Experts say Jakarta must accept unskilled migrants
Experts say Jakarta must accept unskilled migrants
JAKARTA (JP): The city could not close itself to unskilled
migrants because there were not enough jobs in rural areas, a
senior sociologist said yesterday.
Mely G. Tan, a researcher at the Indonesian Institute for
Sciences, said the flow of unskilled migrants would continue
despite the municipality's efforts to stop it since Ali Sadikin
became governor in the early 1970s.
"The municipality has never succeeded in making Jakarta a
closed city," Mely said.
"It was the unskilled migrants which built the city," Mely
said.
"In the villages they have no more land as it has been changed
to golf courses and housing areas," Mely said during a break at a
conference on Asia's cities.
Governor Surjadi Soedirdja has said migrants planning to work
in the city should be skilled because too many unskilled people
added to the city's burdens.
The government and planners have called for more effort in
creating growth centers besides Jakarta.
Mely said unskilled migrants would keep coming even though
they were chased away.
After decades of chasing and land evictions Jakarta's
underclass has proved to be "tough and highly adaptable to
changes", she said.
It is these migrants' work in the informal sector which has
prevented more unemployment, Mely said.
"But don't ask about their quality of life," she said.
As migrants were often without documents they were treated as
non-persons and had no access to facilities like health care, she
said.
She said the influx of poor migrants was a dilemma for the
municipality. "We cannot just criticize."
Luckily developers, planners and architects "are beginning to
see that beautiful structures must take people into account."
Tommy Firman, a professor in urban planning from the Bandung
Institute of Technology, said the city was yet to recognize "that
rich and poor live together here." Tommy said city planning was
still insensitive about this.
"If drivers wait outside a building for their boss they could
not be without the vendors," he said.
Tommy and Mely acknowledged the city had started to allocate
space for vendors by ruling that shopping plazas, for instance,
must provide places for vendors.
More of this needed to be done, while attractive sites outside
Jakarta were yet to be developed, they said.
One of the speakers at the last day of the talks was from
developer Ciputra. He talked on Ciputra's experiences in
developing 10 new towns across Indonesia.
The organizer of the talks, closed by State Minister of Public
Housing Akbar Tandjung yesterday, was the New York based Asia
Society and the Center for Information and Development Studies.
(anr)