Rapid Urbanization: The Challenges and Opportunities for Planning in Indonesian Cities

Abstract

Within the rapidly urbanizing Southeast Asia region, Indonesia’s largest cities are among those experiencing the highest rates of growth. The Jakarta Megapolitan Region, now exceeding 30 million inhabitants, has spawned four of Indonesia’s most populous cities in its periphery over the past three decades. Data presented, dealing with demographic and spatial expansion of Jakarta megacity, supports the conclusion that it is the periphery and not the center city where urbanization is occurring. This process has been fueled by the real estate development machine with significant support from public transportation investments, but with costs borne through widespread displacement of peri-urban settlements and conversion of agricultural lands to urban uses, all contributing to an acknowledged increase in inequality in Indonesian cities. This places increased pressure on national and local governments to provide infrastructure to support post-suburbanization, including continued expansion of transportation facilities, but especially to generate affordable housing to accommodate the growing population drawn to the economic opportunities in expanding cities. Current investments are not keeping up with the needs of these urbanizing regions. Moreover, evidence from Indonesian researchers suggests that the day-to-day planning and implementation in support of peri-urbanization is guided by the private development sector objectives rather than through public controls and meeting the needs of incoming residents. With the attention of national government now focused on planning a new capital city in East Kalimantan, the necessary engagement of the public sector to counter the dominance of the private sector in guiding Indonesia’s rapid urbanization is not likely to be sufficient.

1 The Rationale: An Urban Story

A 5-month long Fulbright Senior Scholar appointment at the University of Indonesia in 2019 provided an opportunity to closely observe the extensive changes that have transformed the Jakarta metropolitan area over the past two decades. In many respects, the evolving form of Jakarta reflects conditions of Indonesian cities as well as in urban areas throughout the Southeast Asian region. The term that best captures this shared urban experience is “rapid urbanization.” While we typically measure urbanization in terms of its population change (which in the case of the Jakarta megaregion puts its somewhere between 26 and 30 million according to recent estimates), less attention is generally paid to how these demographic factors affect the urban spatial footprint. What I witnessed in Jakarta, Bandung, Makassar, Semarang, and Surabaya in Indonesia, as well during visits to Ho Chi Minh City and Phnom Penh, was the penetration of urbanism deep into the adjacent hinterlands responding to commercial and residential developments on an unprecedented scale. At the same time, I witnessed a spatial transformation on an equally profound scale within the already previously built-up areas of the city proper. In the case of Jakarta, inner-city redevelopment began in the early 1990s, halted during the economic crisis of 1997 through 2005 (Silver et al. 2001), but then resumed with a vengeance, especially after 2012 and continues to revamp the urban core. Changes in the inner city built environment (which in some sections saw declining population, especially in Central Jakarta), but where densities remained extremely high (14,464 persons per square kilometer), were complemented by exploding spatial and population growth beyond the Jakarta boundaries.

City and suburb now constitute a single urban continuum. Because of this, it is often difficult to know when you are in Jakarta proper or have moved outside into one of its satellite cities, such as the booming city of Depok where the University of Indonesia straddles the political boundaries separating Jakarta and Depok. It is in the cities and regencies that surround Jakarta (forming the region known as Jabotadebek by borrowing parts of Jakarta, Bogor, Tangerang, Depok, and Bekasi) where a new urbanism is being fashioned. Previous scattered traditional settlements and new subdivisions for residential, commercial, and industrial activities have morphed into major cities that reside to the south, east, and the west of Jakarta proper. There is also movement to push urbanism northward into the Jakarta Bay on reclaimed land. According to recent population estimates, the formerly unincorporated Bekasi settlement on Jakarta’s east flank is now the second most populous city in Indonesia, taking over the spot that Surabaya in East Java had held for many decades. It boasts the highest concentration of industrial estates in all of Indonesia. and these investments account for the rapid spatial expansion and transformation that is occurring there.

