River, 2025 - image courtesy of Tito Ambyo.

​

     III     

​

I have heard what some people call the new apartment buildings. "The Great Wall of Stubbs Street" one said, which, to me, as a migrant, carries a tone of xenophobia. On the Facebook groups, commenters dismiss our homes as "shoeboxes". Cramped. Vertical. A compromised version of the true Australian dream. This is despite how we are changing. We used to only want detached houses with backyards. Now we prefer vertical living with trams, trains and amenities close to where we work. 

The old dream, however, remains in the language. In the way vertical living is described. Australians see the vertical and think only of what is lost, what is lacking. They complain about what is being overshadowed, not what has been grown. 

     IV     

Olive trees are tough survivors. One, called the Al-Badawi tree, is at least 3,500 years old, and could be one of the oldest trees in the world. It lives in the Palestinian village of Al-Walaja, metres away from the separation line with Israel, a witness to the caring hands of generations of Palestinians.

My olive tree is young, bound to a pot, but it carries old memories in its leaves.

     V     

There is a better language for vertical living. In Indonesia, where I came from, there is a name for a new type of development: kampung susun: “stacked villages.” 

‘Kampungs’ struck the eyes of the renowned American anthropologist Clifford Geertz in 1965. He described it as "something of a reinterpretation of the village" in cities and towns. Imagine a village-like social structure, where people know each other, solve each other’s problems, build public facilities without long meetings and proposals, but situate it in metropolitan cities like Jakarta. These kampungs are estimated to be where up to 80 per cent of people in Jakarta live. They are everywhere - in narrow corridors between the body of a river and an apartment building; between shopping malls; along railway tracks. 

They grow in a way that the Indonesian architect Abidin Kusno has recently described as “middling urbanism” — neither problem nor solution, but a dynamic in-between. Urban geographer AbdouMaliq Simone calls this concept “the surrounds,” the dense networks of care and improvisation that flourish when people are not bound by rigid plans, but by what needs to be done. 

Kampung susun is new - and they are profoundly different from rumah susun (“stacked houses”). The latter are high-rise towers, built by the government, to house kampung residents evicted from their homes, often in an effort to “‘modernise”’ their living conditions. But these projects often failed. They moved people from organic, dynamic communities – where they were connected to each other and their specific locations – into sterile concrete boxes, designed without consultation, seen from above instead of from the ground-up.

So a new model was born. In a kampung susun project, architects and residents collaborate to design vertical structures not from a developer’s blueprint, but from the stories and rhythms of how people actually live. It is an architecture of listening. 

​

     VII     

“This is our land”, a young woman shouted, standing on the sands of Bondi Beach. She was shouting at Pro-Palestinian demonstrators. “We don't come to Lakemba, don't come to Bondi”.

She obviously wanted to be heard, and the words carried more than just anger. They carried a whole way of thinking about land in Australia: as something to be owned, defended, fenced off. Belonging, in this view, is always at someone else’s expense.

But in the kampungs I know – and even in the Flemington towers – belonging is not about borders or exclusion. It grows through proximity, through care, through living side by side in the mess and density of everyday life. Care is constant labour and practice. It is also an urban design principle.
 

     VIII     

The government has plans for the public housing towers I can see from my balcony. Demolition, they say, as if the word itself could erase what has grown there over decades. They speak of these buildings as problems to be solved, concrete to be cleared to make something new under the mantra of "renewal" – as if the residents are not already creating, innovating new things, teaching us how to live together, reshaping and renewing their lives despite the challenges they face. 

When the pandemic locked these towers down harder than anywhere else in Australia, it was the residents who became the infrastructure - translating when there were no interpreters, sharing food when the government clumsily delivered pork to Muslims, volunteering to help spread information. They wrote their knowledge into a cookbook afterwards. Just like in the kampungs, the residents of the towers are already finding solutions, and they are already teaching us.

Yet when OFFICE Architects presented 171 pages showing how these towers could be renovated, the government looked away. In court, they refuse to release documents explaining why demolition is “necessary,” and a judge concluded protecting Cabinet deliberations and “future policy development” is more important than the rights for the residents to know. 

But here's what I'm learning as I tend to my olive tree and build my own kampung: those towers hold the teachers we need. People have been living there for decades, supporting each other. They have been practising what we’re only beginning to attempt. While we’re still on the awkward lift conversation stage, they are already cultivating ways to connect, to solve problems, and to grow in vertical structures. These are not shoeboxes, but a tower of knowledge. Of pain, yes. Of hardships, yes. But also, of kindness and community spirit. At night, they glow not only with lights, but also with knowledge — knowledge we need to learn to see.