Designing for Slums: Investigating Sustainability from the Role of Design, Socio-culture, and Economical Aspects

In 2021, the North Jakarta Public Housing municipal government collaborated with the School of Design, Universitas Pelita Harapan (UPH) to develop a Community Action Plan (CAP) for 4 slum areas in North Jakarta within the city-slum area improvement plan. This was part of Jakarta’s Governor’s initiative to make Jakarta, the bustling capital city of Indonesia, a livable city for everyone through participative collaboration among all stakeholders. The School of Design, UPH used a specific research-design-action methodology called Design as Generator (DAG) that combines Participatory Action Research (PAR) and Design Thinking (DT) to engage and collaborate, designing the CAP with communities and all stakeholders including the municipal government in 9 months. The CAP resulted in three areas: a design for physical improvement, ideation for socio-culture and economical aspects improvement, that will become the guidelines for Collaborative Implementation Program (CIP) which will be conducted by the North Jakarta Public Housing municipal government with the communities in 2022. The aim of this paper is to investigate the sustainability of the three areas that the CAP resulted, in which from the role of design, socio-culture, and, economical aspects. It used the pre-test and post-test measurement techniques with the Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test and linear regression, T-test statistical analysis, to determine the most important aspects that ensure sustainability when designing for the improvement of slum areas and empowering their communities.