While urban population changes are relatively easy to document, much less accessible is data related to changes on the ground, that is, to measure and assess the qualities of the rapid spatial transformation that is reshaping Jakarta and other major Indonesian cities. In addition to the spatial transformation so evident in Jakarta, a similar process of rapid urbanization characterizes regional cities such as Semarang (in Central Java), Surabaya (in East Java), Bandung (in West Java) and Makassar (in South Sulawesi). In these cases, there seems to be the same simultaneous largescale spatial transformation taking place in the center as well as in formerly rural periphery. How these changes are impacting the character and quality of the urban environment is not sufficiently addressed in the scholarly literature. Demographic and spatial data alone does not answer the question of who is benefitting from growth and the spatial changes. Conversely, are there those being negatively impacted by rapid urbanization? Another key question is whether the infrastructure needs of the modern city (which were less than desirable before the growth processes started) have been able to keep pace with both the demographic and spatial transformations, or stymied as new developments in the periphery draw off critical resources for their needs? And finally, has this rapid urbanization reduced or widened the gap between those who are pushing the urban agenda of growth and modernization, and the larger mass of urban residents who historically occupied the urban village environments that were the dominant form until the end of the twentieth century, but are less engaged in this change. To use the language from a recent World Bank study of Indonesian cities, rapid urbanization is the current “urban story” of Indonesia. What does this story tell us? As the World Bank study noted, despite the positive gains resulting from rapid urbanization, such as increased formal employment, greater economic productivity, and a sharp drop in the national poverty rate, “challenges lie in the way (emphasis added) of future growth and prosperity: a large urban infrastructure deficit, slow gains in labor productivity, and rising inequality” (World Bank Group 2016). This paper offers a preliminary examination of the “way” rapid urbanization is progressing in Indonesian cities, and especially in Jakarta, and to raise questions about that process.

2 The Big Picture

There is indisputable evidence that the next 20 years will witness continuous, indeed explosive, urbanization throughout the world, but especially in Asia. The Asian Development Bank projects another 1.1 billion people living in cities in Asia by 2030 (see ADB, Managing Asian Cities) In a region where most of its countries were until quite recently identified by their rural villages and agrarian lifestyle, the change to a predominantly urban region is profound. According to available population figures, Asia possesses the largest concentration of megacities in the world. In Asia, there are 12 urban concentrations with populations in excess of ten million, with 7 of these places among the 10 largest in the world. There remain vast differences in urbanization rates if we subdivide Asia into its regions. East Asia is the most urbanized, led by China, Japan, and Korea. Southeast Asia is slightly less urbanized, not yet crossing the 50% urbanized mark when considered as a whole, but there are countries within the region, such as Malaysia at 72% urban and Indonesia and Thailand, which are now a majority urban (as well as the city-states of Singapore and Brunei) which are offsetting the still largely rural Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and the Philippines. South Asia urbanization rate remains below 40%, impacted by India’s massive population which is around two-thirds non-urban.

An assessment of the relationship between urbanization and development in Southeast Asia by Richard Florida suggests that these rapidly growing cities are driving a rising living standard. Looking at urbanization in six major Southeast Asian nations and the cities of Phnom Penh, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, and Singapore, Florida’s study found positive, albeit uneven performance within this group of growing cities. Singapore and Kuala Lumpur were the top performers, with Singapore generating economic output per person ($66,864) on par with world cities and slightly ahead of Tokyo, Toronto, Seoul, and Hong Kong. Kuala Lumpur’s economic output per capita exceeded that of Shanghai and Beijing ($28,076) and even exceeded top European performers such as Stockholm and Stuttgart. Bangkok and Manila fell into the next lower tier, with per person economic outputs of $19,705 and $14,222, respectively, which represented between three and six times their national average. Among the six cities Florida examined, Jakarta and Ho Chi Minh City had the lowest per capital economic output, at $9984 and $8660 respectively. As with all six cities, both Jakarta and Ho Chi Minh City both accounted for at least one-third of the national output, with the Vietnamese city accounting for a much higher proportion, likely because Indonesia boasts a larger number of big cities that also play key roles in national economic development. The Florida study did not look at the distribution of economic output within the population of these cities to explore how the benefits of rapid urbanization affect different population groups. But what the study did suggest is that the rapid pace of urbanization appears to be positively related to strong economic growth within these cities, which implies that those who are participants in the urbanization process are better positioned to gain benefits not so prevalent in rural areas of these nations (Florida 2017).

