A Floating City
Operated by PELNI (National Cruising Company), this old cruiser, KM Leuser, offers various people with different intentions inside. A public cruiser is a place where people meets and interacts, almost similar with a miniature of floating city. The experience of watercraft travelling, in a longer time period, is different with a bus, train, or airplane. Passenger classing evidently attests the socio-economic class in a physical manner in which lower class passengers stay in lower decks and receive inferior services while higher class passengers enjoy the luxurious vitality and amusement of a limited platform. Nevertheless the design of public cruiser allows people to build a more intimate relationship with other passengers who shared the same deck, speak with the same language, came from the same city/village, or work in the same business. People can deliberately associate or randomly foregather with other people and finally end up in an unpredictable relation. Putting this unpredictablity of a cruiser into an urban context is about collecting smaller distributed occurences over irregular intervals in time and space. Mobility, informality, and reciprocity, the same basic features of urban study, however, is applicable to narrate this into chain of related events.
[a night view from the fourth deck]
[economy class]
[the free entertainment]
[a market inside the cruiser]
