I was talking with a friend about this Aceh Green last night, on the way home from my first debut singing on Aceh TV . For me, Aceh Green is a blurry concept made by current Aceh Governor, Irwandi Yusuf. We, Acehnese, never actually know about the concept. All I know is that there is a big billboard in the secondary artery road which written “The Development toward Aceh Green”. Well, there is a moratorium logging regulation supported by The Multi Donor Fund (MDF) through the World Bank, but that's for forest conservation in Ulu Masen and Leuser. What about other areas??Urban areas?? Rural areas?? 

I don’t want to protest much in here, but what is green anyway?? How green would the governor want Aceh to be??

Refer to the standard of land use planning, green associates with open green areas, gardens, parks filled with trees, and jungles. Moreover, if Aceh want to follow the fortunes of modernist urbanism… green means to find jungle and urban form entangled again, literally.

I guess we all agree that Aceh is a lush tropical place where nature has already provided its own “green”. Stephen Cairns, an Australian architect stated in his essay about urban jungle, that the twentieth-century anxiety around the urban jungle is already pre-figured in this part of the world. In North Sumatra, across the Malacca Strait from where Singapore now stands, was the city of Aceh, a place where the idea of the urban jungle full reign was allowed.

Before Cairns, Anthony Reid and Denys Lombard have actually mentioned about this urban jungle form in Aceh.

Sixteenth-century English traveler Captain John Davis was confused by his first sighting of the city: it was very spacious yet built in wood, so it was not visible from a distance and seemed to leak out across the countryside.

French Jesuit SJ Premare was also puzzled by the entanglement by the dwellings and jungle in Aceh. So much so that he could not see the city at all. He reported: imagine a forest of coconut trees, bamboos, pineapples, bananas, through the midst of which passes quite a beautiful river all covered with boats; put in this forest an incredible number of houses made of canes, reeds and bark, and arrange them in such a manner that they sometimes form streets, sometimes separate quarters; divide these various quarters by meadows and woods. Everything is neglected and natural, rustic and even a little wild. When one is at anchor one sees not a single vestige or appearance of a city, because the great trees along the shore hide its entire house.

(Both cited in Reid, 1980, The structure of cities in Southeast Asia, fifteenth to seventeenth centuries)

I don’t see Aceh (the terminology Aceh is actually used to describe the city of Kuta Radja, the so called Banda Aceh nowadays) the way Reid and Lombard had seen. I see Aceh as a mish mash of whatever… it has no figure and it seems to obey urbanism rules.

However, there is a dwelling I know in Aceh Besar with traditional concept of land use called Gampong Lubuk. I made observation and analyzed its spatial structure for my final project, of which I am sure, the findings are well known among Acehnese (especially for those who study architecture). The study showed that the spatial concept formed by physical characters of the settlement, indicates a division of land use; housing area is located in the middle of settlement called tumpok, public facility is located not far from the housing area called ujong, and farming area is located outside of the housing area called blang. There are some villages also in Aceh Pidie with similar spatial structure as Gampong Lubuk, which strengthen the idea that Acehnese actually has the urban/rural jungle spatial concept already, the Aceh Green.  

We have all the concept... There are already lots of recommendations for spatial planning in Aceh, that it is important for people/institutions involved in spatial planning to acknowledge the spatial concept of Aceh through history and traditional values.

What Aceh really need is a real action of the concept itself.

Now... big question for me!!! What can I do?? I have betrayed my academic background...

Oh, about my singing debut… it was crap!! I’m not singing anymore…