Another Fine Mess

This chapter studies three neighborhoods in Medan to map out the contentious patterns of legalization of urbanizing land. The city's expansion has largely taken place on land that was once under plantation leases. People and developers have not always waited for the land to be legally released for other purposes, and when leases finally lapsed, new urban neighborhoods or industry, rather than plantation crops, would already stand on it. This produced a legal conundrum. When a plantation lease expired, land would revert to the state of Indonesia. The state would then have several options: renewal of the lease or a change in land use and the issuing of other new leases. Renewal of a plantation lease for a densely built neighborhood spelled trouble, but so did issuing new leases for other land uses. In reality, a third, messier, option was often preferred: inaction, referral, kicking the can down the road, post festum approval, and leaving it to land-hungry people, movements, gangs, companies, soldiers, and government agencies to rough it out.