What is documented is that rapid urbanization is occurring as the cities continue to absorb the large numbers of rural poor. An assessment of the linkages between urbanization and expanding slum areas, produced by the Asian Century Institute, notes that increases in subsistence population migration is shifting the locus of poverty from the countryside to the city throughout Southeast Asia. Of course, as the Florida analysis suggests, there is greater earning power as cities expand. But what is not guaranteed is that the services necessary to sustain improved living conditions can keep up with the urbanization rate. As West notes, “in South-East Asia, 31% of its urban population lived in slums in 2010, a substantial decline from 50% in 1990. Slum populations in poor countries like Laos and Cambodia are close to 80% of total urban population, while in the Philippines and Vietnam they are over 40%” (Asia 2014). Given the pace and scale of population growth, the absolute numbers of city residents residing in unserviced or under-serviced slum areas has actually been growing in recent years owing to the inability of both the government and the private sector to provide new serviced housing for the expanded urban population. West concludes that “if Asia maintains its rapid development, this will continue to have a positive effect on urban poverty and slums. But experience shows that a growing economy is not sufficient to solve these problems. Effective action by governments, especially at the local level, is necessary to implement the necessary urban planning, and to provide infrastructure and services” (West 2014).

Indonesia’s urban population is approximately 60% of the total population if the annual growth rate between 2007 and 2017 (Fig. 3.1) has been sustained through to the present. This is occurring largely because of the expanding new cities around the historic urban centers. The table below clearly shows the distribution of megacity Jakarta’s population between the center city and the newly created cities and urbanized districts which surround it as of 2010 (Table 3.1).

Fig. 3.1

Indonesian urbanization from 2007 to 2017 (Source: World Bank 2018)

Table 3.1 Population of Jakarta and surrounding cities, 1980–2010

Evidence of the emerging spatial deconcentration of urbanization in all of Indonesian cities is underscored by the data on the locus of population and percentage change in core city and periphery from 1995 through 2005 in Table 3.2. In the case of Semarang in Central Java, for example, the data on the expansion of the built-up area (see table below) shows how a compact city of about 2000 hectares in the early 1970s mushroomed into an urbanized region of nearly 20,000 hectares (Fig. 3.2). Sitting in an upscale restaurant in the posh and highly developed mountainous area south of the city (where I was in March 2019), and looking north to see the distant city lights glowing at night, this was not the compact seacoast Semarang I first visited in 1990. To access the peripheral community where we dined that night involved using an extensive system of limited access highways that have opened up the peripheral urban zone. What hadn’t changed, however, was that only by cars was it possible to reach this peri-urban locale. Semarang’s brief experiment with a busway system to modernize public transit had not proved workable. The table above shows how rapidly Semarang’s built-up area has expanded over the past four decades.

Fig. 3.2

Built-up area of Semarang from 1972–2009 (Source: Handayani and Rudiarto 2014)

Table 3.2 Population growth in several cities

According to World Bank data, Indonesia has the third largest area of land in its cities in East Asia, after China and Japan. As the urban land area of Indonesia increased from 8900 to 10,000 square kilometers between 2000 and 2010, the population density of Indonesian cities also increased from 7400 to 9400 persons per square kilometer, which puts it at double the density of neighboring Malaysia and Thailand (World Bank 2015). Even though there is clear evidence of sprawling urban conditions, densities remain high enough to sustain urban services (such as transport) if they were provided.

