(MENAFN- Muscat Daily)
Brightly coloured wooden and brick houses line a clean riverside path amid trees and vegetable gardens, a tranquil scene in the normally chaotic Indonesian capital Jakarta.
tongkol kampung was once much like many other down-atheel riverside communities found across the overcrowded, traffic-choked metropolis of 10 million, blighted by dilapidated housing and strewn with rubbish. but a series of controversial evictions of waterside neighbourhoods in the past two years, aimed at getting houses away from the capital's rivers to combat annual flooding, spurred the residents into making major changes. 'we want to prove that poor people can bring about change in their environment,' said gugun muhammad, a resident and one of the people behind the initiative to transform the kampung. the project, which began in 2015, involved launching a major clean-up by sending rafts onto the stretch of river running through tongkol to remove mountains of trash, putting up bins around the kampung and signs to remind residents not to litter. the most drastic part of the facelift saw residents taking sledgehammers to their own houses to remove sections that previously went right up to the water's edge, with poor families sometimes demolishing entire rooms.