Technological innovation and democracy in the design of earthquake-proof dome buildings in Yogyakarta

Abstract

A settlement may be viewed as a sociotechnical network consisting of buildings and social groups that together performs a certain function. A key question that has invited considerable debate in recent literature is how a collection of human and nonhuman elements converge to jointly function, thus, delineating the boundary between indoor and outdoor environments. The purpose of this paper is to address this question by employing actor–network theory (ANT) to investigate the design and construction of earthquake-proof dome buildings within the late 2000s Sleman Regency in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The design trajectory of these domes was shaped by local and global actors, and negotiated the boundary between humans and their environment. The empirical findings in this paper identify the disentanglement of certain local groups during the design and construction process, which led to a fragile indoor–outdoor boundary, and contested the very uses of these structures. This paper discusses the issue of bringing technological innovation into a democratic composition of a collective, chiefly by introducing ANT in the design and construction of Yogyakarta’s earthquake-proof dome buildings. It also seeks to improve both scholarly understandings and existing post-disaster reconstruction practices, in turn.