3 Changing Spatial Configurations: Center and Periphery

By expanding the examination of rapid urbanization from population growth and economic expansion to assess it from the standpoint of the changing land use footprint, and in particular spatial expansion of urban areas beyond the official city boundaries, it becomes clear that rapid urbanization is exerting pressures to provide urban services where they previously did not exist and probably were less needed. At the same time, Indonesia’s core cities are trying to address longstanding service deficits. In theory at least, highly concentrated urbanization makes it possible to address the service needs of the growing population more efficiently (albeit recognizing that this can also generate either great inconveniences or even displacement). At the same time, the urban dispersion creates an opportunity, again in theory, to bring to these new sections of the urban system a higher quality of services, and with potentially less disruption to existing settlements. Given that urban and national governments in the less developed Asian cities are faced with demands to address substantial unmet needs of existing settlements, the challenge is how to deliver appropriate urban services in the urban core while also expanding services to the rapidly urbanizing periphery.

Geographer Terrence McGee labeled the regions beyond the urban center where urbanization was infiltrating former rural settlements as “peri-urban” and with this came new employment opportunities that previously had required rural residents to migrate (or commute) to the urban center to secure. The “peri-urban” was the first phase of the rapid urbanization trend. What distinguishes the current trend is that these outlying regions have become fully urbanized, representing self-contained and expansive urban concentrations that no longer coexist with agricultural communities. Urbanization has obliterated many of the peri-urban communities to create spaces for new affluent developments, and where land prices make affordable replacement housing for the displaced poor difficult to provide. This is particularly evident in the Jakarta mega-urban region where former suburban residential enclaves, such as Bumi Serpong Damai (BSD), have become highly concentrated and affluent cities in every sense over the past two decades. The story of BSD’s development in the Kabupaten of South Tangerang provides a lens into the urban development processes within the mega-urban region beyond the borders of Jakarta. A government-supported regional development plan intended to accommodate a mixture of agrarian and suburban activities and with space designated for mixed-income settlements to support the growing metropolitan population has been usurped as a space almost exclusively for the upper middle class and a source of substantial profitability for Jakarta major real estate developers.

According to real estate analysts examining the past decade of development, the period from 2007 to 2009 (during which a global financial crisis occurred), development and investment prospects declined. Yet beginning in 2010 through 2017, the urban real estate market surged. On the commercial/office side, as 2017 reports indicated, “the market has shown itself receptive to new supply, with good buildings close to transportation links having no problem finding tenants,” although it was observed that the overbuilding of residentials over the previous 7 years had depressed that market except where it was done in mixed-use setting and near the forthcoming light rail transit system (Urban Land Institute and PwC 2017). But this did little to meet the housing needs of the vast majority of the new urban inhabitants.

Robert Cowherd has provided the most comprehensive critique of the Mixed Settlement Program, a program initiated in 1974 to foster decentralization of new communities to ensure new and decent housing for those situated in the 20–80% middle-income groups (Leaf 1991). The program required private developers to build three small houses and six very small houses for each luxury unit constructed, and that they should be located within a contiguous area to promote social cohesion (Cowherd 2002). It became known as the “1, 2 and 3” program and with some of the same problems of the lower cost housing not being built.

