The Urban Lawyer's Brief

Welcome to hanggawan.com.
This website is a continuation of hanggawan.wordpress.com, a personal blog first established in 2007.
It is simply a collection of writings accumulated over the years, primarily on law and occasionally on other matters.
The current title The Urban Lawyer’s Brief reflects the past decade of my work, though the writings themselves span beyond urban law and local governance per se.
Published in both Bahasa Indonesia and English, this website serves as an archive of past and present writings.

— Farid Hanggawan

  • Jakarta’s Bicycle Infrastructure and the Limits of Traffic Law

    The Urban Lawyer’s Brief In January 2023, a video went viral of a motorcyclist casually riding through the protected bicycle lane on Jalan Jenderal Sudirman — the flagship stretch of cycling infrastructure Jakarta had spent three years and tens of billions of rupiah building. What made the clip newsworthy wasn’t the violation itself, which cyclists…

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  • Air Quality Regulation as Both Barrier and Enabler

    The Urban Lawyer’s Brief On September 16, 2021, activists gathered outside the Central Jakarta District Court holding placards shaped like infants — a blunt visual argument about who pays the price for the capital’s air. Inside, judges delivered a verdict few expected a court to hand down against a sitting president: President Joko Widodo, along…

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  • Seventeen Years Late: The Legal and Institutional Failure Behind Indonesia’s Waste Crisis

    The Urban Lawyer’s Brief On June 30, 2026, a fire broke out at the Jatiwaringin landfill in Mauk, Kabupaten Tangerang. By the time it was fully extinguished nearly two weeks later, the blaze had spread across roughly fifteen hectares — close to half the site — forced more than two hundred residents to evacuate as…

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