dual image of Jakarta, with a particular concern for the transformation of the inner dynamic of its social life. It concerns the triad of knowledge-power-space in which the society is produced and reproduced in the timespace dimension. The kampung is investigated as a locale of social practices, especially in regard to the low-income urban population. The idea and term tropotopia is introduced to describe urban form or spatiality that is in a continuous process of formation and transformation. The study looks particularly the history of the reproduction of society in Indonesia, where dominant social systems control allocative and authoritative resources. Such practices primarily govern the spatial formation of Jakarta. In these systems, planners and designers acting as agents have played crucial roles in the structuration of society, and of the space. Planners and designers are seen to be part of the episteme that develops and informs the poor relation of society. The dissertation concludes with a reflection on the ways in which the dual quality of Jakarta is revealed in the interplay in social practices within a triadic knowledge-power- space.

Kampung is a pervasive concept in Malay Culture and considered counter urban in contemporary discourse. Rural to urban migration of the Malays from kampung to cities occur at an accelerated pace in urbanizing Malaysia. Rural migrants are said to remain attached to their rural kampung lifestyles and find the socio-spatial character of urban environment difficult to adapt to. Previous studies on rural kampung by anthropologists and social scientists have unpacked the socio-economic and cultural aspects of kampung Malays in rural area. My study of migrants in Alor Star and Kuala Lumpur is focused on the landscape meanings of kampung and explores how these ideas have been brought across to a city environment. I investigated the meanings and symbolic values that kampung holds to the rural-urban migrants through a ‘landscape lens’. I recorded the experiences of the rural-urban migrants in adapting to an urban landscape, identified kampung elements to which people have strong attachment with and highlighted the kampung characteristics that could be maintained or replicated in order to address the maladaptation of the migrants and enhance their urban living experience. Study participants were rural-urban migrant respondents from rural kampung in Yan, Kedah who have either moved to Kuala Lumpur or Alor Star. The case studies in the two cities were carried out using qualitative methods including photo elicitation, in-depth interviews, model mapping techniques and participant observation. Respondents provided narratives of their journey from kampung, moving to the city, and their process of adapting and settling in cities. Challenges in adaptation to city living spaces included spatial use, privacy, social relationships, safety and surveillance. My findings demonstrated that the memory of kampung plays a significant part in guiding the life of respondents in the city, and that the image of kampung is pervasive in the daily social and spatial practice of rural-urban migrants, guiding respondents’ level of adaptation and place-making in the city landscape. The use of landscape as lens was helpful in interpreting the complex and multivalent kampung meanings. Addressing a dynamic kampung idea through a landscape framework highlights the strong parallels between kampung and the early landscape concepts. The process of unweaving the meanings of kampung have illustrated that kampung ideas have the potential to inspire a landscape design language that could mitigate the harsh contrast between rural and urban Malaysia.