Ambition blamed for visionless city development

JAKARTA (JP): Indonesian cities are facing several major problems, including a visionless over-development driven by an ambition to catch up with other cities in the region, a scholar says.

Johan Silas, head of the Laboratory for Housing and Human Settlement at the Surabaya Institute of Technology in East Java, yesterday identified limited quality human resources and unprogressive institutional development as among the problems besetting urban centers in Indonesia.

Johan was speaking at the International Conference on Urban Culture in Asia titled The Future of Asia's Cities here yesterday. The gathering was arranged by the Asia Foundation and the Center for Information and Development Studies (CIDES) at the Jakarta Convention Center, and will last through to tomorrow.

President Soeharto, who opened the conference, said Monday that cities's growth needed serious attention to prevent more problems from occurring.

According to Johan, the government and the private sector should sit down together to agree on a common vision for urban development. This vision should be sensitive to the aspirations of the city's poor, he said.

"The vision needs to include the aspirations of the common people, who are actually the city's income generators," Johan added.

Johan also said a shift in function has made cities no longer the center of political, social and cultural affairs. Economic motives, instead, are now dominating urban development, he said.

"Older understanding of a city was that it was the center of governance, political, social and cultural activities. Because there is weak governance controlling development, economy wins," Johan said.

He said Indonesian town and cities are now being developed mostly because of the pressures of economic interests.

He conceded, however, that the trend also occurred in the cities of many other countries where development was controlled by economics, not the government.

Indonesia's urban growth largely reflects the current pattern of urban growth in Southeast Asian countries which is marked by imbalanced spatial usage.

"Indonesian cities other than Jakarta, especially outside Java, should be given a chance to develop and attract investment since competition now is not only between countries but also within a country," he said.

Also speaking at the conference yesterday was the United States Ambassador Stapleton J. Roy who said that U.S. foreign policy could be "compromised" if Asian cities were not managed properly and begin to hold back economic growth.

"All of the areas where U.S. foreign policy attaches importance in Asia, such as living standards, which contributes to the region's stability, will be compromised if better ways are not found to deal with the explosive growth in Asian cities," he said.

According to the ambassador, the region's stability is put at risk when governments are unable to come up with a solution for improving economic growth and living standards.

Urban areas are expected to contribute up to 80 percent of Indonesia's national income.

Jakarta Governor Surjadi Soedirdja also gave a speech yesterday.

Hasan-Uddin Khan, a visiting associate professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Architecture, also spoke. Khan identified five issues to be considered by people pondering the forms of future Asian cities, including the need to reinterpret the city as a network of complex pluralistic interactions.

The conference was attended by about 400 experts, including urban planners and architects, from more than 20 countries.

Nicholas Platt, The Asia Society president, had earlier said the conference's focus was the "challenges and opportunities" to the world created by the shift from rural to urban living in Asia.

By the early 21st century Asia will house 4.2 billion people. By the year 2010, 30 cities in Asia will have populations of more than five million each. (06/anr)