Displacement of kampung settlements both in the city and in vast areas of the peri-urban region has been a part of the transformation underway during Jakarta’s rapid urbanization phase (For example, see Fig. 3.3). As Leitner and Sheppard (2018) note, Jakarta’s “central and peri-urban kampungs are highly desirable spaces from which land can be assembled for real estate projects and thereby commodified (p. 443).” This began in the late Suharto New Order era when the government passed a law (Perda 11/1988) that set out to classify informal settlements as legal or illegal. Refined in Perda 8/2007, it was determined that housing situated on streets, within 10 m of a river or other water bodies, in parks or other green spaces, along railroad tracks or under bridges and flyovers, could be removed by government actions (Leitner and Sheppard 2018). As they found in examining the transformation of a central city kampong, Menteng Atas, where many of the residents had legal title, under the new rules of property acquisition and being in a “legal” condition, they could negotiate with potential developers and as a result often acquired a substantial windfall if they chose to sell. As Leitner and Sheppard (2018) argue, they were also part of the capitalist trend, in some cases getting $1000 per square meter for the 100 square meter plot, that provided these modest middle-class owners the windfall of $100,000. Yet those residing in the “illegal” settlements, like Bukit Duri and Kampung Pulo situated along the Ciliwung River, despite resistance to displacement, they were quickly and forcibly removed. Leitner and Sheppard (2018) regard the process as one of building a consensus to create the modern global city during this period of rapid urbanization, fitting Jakarta into a worldwide neoliberal phenomenon. As they put it, “Under the overarching umbrella of the norms of neoliberal global urbanism, and policy mobilities propagating these in variegated forms worldwide, urban elites actively seek to modernize/westernize their cities and cleanse them of visible poverty: Privatizing urban land ownership, formalizing economic and settlement activities, promoting infrastructure development and sustainability and enjoining citizens to self-identify as entrepreneurial and responsible individuals (p. 450).”

Fig. 3.3

Rawa Bebek low-cost housing in East Jakarta (Source: Jakarta Post, 31 July 2017)

Yet even with this push for modernization and formalized settlements, there is evidence that ongoing inadequacies of the existing infrastructure, coupled with the inability of the government or the public sector to produce adequate replacement shelters that provide upgrades means that problems are shifted but not addressed. In Central Java, for example, the provincial government instituted a policy to remove all informal settlements not just in Semarang but throughout the provincial hinterlands beyond the city itself. By 2014, the Central Java government has cleared 4000 hectares of slums (especially along its rivers) that represented 57% of the total area of substandard housing. The official goal was to clear all of it, and be slum free, by 2024 (Jakarta Post, 31 March 2019).

In Jakarta, the process of clearing informal housing along its rivers that got started in a serious way when the city decided to address the flooding problem by dredging its rivers, came with a commitment to construct low-cost housing elsewhere in the city in exchange for 11,100 hectares of green open space planned along the riverbanks. By 2014, approximately 14,000 units of the 52,656 goals had been built. Although the first 6 months of occupancy is rent-free, after that the units require a rent of $22 per month (or Rp 3,000,000) which according to various reports has left many of the occupants in arrears because their incomes are completely expended before making the housing payments (Sustainia 2018). At the same time, a private land developer constructed a large-scale affordable housing community in Bogor (named Puri Harmoni 7), but of a very different character for low-income families. In this case, they needed a monthly income slightly under $400 per month (or Rp 56 million) to be eligible and have the capacity to afford them, since potential owners had to handle the $10,000 basic housing price tag. Housing developments like the Puri Harmoni 7 project in Klapanunggal, Bogor were nearly sold out before completion in 2015. Its role was to create another rung in the housing ladder to accommodate lower-middle class families seeking new housing (and perhaps opening opportunities for others to move into previously occupied older units), but it also demonstrated that government, not the private sector, was necessary to build for the very low income (Markets 2015).

It is not housing for the poor that is being built in the rapidly expanding peripheral area. The major action in Indonesia’s mass housing sector was aggressive development of high volume, and largely affluent “vertical housing.” For Indonesia as a whole, the housing backlog of 13.5 million units required pushing large developments into the fringe areas of cities (or in cleared areas in the urban core). Under the presidency of Joko Widodo in 2014, he launched the “one million homes” program. In 2016, the target of one million units was nearly achieved (with 805,169 units added), but only 111,796 accessible to low-income. The rest aimed at a higher income clientele, with an increasing preponderance coming in high-rise structures, especially along the fringes of Jakarta. The location of much of the new construction is a variant on “transit-oriented development” and initially located alongside Jakarta’s toll road system. In the past two years and in concert with a Light Rail Transit system being built around and beyond Jakarta, expanded commuter rail lines and to the portion of the South Jakarta served by the first line in the new subway system, the public transit options are supporting the peripheral cities. A good example of this is a two-tower housing complex being constructed at the Tanjung Barat train station near the edge of Jakarta on the commuter line connecting Jakarta and Bogor. Just further south along the same train line, at the Pondok Cina station in Depok, another complex of housing towers are under construction and then in Bogor, an even larger complex of six residential towers. Altogether, these projects, spearheaded by Indonesian housing agency, Perumnas, but built and managed by the private sector, add over 5000 quality units in the urban periphery. In addition, the railway company in Jakarta plans to build or renovate units near its stations in select areas (Kebon Kacang, Tanah Abang, Klender, and Cengkareng) (Global Business Guide Indonesia 2017).

