The Unsustainable Jakarta

M. Ridwan Kamil

[AGORA] HERE comes again a classical complaint: Jakarta is getting crammed, hazy and unpleasant. Today, more than 15 million people are squeezed during the daytime in the 65,000-hectare city and leave 9 million others at night. With that size Jakarta is considered as a truly megapolitan city -in notorious image of course. That number also contributes to today's 5.8 billion world population, in which for the first time in history, half of them will be living in urban areas. It is forecasted as well that this inexorable urbanization will make The Greater Jakarta Metropolitan Area (JABOTABEK) packed by 37 million people in the year 2015.

Haphazardly plotted as the center of Indonesia's economic activity by dominating 75 percent of capital circulation, Jakarta turns out to be a peerless allure for so many migrants with so many hopes. Thousands of middle and low class individuals flock to Jakarta every year scrambling to taste a bit of economic pie, and trying to find the path of their fate there. The flow of this unstoppable headlong urbanization then becomes an annual pilgrimage -a ritual in its own right.

Reading urbanization as a migration flow from rural to urban areas is not always true. From the year 1990 to 1995 in Jakarta, 61,7 percent migrants were from urban areas while only 35,9 percent were from rural areas. This indicates that there is also a big gap in urban-to-urban economic development especially between Jakarta and the rest of Indonesian cities.

The consequence of this economic disparity then comes with a price -the expensive one. Some are succeed in finding their bliss, but mostly failed. Accelerated by ongoing monetary crisis, the growth of population in Jakarta then somehow always relates to poverty. The population now is caught in a pattern of growing bigger without growing richer.

This agglomeration of poor population leads to another common problems: the need for jobs and housing. Since the number of jobless people increase by the crisis, some of the unskilled individuals find themselves desperate and frantically take a shortcut by becoming a criminal. Now every 200 seconds, one crime scene occurs in Jakarta, and 78 individuals per 100 thousand people are vulnerable by crime.

Under the New Order regime, the government of Jakarta also failed to provide adequate housing for its citizen. The great demand for affordable housing were often overlooked. Ironically within national level, the housing for middle and affluent class are over-supplied by 45 million units, while the affordable housing for low-income is always in a shortage situation. This imbalance is also worsen by the fact that 30 trillion rupiahs of capital debt are rooted from the property industry.

In terms of imbalance between built and natural environment, we have yet another serious problems. The chosen settlement developments pattern that haphazardly imported from the West, the suburbia model, creates perpetual environmental degradation, traffic jams, faceless sprawl, and heightens social inequity.

The market-driven model, stretching out from Bogor, Bekasi to Tangerang, has been chosen and implemented excessively in and around Jakarta, and built largely for affluent society only.

This sporadic sprawl generally devastates the green belt, rice fields, trees and the rest of natural landscape making them unable to filter pollution and provide habitats for wildlife. The recent flood accident overfilling Sedyatmo toll road in Cengkareng was just one case among others that triggered by such development. In other words, the ecological footprint of development in Jakarta has superseded its natural carrying.

Such model also ignores the importance of building a reliable public transport, and assumes that we all have a car to commute. Yes, Jakarta is becoming an automobile dependence environment, and Yes, we have fallen into a trap where we have no choice, unless we own one.

The ironic thing though, in the West this model is in the process of being discarded and replaced. Now, they realize that the most sustainable model is the one that rely efficiently on good public transport not automobile. The so called "Transit Metropolis" concept is now emerging everywhere from Singapore to Curitiba in Brazil, from Stockholm to Greater Tokyo.

This transit-based development is proven to be a fine model since it addresses most of the critical issue on physical sustainability with less impact on environment. Meanwhile in Jakarta, the government is still baffled among themselves on how to deal with it, and only acts fragmentarily by implementing the infamous 3-in-1 concept, approving more suburban estates and adding more toll road that turn out to be a worse case.

CAUGHT in a tiring traffic in Jakarta also becomes an inevitable ritual for its people. As the morning sun hits the road or as dusk shrouds the city, 6 million people are involuntarily jammed on a boring winding traffic, flocking back and forth from their gated suburban homes to their office, mostly in the central area of the city.

The length of traffic jam could as bad as 3-5 kilometers as seen every morning along Kebon Nanas Toll gate, where residents of gated-community estates, such as BSD, Alam Sutera, Gading Serpong, Villa Melati or Villa Serpong, clog the road scrambling as fast as they can to reach their office in downtown Jakarta. The scenes within the downtown Jakarta are even worse.

The incremental number of automobile -85 cars per 1000 people in 1997- worsen the situation. Within the downtown area, the average speed is around 8 kms/hour. It's below the tolerable 12 kms/hour international standard. The slow movement of automobile of course releases more pollution into air, and make the air pollution level in Jakarta excruciating.

Such a pity, if one wants to see the blue bright sky in Jakarta, one has to patiently wait until big holiday, like Lebaran or Christmas, comes by, where people and cars will be seen less. Otherwise, one has to take hazy days as a permanent curse from the angry mother nature.

Meanwhile, the carrying capacity of ground water in Jakarta is also endangered. While only 50 percent of people in Jakarta have access to clean water, the ground water capacity which is only 114 million cubic-meter/year is being threatened by 300 million cubic illegal use every year. This unequal and excessive use by the vast population also makes the level of soil surface in Jakarta shrink around 4-9 cm annually. Even in Northern part of Jakarta, for the last ten years, the level of soil surface has already lowered around 0.3 to 1 meter.

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Okay, enough for the headache. What should we do now?

Well that's another story. This article only wants to show that the way the government of Jakarta deals with spatial planning is definitely creating unsustainable environment and threatening the nature's carrying capacity in handling Jakarta's enormous population.

If we take the concept of sustainable development as described by the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development or The Brundtland Commission as "the type of development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs", then the government of Jakarta has to re-oriented their approach and vision in dealing with the urban planning of Jakarta. By so doing, our children will at least be experiencing the same privilege as we have today, if not better.

Otherwise, we will fall again into a trap, like the 32-year New Order regime had put us into, by breathing and living in a pseudo-modernized environment without even knowing it.