Occupying Leftover Urban Space by Bajaj in Manggarai Station, Jakarta Rumaishatul Ulya*, Dr.-Ing. Yulia Nurliani Lukito, ST, MDesS. Architecture, Faculty of Engineering, University of Indonesia, Depok, 16424, Indonesia *e-mail: rumaishatul.ulya@ui.ac.id Abstract— In everyday life of the city, both formal and informal spaces exist with informal space as a sphere of spatial claim-making. The idea of informal space is very compelling to understand what really happens in everyday life of the city. The structure of the city, including its physical elements, contributes to the creation of informal space in urban life. It is the aim of this paper to relate the users or people in their everyday life with urban structures. We believe that informality in urban space, which is usually understood as a problem, can actually contribute to urban design development. As a basic platform to discuss informality in the city are some elements of the city such as nodes, corridors and connections, stepping stones, and barriers. Those elements define an absence of fixed values in informal space and, as consequences, there will be a negotiated space as a result of spatial claiming made by users. Here, we examine how informal space can create a negotiation of space and produce a specific space that experienced today, but might be different tomorrow. As a case study, this paper discusses the phenomenon of bajaj ‘ngetem’ around Manggarai Station, in South Jakarta. ‘Ngetem’ is an activity of waiting for users to use bajaj, which usually happens in a strategic city’s spot. The phenomena of ‘ngetem’ shows us how a leftover space can be used by people of the city and how the activity of occupying leftover space generates unique space and even produces new image of the city. By discussing the connection between the elements of urban informality around Manggarai Station and how users of the city occupy leftover spaces, we argue that urban informality becomes an important thing in the representation of the city. Moreover, the interaction between users and the physical elements of the city creates unique lived space. This paper suggests that considering and focusing on urban informality will offer new point of interventions and guidelines in our urban development. Keywords— bajaj, leftover space, urban informality, negotiated space I. INTRODUCTION Architecture, urban space, and everyday life are strongly related to each other. The interaction among them is related to design and occupation and to understand the interaction we need to know the actors or the users of urban space and their activities. There are two important actors in urban space, namely planners and users [1]. Discussing the two point of views of those actors will lead us to a better understanding of how people use urban space in everyday life and show that both formal city structure and urban informality are significant. However, urban informality creates a specific mode of the production of space and thus it continuously changes the meaning of space as the result of space claiming. In dealing with city structure, Lynch suggests five basic physical elements to have an image of the city: paths, edges, nodes, districts, and landmarks [2]. In addition to this, Peraboni offers some other basic elements to understand the structure and the informality of built environment through nodes, corridors and connections, stepping stones, and barriers [3]. A discussion of basic elements of the city is related to the space production in everyday life and how users perceive opportunities in certain urban spaces. Therefore, it becomes a necessary thing to examine strategies, tactics and elements in understanding urban informality of the city. Michel de Certeau in the Practice of Everyday Life examines how people individualize things in order to make those things suit their needs by using the idea of strategy and tactic [4]. Strategy means any method or rule of power manipulation related to proper places. By contrast with strategy, a tactic-which connected not only to places but also to time-is a manipulation of activity doing by users that take advantages of “opportunity” in strategic areas [5]. Strategies and tactics are two components in everyday architecture and urban life that cannot be separated as the way we create city images and give meaning to the city. In short, we can say that strategy is the way planners and government create the structure of the city while tactics are space making of people with less power or the weak. Upton sees everyday life as less a rhetorical practice or collection of leftover activities and people have their own habits and backgrounds that will give various meanings to urban space [6]. This means that some activities in the city are formal or happened in certain or desired places according to the plan and some activities are informal or