Planning the Megacity

Jakarta in the Twentieth Century

Christopher Silver

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781135991210
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

In this book, the first on the planning history of Jarkarta, able expert Christopher Silver describes how planning has shaped urban development in Southeast Asia, and in particular how its largest city, Jakarta, Indonesia, was transformed from a colonial capital of approximately 150, 000 in 1900 to a megacity of 12–13 million inhabitants in 2000.

Placing the city's planning history within local, national and international contexts, exploring not only the formal planning actions, but how planning was shaped by broader political, economic, social and cultural factors in Indonesia's development, this book is an excellent resource for academics, students and professionals involved in urban planning, history and geography as well as other interested parties.

Chapter One
Understanding Urbanization and the Megacity in Southeast Asia

Jakarta is the most populous city in Southeast Asia, the largest city in a nation and a region where cities account for less than half the total population. The rural village, not the urban neighbourhood, remains the dominant form of habitation and, according to some observers, Jakarta is really an overgrown cluster of villages. When measured as a whole, this cluster of villages makes up an urban area with nearly 10 million residents, which grows to nearly 11 million during the working day. Jakarta’s rapid growth, as well as that of cities throughout the region, has largely been the product of the past half-century. In 1950, according to data from the United Nations, only 14.8 per cent of Southeast Asians lived in urban areas compared to 63.9 per cent in North America and 52.4 per cent in Europe. Only Sub-Saharan Africa had a lower rate of urbanization (11.5 per cent) although throughout Asia, especially if the massive rural populations of India and China are added to the equation, the overall percentage of urban inhabitants amounted to just 17.4 per cent.¹ Over the subsequent half century, however, the percentage of urban residents in Southeast Asia jumped to 37.2 per cent, pushing it ahead of Asia as a whole but still far behind North America, Europe, Latin America and North Africa.²

What is most distinctive about urbanization in Southeast Asia between 1950 and 2000 is its concentration in just a handful of urban places, creating a phenomenon that urban geographers refer to as primate cities. Their pre-eminence and centrality are in functions that strongly influence urbanization (e.g. jobs, transportation, services). Although the development of primate cities has been a global phenomenon, what happened in Southeast Asia in the second half of the twentieth century is a distinctive variation on primate city formation. Explosive urban growth, in terms of population concentration, economic development and spatial growth led, within a very short time span, to truly enormous urban places.

The term that emerged to distinguish those cities which reached the remarkable plateau of supporting a population of 8 million or more people was ‘megacity’, and during the 1990s Jakarta became the largest of Southeast Asia’s ‘megacities’. With a population of more than 11 million, Jakarta became one of the most populous cities in the world.³

Southeast Asia’s other megacities are Manila, with a population of 10 million and Bangkok, with more than 7.5 million inhabitants. Singapore, the region’s economic powerhouse, might have shared a similar glory in population growth were it not a small island nation lacking enough space to accommodate a megacity size population. Nevertheless, its more than 4 million residents make it the fifth largest city in the region, surpassed slightly in population by Yangon, Myanmar (4.5 million) although the former colonial capital of Burma is one of the poorest of the region’s large urban places. Several other cities had multimillion populations by 2000 and were poised to gain entry into this elite grouping, including Surabaya (2.5 million) and Bandung (3.4 million) in Indonesia, and Ho Chi Minh City (4.6 million) and Hanoi (3.8 million) in Vietnam. In spatial size, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia also exhibits megacity traits, especially in its spread, although the Malaysian national policy of encouraging urban deconcentration ensures that the capital city will not achieve megacity stature any time soon. Yet like Singapore, Kuala Lumpur’s highly educated urban population of 1.4 million plays an economic role in the region far greater than would be predicted by its modest size.⁴

The official population figures for these large Southeast Asian urban centres do not tell the full story, however. The megacities are the nexus for much larger areas that include many more people than just those officially residing in the urban area. This uncounted population includes those who remain with one foot still firmly planted in rural agricultural life, but who have formed attachments through various linkages, usually economic, to the urban market. Because of the dual nature of these urban-related agricultural areas, Terence McGee aptly labelled them desakota, which literally translates from Indonesian as ‘city village’. Together the desakota and the urbanized area make up what demographer Gavin Jones refers to as a ‘mega-urban region’. As Jones notes, while in Western cities, there is typically a sharp division between urban and adjacent rural areas, in the Southeast Asian mega-urban region, densely populated rural enclaves lie beyond the confines of the metropolis, in some cases drawn into the urban orbit by out-migration of urban industries or through conversion to urban residential uses. But many serve as a labour pool for urban industries and services while simultaneously sustaining a rural lifestyle.⁵

‘Extended metropolitan development’ (another term used by analysts to describe the megacity and mega-urban region phenomena), has been a distinguishing characteristic of urbanization in Southeast Asia’s developing countries over the past two decades. Accompanying this profound urban restructuring of large and intermediate cities has been a substantial research literature seeking to explain the phenomenon.⁶ The megacity concept refers not only to population thresholds but also to the physical manifestation of an urbanization process where dense population and mixed land uses extend from 75 to 100 kilometres from the urban core. As McGee and Robinson put it, the ‘megacity’ encompasses ‘the entire territory – comprising the central city, the developments within the transportation corridors, the satellite towns and other projects in the peri-urban fringe, and the outer zones [within] a single, economically integrated’ territory.⁷ On the basis of spatial development, five extended metropolitan regions had been identified by the 1990s – Bangkok, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Manila and Singapore – although other candidates were poised to assume this status, including Bandung, Surabaya and Medan in Indonesia, Changmai in Thailand, Cebu City in the Phillipines and Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam.⁸

