A couple of weeks ago I was in the final review of one of the sections of urban design and planning of the summer program of the Harvard Graduate School of Design as a guest critic. One of the observations made by another guest critic to one of the students was about the lack of a clear grid of the streets of the proposed development in South Boston. I could not help to intervene and ask a sincere question about the need of such organization of the area. Although rational, easier for people to locate themselves and easy for the city to manage it, a city with a grid pattern has in my opinion a negative component of homogeneity. One of the things I use to miss in American cities and in some European cities was those unique corners that happen in a city like Cusco that did not have that much of a rational urban planning. That small chaos of the streets of a not rationally planned city is something that came to my mind today in Kampung Melayu, a medium maturity informal settlement in the east of Jakarta, in the banks of the Ciliwung River. Unlike the settlement we visited the first day, people living in Melayu have been around this area for a long time, that is, two or three generations. Enough time for already having been able to develop a neighborhood of two or three stories houses, schools, mosques, stores, restaurants, streets, alleys and all the elements that typically define a city. What impressed me the most is how beautiful and vivacious the neighborhood was. Not only it looked like an area where people had gone out of a precarious situation, but it looked like an area where one would want to live. The lack of state-led planning disappeared in this area any shadow of a grid and yet the spontaneous pattern of life that was progressively developed here gave birth to edges like the one that is in the picture. We came by foot over the alley that is in the top picture and suddenly we run into this house that had the fortune to be in the corner and, maybe as a compensation for the less privacy, enjoyed a sort of semi-private space, that along with the varied assortment of plants gave the place a lovely sentiment of warm, only broken some steps ahead by the giant mouse that caught the eye of Astrid and made Edu run for his life.