The Challenges of the Surabaya City Government to Create Green Open Spaces

Spaces in urban areas have changed a lot/functions since urban areas were placed as locations to spur regional and national economic growth. Perhaps this is relevant to the statement of Lefebvre (1991), the development of world cities in the 21st century tends to lead to development as capitalist cities. Residents flocking to the city with all its social and cultural impacts, has led to the growth of slums everywhere, street vendors on the shoulders and sidewalks, spilled markets, and so on. In addition, the city provides less and less green open space, even though there are regional regulations that regulate it. There is still a crush on the allotment of space for business and school purposes, for example for the construction of malls and offices, for housing and so on. This is a real problem faced by many big city governments in Indonesia. So that spaces in urban areas are really contested by various actors for various interests.

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Slums and squatter settlements exist due to the absence of policies from the local government to provide housing for migrants. Likewise with the presence of street vendors who appear in almost every corner of the city of Surabaya. Many people have ignored the allocation of space. Not only owners of capital can make changes to space or change the function of space, but the urban poor have played a major role in changing the face of the city and causing city chaos. Urban space is not something that is free and can be claimed as individual property.

According to Lefebvre (1991), the alternative to capitalist space is social space. Social space rests on the socialization of the means of production, not under the domination of the capitalist class. And because the production activity in a socialist society, as theorized by Karl Marx, is production for social needs. For Lefebvre, the basic aspects of social needs, such as housing, education, health, and transportation, are the main issues that must be answered in the socialist space. Included in this social need is also the reorganization of urban space for the needs of all, not for the few.

The green city as a concept for realizing green open space in Surabaya is expected to be able to create a balance of land use for development in the economic, socio-political, cultural and environmental fields to achieve the goal of establishing green open space in living in Surabaya. The current area of green open space in Surabaya, according to data from the Surabaya City Sanitation and Parks Service, is in reality only 3,000 hectares compared to the area of the built area, which is still not sufficient for Surabaya, which is 326 thousand hectares. Based on the East Java Spaces Planning 2005 – 2020, the green open space in Surabaya should have an area of about 6,500 hectares including urban forest.

The portraits of green open space that already exist in Surabaya are urban forests, city parks, city recreation parks. Successively, the green open space covers an urban forest area in Surabaya, in Lakarsantri covering an area of 8 hectares, the Wonorejo Nursery Gardens covering an area of two (2) hectares and the Wonorejo reservoir covering an area of  five (5) hectares. Urban recreational parks in Surabaya are located at Surya Garden, Bungkul Garden, and Flora Garden and Bibit Garden, while other forms of green open space are city parks and green lanes on the edge or in the middle of main roads, such as  Raya Darmo Street, as well as green areas in buildings that preserve it.

The realization of green open space in Surabaya, similar to other big cities in Indonesia, is the difficulty of providing space for green open space. The general excuse for the difficulty in realizing green open space in Surabaya is the proliferation of slum housing due to the high level of urbanization, the existence of the informal sector which tends to increase, due to the rapid increase in population density, or the importance of other sustainable development goals, so that many green open spaces are converted to other land uses. Whereas the rate of urbanization development that hinders the development of green open space has been predicted.