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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Holy Cows in the Big Durian

Since March the fifth, 2003, I have been in Indonesia. That day I arrived at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport around noon, greeted by a blazing sun - and a traffic jam of inhuman proportions. It took the taxi three hours at snail’s pace to arrive at my hotel. Halfway we got company of the rain; rain pouring down did certainly no good to our tempo.

Back in the Netherlands, I am sure drivers would have gone totally bananas, showing their middle fingers, yelling at one and another, banging their heads on steering wheels, and eventually abandoning their cars to ventilate their anger elsewhere. But then here, in this big stinky durian, one seems to be much obliged to accept fate.

I start to feel at home here though. Indonesia is nesting underneath my skin - the dust, the dirt, the heat, the jams, the noise - the thrills for me, the urban junkie. It has been and surely still is a valuable lesson in slow living. Now I am a denizen of this city too, a citizen with no right to vote.

Here in Jakarta, congestion can be treated as a virtue. When traffic comes to a halt, when the traffic lights turn red, then it is time. It is the time to sell tofu, slices of mango, nuts or krupuk, cold beverages, maps and dictionaries, a whole range of newspapers and magazines (including the latest edition of Playboy), nail clippers and razor blades. It is the time for the lame & blind to beg for some change. It is the time to sing a protest song in honor of Soekarno or to read some poetry in favor of a local pesantren.

Others gnash their teeth and give out some change or wave beggars off with a lofty hand. Others catch up with their reading. It is the time to clean one’s nose, to stare in oblivion or just to doze off for a second or more.

Currently the average speed of the 2.5 million private cars and 3.8 million motorcycles is 14.75 km/hour. Every single day 300 new cars and 1200 new motorcycles enter the 7500 kilometers of Jakarta’s roads. On average 50 percent of the travel time is wasted at intersections - there are many spots of such chronic congestion. The total amount of cars in the city of Jakarta increases per annum by 11 percent. Jakarta is close to a final gridlock.

Urban-based societies are generally considered civilizations. Perhaps Indonesia urbanized too quickly; concerning Jakarta it is Dante’s inferno that comes to mind. The streets of Jakarta are a paradise, though, around midnight. Then it is sheer pleasure to drive around this nocturnal city of concrete asphalt and multifarious lights. Take a joyride: roll the windows down, feel the wind and hear P.J.Harvey sing ‘Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea’

We wanted to find love
We wanted success
Until nothing was enough
Until my middle name was excess
And somehow I lost touch
When you went out of sight
When you got lost into the city
Got lost into the night.

Political philosophers tell us that every one’s freedom is limited by the freedom of others; freedom is a relational concept. These philosophers also claim that accumulated private vices can become public virtues. They speak then of asocial sociability. Here in Jakarta private vices do not add up to a virtuous situation, a civilized society. Nevertheless, no one wants to hear that a change in the way we live our lives is needed.

Recently I bought a map of Jakarta. To my surprise, the only green areas indicated are Monas, Senayan sports complex, a few cemeteries and some golf courses (quite a few actually). Nature has been colonized. So how many more toll roads and flyovers can this city absorb? With how much more asphalt can the city be flooded? The TransJakarta Busway and the three-in-one policy during peek hours meet mockery, and ust because it's felt by the well-to-do that it eats up ‘their’ space.

There can be no blueprint to solve all Jakarta’s problems at once. Piecemeal solutions, though, should come from a public - i.e. political - approach. How to use the space of our mega-metropolis is open to political debate for all its users - poor or rich, indigenous or foreigner (Indonesian poet and essayist Goenawan Mohamad writes that in Jakarta everyone is a foreigner, in Jakarta everyone’s place of origin is somewhere else). Every Jakartan needs to have a stake in a just space.

That solutions can only be implemented in a piecemeal manner does not mean however that we cannot open our minds to think outside the confines of the box. This is usually the territory of science fiction. Sci-fi speculates on future uses of science and technology. For example, Steven Spielberg’s 2002 Minority Report movie with Tom Cruise is a showcase of new transport modes we imagine to use in a not so distant future.

Henry Ford (1863-1947) was the founder of Ford Motor Company. The Model T was in 1908 the first mass produced car (sociologists call this mode of production Fordism). Ford wanted every one to buy a Ford, simply because he wanted to make as much money as possible. We have become habituated with the idea that if we can afford a car we will buy one. We should not forget, though, that Ford did not create the right to privately own an automobile.

Can we imagine our city devoid of combustion engines? (This is not a question from an environmentalist perspective; I’m discussing the city’s congested space, so trading in the petrol fueled automobiles and motorcycles for an environmental friendly variant will not help.) At today’s markets models for every aesthetical taste and use can be purchased. The choice for a type of transportation mode depends on its efficiency, flexibility, costs, cleanliness, and prestige.

Talk about the holy cow is a taboo. The car seems these days an expression of the self. Talking about banning the car from our streets rocks people’s identity and will get you branded as a communist. People want to distinguish themselves from others, even in a traffic jam. A few weeks ago I saw two teenagers driving very slowly a convertible Ferrari through the congested streets of the snobbish neighborhood Pondok Indah.

Can we phase out private ownership of automobiles and motorcycles in Jakarta while at the same time making public transportation efficient, flexible, cheap and clean? It would not help much if we individually decide not to purchase a motor or car. We together need to answer that question. And for this we need the esprit of a polity.

A certain degree of snobbery should be tolerated as a translation of the unequal distribution of prestige. In Jakarta’s polity this ought to have no extra political weight. If public transportation can be made efficient, flexible, cheap and clean, then prestige has to be channeled through other means then car ownership. All Jakartans have the right to take part in discussions on a fair use of space.

I love to hate Jakarta. I hate to love Jakarta. However, I am a Jakartan.
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Roy Voragen, from the Netherlands, lives in Jakarta and teaches at Parahyangan University, Bandung. His weblog can be accessed here.