4 Roads and Transit Shaping Urban Land Development

The new push for transit-oriented development is a belated acknowledgement of the inadequacy of Jakarta’s ongoing one-dimensional transportation strategy, namely exclusively relying on toll roads to accommodate automobiles (and buses within the Jakarta boundaries) to move the millions (Hudalah et al. 2013). It has been along the toll roads, especially the outer rings, where the intense, vertical city has emerged in the past decade along with the exclusive residential suburbs that had been an ongoing development since the 1990s. At the same time, there were multiple plans to add mass transit to the metropolitan transportation system in addition to the busway system, but not until the past 5 years did these plans materialize. Deden Rukmana has written that “rapid urbanization in Jakarta has contributed to the need for sustainable transportation policies in Jakarta” since “the growth of registered vehicles in response to the growth of population in Jakarta and its peripheral areas has caused acute traffic congestions in Jakarta” (Rukmana 2017).

Under the Jokowi administration, both the long-contemplated and even longer overdue Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) opened its first line in April 2019, connecting commuters between the traffic circle at the Hotel Indonesia in central Jakarta to Lebak Bulus in South Jakarta, where it intersects with the outer-ring toll road. This first of the proposed ten lines in the MRT system will connect to all portions of Jakarta, but more importantly, interconnect with the other transportation systems reaching into the periphery, most notably the commuter rail lines that run east and west (between Bekasi and Tangerang) and north and south from Jakarta through Depok to Bogor. The additional development currently underway is a massive Light Rail Transit system that reaches far to the east, west, and south beyond the Jakarta boundaries to serve the peripheral areas. Along with the LRT, creative use of fringe parking can reduce substantially the volume of automobiles that otherwise would clog the already over-taxed toll road system. The aggressive implementation of the LRT, which has required the formation of three separate companies because of the inter-jurisdictional nature of the system, is a key to the higher level of integration of center and periphery in the context of rapid urbanization.

But there is no real strategy to slow down the inexorable increase in automobiles, trucks, motorcycles, and buses that demand additional roads and that ensure that traffic congestion (and accompanying air pollution) will only get worse even with the increases in environment improvements facilitated by the aggressive transit infrastructure developments. It is simply too easy (and inexpensive) for virtually any family to own one (or many vehicles). Eighteen students in my undergraduate sustainability class at the University of Indonesia confirmed through a polling of their family’s automobile inventory that they collectively accounted for over 50 vehicles. Among this student group, only two confirmed that they occasionally used any transit. Accessibility difficulties to get to various destinations was the primary explanation behind relying either on their cars, taxis, or the ubiquitous motorcycles. The difficulty of implementing transit that can serve mass ridership is the dispersed patterns of settlement in the periphery and is exacerbated by the current lack of fringe parking places that would enable automobiles to remain outside the highly congested areas by connecting to various transit options (especially the extensive TransJakarta busway system that has been in place for several decades and reaches all parts of Jakarta). The current aggressive transit infrastructure efforts represented by the MRT, the LRT, and expansion of the commuter rail lines must be complemented by other strategies to shift the balance of urban transportation utilization from such excessive reliance on the individual vehicles to higher volumes of transit passengers.

