GOVERNING INFORMALITY : Eviction, Recognition, and Legal Ambiguity in Kampung Akuarium, Jakarta

Informal settlements in Jakarta have long been governed through cycles of tolerance, eviction, and selective recognition. Rather than resulting from the absence of planning, informality is often produced through spatial regulations, legal ambiguity, and political intervention. This article examines Kampung Akuarium, a settlement in North Jakarta, to explore how informality is governed through planning instruments and political change. The study combines an overlay analysis of Jakarta's spatial planning documents from 2005, 2014, and 2022 with satellite imagery and a review of news media and policy archives. The findings trace how Kampung Akuarium was alternately erased from planning maps, criminalized through redevelopment agendas, and later partially recognized through state intervention. Eviction under the Basuki Purnama administration functioned as a political assertion of legality rather than a resolution of land‐use conflict. The subsequent shift toward in‐situ redevelopment under the Anies Baswedan administration reconfigured informality into a negotiated condition. Spatial planning documents played a central role in institutionalizing legal ambiguity, enabling flexible governance while sustaining residents’ precarity. The article argues that conflicts over informal settlements are central to remaking urban citizenship, exposing colonial and postcolonial logics of dispossession while opening spaces to renegotiate tenure, design, and belonging through fragile, contested forms of co‐production.