Introduction

Urban vulnerability is a conditional state that differs among cities while determining their adaptation pathways. As climate change is debated around the world, the slow onset and rapid changes, especially those occurring in tropical coastal regions, have increased urban vulnerability. This evolving discourse has attracted the attention of scholars from a variety of disciplines. Most of the scholars agree on the importance of knowing the state of climate-related vulnerability in urban development. Fuchs (2010) has predicted that Asia's at-risk urban population will reach 2.4 billion by 2030. Most of the affected people will be the urban poor, living in the most vulnerable locations.

The urban poor are unique in their capacity for producing space for living, such as the kampung2 in Indonesia. Kampung is the informal, traditional, self-organized settlement that still can exist in the modern living space of Indonesian cities (cf. Jellinek 1999; Kenworthy 1997). The hallmarks of the kampung are a densely populated area, inhabited mainly (but not solely) by poor people suffering from limited access to utilities and other public services (Marcussen 1990). In Jakarta, there are an estimated 600 kampung settlements (Kompas 2010). There are 490 pockets of poverty in Jakarta, which are associated with the presence of kampung (UN Habitat 2003). “It is estimated that 20 to 25 percent of Jakarta residents live in kampungs, with an additional four to five per cent squatting illegally along riverbanks, empty lots and floodplains” (UN Habitat 2003). The vulnerability of kampungs has exposed them to climate-related disasters, especially to flooding due to heavy rainfall, the rising sea level, and tidal flooding (Firman et al. 2011).