On December 10th, 2017, the Peta Bencana Foundation transformed a portion of the heavily traversed Sudirman-Thamrin road with an anamorphic street art installation, exclusively designed towards building resilience for the forthcoming monsoon season! Every Sunday morning in Jakarta, main roads in the center of the city are closed off to vehicles for the weekly Car Free Day event, making way for thousands of walkers, joggers, bikers, and skaters. Peta Bencana took this opportunity to launch a preparedness event for the 2017/2018 monsoon season; as passers-by stopped to take selfies with the street art installation, they were reminded to continue to share their selfies with PetaBencana.id during the monsoon season, and contribute to real-time community flood-mapping. PetaBencana.id gathers confirmed crowd-sourced reports about flooding from various social media channels and visualizes these on a free web-based map, so that everyone has the information they need to stay safe and avoid danger during flood events. This information is shared with emergency management agencies, who are also able to update the map with time-critical flood-related information, creating a transparent two-way communication channel for everyone in the city. The Jakarta Emergency Management Agency (BPBD DKI Jakarta) also took this opportunity to spread awareness about their disaster management programs to the Car Free Day visitors.
Peta Bencana was glad to see the enthusiasm displayed by people of all ages excited to engage with community art and continue to spread awareness through sharing their selfies on social media. Passers by were intrigued by the perspective of the installation, which was designed to have a specific vantage point, and eager to take photos – posing to rescue friends and family from the painted flood.
One visitor noted: “Setting up an art-based installation in the middle of the road during Car Free Day is a great way to capture the attention of thousands of residents and engage with the public in Jakarta to spread awareness about community resilience!”
Residents as well as staff from Jakarta’s Emergency Disaster Management Agency (BPBD), expressed their enthusiasm and interest to see similar events occuring more frequently around the city. We are looking forward to create more selfie-spots for residents in Indonesia, and embracing the combined power of the selfie, social media, and community-art installations in public spaces, to support community-based resilience!
Stay tuned for our next event!