Establishing a modern domestic water management system in Batavia, colonial Jakarta, involved struggles over territories between different actors. The multifaceted territorial character of managing water and land reveals the highly contested notion of citizenship as there were continuous processes of service inclusion and exclusion within complex interactions among different state institutions, the private sector and communities. While the twentieth century colonial government addressed water and sanitation issues as part of modernity projects, urban kampung communities simultaneously used diverse socio-ecological networks to meet their water and sanitation needs. However, their strategies did not always comply with the modern sanitation standards idealised by the colonial state. The existence of Batavia’s kampungs preceding and following the inception of modern planning system reflects their capability of undergoing socio-spatial transformations within the contexts of limited state intervention on the provision of basic services and under the condition of unequal spatial development processes. The kampung dynamics seem to call into question the existing form of state-led management systems in providing water and sanitation services. The systems pretty much favour the marketisation agenda at the operational level, while keep idealising universal access to services at the discursive level despite the exclusionary nature of infrastructure planning. The persistence of kampungs has likely proven their socio-ecological relevance, and potentially forms the foundation of an alternative paradigm of citizenship for an improved governance system in the urban water sector.