The spatial configuration of the Southeast Asian megacity, like the sprawling metropolises of North America, has been depicted as ‘amorphous and amoebic-like’ owing to the rapid and irregular process of growth and change which it has undergone in recent decades. The megacity is typically characterized as an undesirable outcome of urban development. Critics point to environmental and ecological degradation, to the loss of precious agricultural lands, and to the increasing poverty among those who flock there from rural areas; its extremely dispersed settlement pattern which fosters inefficiencies in provision of basic services, and the nightmare confronting those charged with its management, have all been cited as reasons to thwart continued growth. Others laud megacity development as a visible manifestation of powerful economic growth forces in the region.⁹ McGee contends that the advantages of spatial dispersion in megacities must be calculated alongside their obvious costs. Examples of advantages accruing from recent development include upgraded housing for workers, increased home ownership rates (as evidence of capital accumulation among consumers); improved environmental conditions through improved sanitation; clean water; increased open space that accompanies new peripheral development; improved job opportunities and wages (in large part associated with jobs that contribute to sustaining megacity development); and improved amenities for a broad segment of the population due to the wealth generated through megacity concentration. He regards as a myth that the size of the megacity is itself a problem, or that megacities cannot be sustained. He rejects the view that the megacities contribute to impoverishment, or that they ‘are places of disharmony and poor quality of life’.¹⁰

As White and Whitney point out, the extended metropolis concept, with its accompanying ‘greater dispersal of population’, might help to ‘overcome diseconomies of very large centers, diffuse economic activity more widely through regions and nations, and permit the environment to absorb better the wastes imposed upon it’. As they note further, the extended metropolis (or megacity) is a variant on the linear city, with the ‘obvious advantage ... that it provides ready access to a string of urban centers without entailing the horrendously inefficient (time and energy consuming) pattern of daily expansion and contraction’ which would be necessary with a single employment centre surrounded by residential areas.¹¹ The contention that unregulated urban development has created a desirable polycentric urban spatial pattern in the megacities of Asia offers the most extreme variation on the ‘metropolitan growth is good’ position. Taken together, these reassessments suggest that the growth and spatial dispersion of the urbanized areas in Southeast Asia yield results consistent with the objectives of a sustainable urban environment even with extended metropolitan area populations approaching 15 million inhabitants as in the case of Jakarta and Manila.¹²

What makes the case of urban sustainability plausible in the case of Southeast Asian megacities is that the rapid growth of the periphery has not undermined the vitality of the urban core as it seems to have done in so many North American cities. The absence of ‘urban spatial abandonment’ in the core areas of Southeast Asian megacities is one indication that the process of urban expansion at the periphery has not eroded critical urban core functions. Another factor is the emergence of a truly polycentric spatial and functional order. According to geographer Ira Robinson, polycentric metropolitan restructuring tends to offset certain economic costs associated with urban dispersion. As he notes, the ‘polynucleated metropolitan spatial structure can relieve congestion costs at the centre without sacrificing the benefits of metropolitan-wide agglomeration of economies’. The polynucleated settlement pattern involves clustering multiple urban functions in order to reduce the length of trips and increase opportunities to make multipurpose trips over a shorter distance. By concentrating new development in a few locations, polynuclearity also reduces land consumption and preserves critical areas. While retaining interdependence with other components of the metropolis, these clusters can develop their own internal cohesiveness, enabling them to respond to service needs and to provide a community-based environment within the larger metropolis.¹³

Late in 1995, the journal Indonesia Property Report devoted an entire issue to examining the ‘problems and prospects’ for Jakarta’s megacity development, focusing on the array of planned urban centres that had sprouted up along the expanding edges of the city. As the editors observed:

New Towns and Satellite Cities surrounding Jakarta seem to have grown like mushrooms during the rainy season. Bumi Serpong Damai, Kota Tigaraksa, Lippo City, Lippo Village, Kota Cikarang Baru, Bintaro Jaya, Kota Legenda, and Royal Sentul Highlands, are only some of the new towns being developed near Jakarta.¹⁴

Their message was that these privately-planned large-scale developments relieved pressures on inner-city neighbourhoods to accommodate Jakarta’s continuously expanding population. Not only were they proof of Jakarta’s dynamic economy but they were the catalysts for restructuring the city from a highly centralized to a highly decentralized structure, so helping to usher in the ‘megacity’ era.

These privately planned residential towns, in combination with numerous publicly-financed (but privately-constructed) low-income housing projects led, in the 1990s, to wholesale transformation of land on the edges of Jakarta from agricultural to urban uses. Development pressures produced dramatic increases in land values close to the centre, thereby forcing moderate and low-income development to seek locations further out. The escalating land prices fuelled even greater expansion. As evidence of the housing construction boom, the national government’s target of more than half a million new units to be built by 1999 was achieved ahead of schedule in 1997. Until the collapse of the Indonesian economy in the second half of 1997, it seemed as though the urbanized area of Jakarta would soon engulf all land within a 60–70 kilometres radius of the traditional city centre. While certainly proud of Jakarta’s new status as a recognized global ‘megacity’, and determined to sustain the development momentum, Indonesia’s planners also acknowledged the serious environmental, economic, social and political implications of this urban explosion.

Suddenly, in the second half of...