If I Were Jakarta’s Governor.

Traffic, floods, H5N1, dengue fever, inappropriate land use, rapid urban expansion, air and water pollution, corruption, crime, street brawls, kampungs, and evictions appear like clockwork in the Jakarta news.

The problems must be addressed simultaneously. Generally, they fall under the headings of health, education, and welfare. Take your pick. The interrelated nature of the problems cannot be understated.

Traffic
In the short term traffic must be mitigated, managed, and mass rapid transit projects initiated and completed.

First, I would immediately halt the proposed subway project but more than double the mileage of the Busway projects by laying elevated tracks adjacent to the ring road toll corridors so as to interconnect the suburbs of Bekasi to Depok to Tangerang. I would also extend the mass transit service to Soekarno-Hatta airport.

Standard fares and services would be established for all. Lower fares and mass transit costs would be subsidised by an increase in toll road fees for private passenger vehicles. If mass transit is clean, safe, efficient, and cheap it will be used resulting in a reduction in the number of vehicles on the road which would in turn also save energy costs and the dependence on rapidly reducing oil supplies.

I would urge the central government to nationalize the toll road system because it is inappropriate that a basic transportation service should be privately run for profit. Above all, it is a matter of Indonesian national security.

Improved air quality would be had by having fewer vehicles on the road plus a requirement to fit catalytic converters on all vehicles. An improvement in fuel quality is also required. The recent regulation requiring all vehicles to be made roadworthy must be rigidly enforced.

The on-going car free day experiment in Jakarta demonstrably improves air quality although it has had its problems. The Jakarta Post called it “no clue day” - Governor Fauzi Bowo arrived at the opening ceremony by car! - but because it is a new emergent idea in Indonesia, the more often it is held the more Jakartans will get used to it.

Urbanization
Traffic problems are essentially a people related problem, namely, too many of them. In 2007, it was reported that more people on the planet now live in urban areas than not. Indonesia is no exception.

Cities are attractive because they represent a perceived and real economic opportunity. In the long term, the key toward solving the traffic problem, and most of Jakarta’s other problems, is to slow the process of urbanization. This means that the economic activity which generates the wealth of Jakarta, which in turn makes it attractive to migrants, must be decentralized.

The economic wealth generated by Jakarta must not simply be reinvested into Jakarta creating a vicious cycle of development and growth. New economic investment must be made equitably through the towns and villages of Indonesia, starting with Java, as that is the island with the largest number of urbanizing cities. If it is economically attractive to stay in your village or town then you will.
Disinvestment in Jakarta and reinvestment dispersed throughout Indonesia would be a high priority.

Floods
Jakarta has had floods from when the city was first named Batavia. In an excellent report titled Flooding in Jakarta: Towards a blue city with improved water management, M. Caljoun, Peter J.M. Nas, and Pratiwo conclude that “a completely different view of the city and its problems are required, one aimed at furnishing ample room for water. Instead of a grey or merely green city, Jakarta should also aspire to become a blue city”. What they are implying is that water will go where it will and over the long term it is best to let it go there and adapt to the new reality.

In the long term I would address the flooding issue through comprehensive survey and mapping of the Jakarta watershed from Puncak to the Java Sea. Simultaneously I would survey, map, and preserve the segmented patches of remaining agricultural land that remain on Jakarta’s fringes which can provide important ecological services such as water retention, micro-climate control, green space, and the conservation of visual quality.

Essentially I would make water work for Jakarta by creating a series of small dams throughout the watershed to slow the course of the water flow, divert it into manmade ponds and lakes; clean, restore, and maintain all diversionary canals; reforest stream banks and coastal mangrove forests.
The slowed and stored water could be used for a number of projects including aquaculture, the provision of clean drinking water, and for the treatment of sewage.

A Comprehensive Urban Plan
This is what Jakarta immediately needs. As governor I would revitalize the city planning office, make it the central management office of my administration, and provide it with state of the art geographic information technologies.

In Towards Sustainable Cities: Urban Community and Environment in the Third World (1996), Peter Nas and Margriet Veenma wrote, “Urban environmental management has to cut the Gordian knot” of special interests… , “not like Alexander with a stroke, but more cautiously, most probably in a step by step application of environmental plans”.

I would develop a “think (out-of-the-box) tank” of young urban geographers and initiate comprehensive planning legislation based on community driven approaches to development.

Kampungs
Giok Ling Ooi and Kai Hong Phua, in Urbanization and Slum Formation , argue that “city governments have to first recognize and then act to establish the link that is crucial between economic development, urban growth, and housing. This is the agendum that has been largely neglected by city and national governments that have been narrowly focused on economic growth with the consequent proliferation of slum formation as a housing solution”.