5 Planning and Managing Rapid Urbanization

But it is the lack of integration on the larger scale of planning and managing urbanization at the regional scale that limits the ability to reconcile the anticipated growth with the needs of the citizens who make up this growth. Since the 1980s, there has been effort to place the urban challenges of rapid growing Jakarta within a regional framework. The Integrated Urban Infrastructure Development Program (IUIDP), the Jabotabek Metropolitan Development Plan (JMDP) in 1983, and the West Java Urban Development Project of 1985 were donor-financed efforts to link Jakarta’s development strategies to the expanding and urbanizing periphery. These studies helped to shape policies at the local and national levels but could only be implemented in fragments because there was no authority that crossed the boundaries between the urban core and the surrounding governments. Indeed, West Java, the large province that surrounded Jakarta (until the province of Banten was carved out of its western side) did not adopt the JMDP. In the 1990s and then again in 2005, the idea of creating a single development authority with responsibility over the entire metropolitan region was broached by Jakarta’s Governor Sutiyoso (and endorsed by its most famous past governor, Ali Sadikin), but lacked political support. What did take place was the creation, under national regulation, of the Jakarta metropolitan area as a “national strategic zone” (Presidential Regulation 54/2008) with oversight by the national government, and coordination between three appropriate ministries (planning, home affairs, and public works), but with the emphasis on collaboration and not on the power to implement. So, as Salim and Firman contend, this “outward-looking, region based” strategy which is so essential remains “collaborative”. With the growing power of local governments in the era of reform and decentralization, the chances of implementing unified strategies for the megacity region are even more challenging (Salim and Firman 2011).

6 Conclusion

Evidence from the real estate market in the Jakarta metropolitan area confirms that the rapid growth into the periphery, coupled with the equally aggressive reconfiguration of land within the core city, are likely to accelerate the processes of spatial change in Jakarta. With the emerging transit system reshaping land uses based upon the concept of transit-oriented development within the urban core, coupled with the massive displacement of existing informal settlements still underway to address flooding (even if the informal settlements are not the real problem as the government contends), and the continued intensification of development along the existing highway corridors that ring the city, the current pattern of “rapid urbanization” will undoubtedly continue. How and where the Jakarta megaurban region will accommodate the continued rural to urban migration will depend upon government housing, infrastructure, and planning processes that at present are divided between national ministries, strong cities (empowered by decentralization), district and provincial governments, and an all-powerful private sector that seems to be the most powerful force in the urban development process. The fact that the Indonesian national government has enthusiastically embraced the values of the Sustainable Development Goals and is seeking to push those values into the local and provincial plans and legislation that it can influence may mean that the ongoing fragmented approach to planning and managing the processes of rapid urbanization may lead to some incremental interventions that make the whole a bit better. The TOD enthusiasm connected to the MRT and LRT is one positive sign for the Jakarta megacity.

Of course, it must be acknowledged that this objective for the region’s spatial development is now being countermanded by the government’s decision in July 2019 to move the national capital from Jakarta to the remote area of East Kalimantan over the next 5 years. And the reason, to put it bluntly, is that Jakarta is no longer functionally able to serve as a capital region with all of its infrastructure deficits that lack effective responses. According to national government pronouncements, the East Kalimantan capital city project can model the modern green and sustainable city that Jakarta could never achieve. With the attention (and resources) of the national government now diverted to the East Kalimantan projects, managing the processes of rapid urbanization in Jakarta will likely continue to rely on diverse stakeholders with competing objectives. Who will benefit? How will all citizens, in the city and the periphery, be served. The answers remain unclear. What is clear is that responses to the multiple challenges of rapid urbanization demand more than facilitating the private development sector? Research has long pointed to the benefits of urbanization in Indonesia increasing incomes and reducing the level of poverty (Azis 1997). But the issues related to the effects of its rapid urbanization now encompass not just how individuals and families fare economically but the complexities of the environmental conditions that are the consequences of transformations generated by runaway urban development processes.