Urban Safety Via Digitally Augmented Relationality: Leveraging Gotong-Royong for Collaboration, Empathy, and Re-Enchantment in Indonesia’s Public Space

Abstract

This article addresses urban safety issues, focusing on their relationship with the ongoing effective structural transformation of inborn instrumentalities of progressively vulnerable communities in the Global South. It responds to the United Nations' call for urgent action to reverse the negative trends towards the goals set with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development by redefining urban safety as a crucial factor for the affirmation of sociospatial justice, resilience, and wellbeing in alignment with the objectives of the Global Digital Compact framework. We redress the conventional crime prevention approach by formulating a new framework for defining a differential right to digitally augmented urban safety that leverages locally embedded sociocultural practices and relational networks. We conjuncturally articulate this right for underserved communities within informal settlements in Bandung, Java, Republic of Indonesia, concentrating on the Indigenous gotong-royong cultural practice—a system of commoning combining differential forms of collaboration, relational empathy and imaginative re-enchantment. We develop and operationalise this right, to produce a pilot methodology for creating a mixed reality instrument that converts inadequate securitisation methods of surveillance into effective safety practices of relatedness. By combining digital twinning and gaming technologies, this instrument enhances community-centred care and accumulation of social, cultural, and infrastructural capital. We discuss the development of this instrument, focusing on the conception and implementation phases that involved multilevel, multistakeholder engagement, emphasising its supplementary transformative aspects. Our contribution to the urban safety discourse further articulates the Right to the Safety by introducing a novel approach that upholds the core good city principles—participation, relationality, and cosmopolitics—for regenerative and differential urban development in the increasingly mediatised society.