Houses for the Poor: How Local Culture Supports the Housing for the Urban Poor in Ternate, North Maluku

摘要

In Indonesia, attention to culture as a potential resource for community development has become an important discourse in social policies, community development, and even in academic discourse since the end of 1990s. However, not many evidence have been shown of how the strength the local wisdom is able to contribute significantly to community development. This article, based on our fieldwork, will show one of the real successes of how local wisdom contributes to alleviate urban poverty, to some extent. More specifically, this article explores how Tidore community living in Ternate, based on their local wisdom, build hundreds of livable houses for the urban poor in small city of Ternate. Interestingly, they initiate, plan, finance, and build the houses without support from district, province, or national development budgets. This finding theoretically can contribute to the debate between those who believe that local wisdom does really exist and those who deny its existence. Practically, this finding has potential policy implication in developing culturally-based programs for urban poverty alleviation.