City needs more parks

JAKARTA (JP): Only five percent of Jakartans live in apartments, hindering attempts to provide more green areas for a better environment, Governor Surjadi Soedirdja said Monday.

He made the statement after a private firm, PT Berkah Bangsal Kencono, symbolically donated 9,000 trees to the city's replanting program.

Surjadi cited Singapore, where 95 percent of its population live in apartments, as a model city. However Surjadi acknowledged apartment living is new here, and regulating people to live in them would not be effective.

"Convincing them to move to apartments is difficult, so we can only use persuasive methods," he said.

If more people lived in apartments there would be more space for green areas, he said, adding to earlier arguments that apartment living would reduce population density and provide more affordable homes.

Surjadi said the city ideally needed 40 percent of its 656 hectares for forests and green space. Only 12 percent of the city currently consists of forest and green areas.

The city's replanting program, launched on Jan. 10, 1993, with a national program, aims to plant one million trees per year.

Surjadi said the city has almost reached its target of four million trees since 1993, as 3,470,924 trees have been planted. The governor said 75 percent of the trees were donated by private companies, and added that if the tree planting program was successful, the city would soon have 15 percent of green areas in the city. (02)