Resisting gentrification: Density of belonging in strangled kampung of BSD City, Indonesia

As Southeast Asia urbanizes, urban expansion repeatedly displaces low-income communities, changes land use, and erodes cultural heritage. In Indonesia, the enclosure of low-income kampung settlements within master-planned private cities was not an organic market outcome but a deliberate product of the Suharto government’s location permit system. This article explores the contradictory pathways of densification through the lens of strangled kampungs, small, irregular settlements trapped within the expansive growth of exclusive, highly regulated private cities. Drawing on historical urban morphological mapping, semi-structured interviews with kampung residents, and field observation across eight strangled kampungs in BSD City, the study analyses four cross-cutting dimensions of this resilience: deliberate cartographic erasure by developers; border-making through enclosing walls, restricted access routes, and engineered flooding; religio-cultural anchoring through mosques, ancestral tombs, and active pilgrimage sites; and adaptive economic practices within the private city itself. The article introduces density of belonging where the concentration of shared memory, emotional attachment, cultural meaning, and religious practice embedded in place function as a critical and underexplored dimension of urban resilience.