The future in the past: colonial modernity as urban heritage in contemporary Indonesia

Across urban Indonesia, the surviving vestiges of ‘modern’ architecture and infrastructure built in the final decades of colonial rule are increasingly being re-defined as ‘heritage’. Through an ethnographic study of Pasar Johar – a striking marketplace in the city of Semarang designed by the Dutch architect and town planner Thomas Karsten in the 1930s – I argue that such cases of modernity-cum-heritage enable the contemporary challenge of hegemonic teleologies of what makes a ‘modern’ city, while also facilitating the perpetuation of insidious colonial-era notions of who counts as a ‘modern’ urban subject. By tracing the ‘afterlives’ of the marketplace and its Dutch creator in present-day debates over the trajectory of Semarang’s development, this article reveals how Indonesian heritage advocates are endeavouring to chart alternative urban futures via their city’s past. Through their lively campaign to save the structure, ‘being modern’ in the postcolonial city comes to be a project not of imitation but of recovery, as well as a passionate critique of urban politics as usual. However, such enthusiastic reclamations of colonial modernity as urban heritage also run the risk of reproducing the same logics of ‘progress’ that once governed the cityscape and its populace a century ago.