City needs more parks

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)