Cities are places full of symbols. In the past decades, Indonesian cities havebecome the cradle of urban symbolism studies. In this article, the authorpresents the results of these studies. The cities researched differ tremendously,ranging from the national capital to provincial capitals and small towns; someof them, such as Jakarta, are purely colonial in origin, while others are more orless traditional in character. Some of them have a top-down symbolic structure,largely the product of government activities, while others have symbolicconfigurations which have a more grassroots character and are based in thereligious domain. The methodological aspect of urban symbolism fieldwork isexplored by the introduction of the concept of flâneur.