Basically, slum formation is a product of having no housing solution. As governor I would embark on creating large scale low income housing unit projects, not high rise cinder blocks, but based on the needs of the community and with access to community services which would include clean drinking water, sanitation, education, and job training.

As governor, I would cease all evictions unless the occupants of an area are threatened with an imminent health crisis or natural catastrophe. People would not be moved until they had a place to move to and in the interim a full spectrum of social services would be provided

I would reinstate a kampung restructuring policy, formerly a successful symbol of social welfare. In conjunction with this I would enforce a moratorium on the building of malls and require that all housing projects include affordable low income units.

Recycling
A report from The Environmental and Natural Resources Policy and Training Project titled Jakarta, Indonesia: The Economics of Water and Waste states that, “Jakarta has an extensive recycling system. No sooner has solid waste left the household than scavengers begin to pore through it. These are people with bags or carts who seek a living by collecting discarded items that can be recycled or reused. They collect not only items that are recycled in industrialized countries, such as paper, plastic, glass, and metals, but also discarded household durable goods, wood, bone, sawdust, boxes, and cigarette butts.

“Also, until recently, officials considered scavengers to be urban undesirables.”

As governor I would place a redemption tax on all plastic bags, bottles, and aluminum cans. I would make household garbage worth enough so as to not have it simply discarded.

The XSProject is a good example of what can be done with it. They buy “plastic consumer waste from Jakarta’s trash pickers at well above market price, providing them with much-needed extra income. Working together with other foundations and small cottage industries, the waste is then transformed into functional accessories that make a strong environmental and social statement”.

As governor I would promote and support small scale projects of this type. In addition there is real potential for turning the organic waste into biodiesel, for mining the Bekasi landfill, and for letting nothing go to waste.

Greenspace
The best out of the box thinking I have seen is on Erwin Maulana’s blog, Rwien Universe, which features an interview with Marco Kusumawijaya, architect and greenspace advocate. He is noted for defending Indonesia’s urban public spaces through his books - Kota Rumah Kita (The City as Our Home, 2006) and Jakarta Metropolis Tunggang Langgang (The Scrambling Jakarta Metropolis, 2004) and by introducing the Green Map movement to Indonesia.

Kusumawijaya states in the interview that “The issue of green open spaces is perhaps one of the smaller problems; the big problem is how to change the pattern of consumption and production; (to implement) a pattern of consumption that produces as little waste as possible, as well as a pattern of production that produces as little waste as possible, or the reusing of waste as much as possible-that’s the essence of sustainable development.

“Sustainable development is not only about physical development, it is also about social and economic issues. Green open spaces fulfil the role of social-cultural space The point is sustainable development implies changes in consumption and production patterns as well as in behaviour”.

He is the kind of person I would want in my government.

The Internet
Myrlyna Lim, has written in Cyber-Urban Activism and the Political Change in Indonesia that “the ability of Internet technology to provide spaces for interpersonal dialogue has in many countries bolstered the potential for a more democratic public realm.

“…for democratization, the Internet has all the features that are suited to civil society and grassroots citizen action in a manner that is less easy for a small number of people or groups to control. These features include: one-to-one communication, low/affordable cost, ease of use, broad availability, and relative technological resistance to surveillance and censorship.”

The internet has emerged as a potent economic and political tool where information is moved at the speed of light. And information is power. As Jakarta’s governor I would promote free broadband wireless access to the Internet. Every school class room would have a computer terminal and students would have mandatory courses in internet technology.

My guiding principles are:
1. Democracy : A government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly.
2. Transparency : It is essential to the democratic process that citizens have the right and ability hold government officials, both elected and appointed, accountable for their actions.
There are few immediate fixes to Jakarta’s problems, but there are answers and in some cases the answers have long been available and in great detail.

So, there is hope.

A former resident of Jakarta recently said this about hope: “Hope is not blind optimism. It is not ignoring the enormity of the task ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. It’s not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it, and work for it, and to fight for it… hope is the belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us… by those who are not content to settle for the world as it is but who have the courage to remake the world as it should be”.

His name is Barack Obama.
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Thomas R. Belfield lives and works and writes Jakarta Urban Blog on the island of Hawaii. He makes the long pilgrimage to Jakarta about once a year staying with his wife's family in Citayam where he drinks innumerable cups of tea and smokes innumerable kreteks while "talking, talking, talking" late into the night.
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