Green Jakarta not a utopia

Nirwono Joga Jakarta

Jakarta is heading toward ecological suicide. Soil subsidence has reached a depth of 40 centimeters in North, West and Central Jakarta. Seawater intrusion has led to the structural corrosion of buildings and flyovers while the contamination of groundwater has encroached on some 14 kilometers of land around the National Monument (Monas) Square, or a third of the territory of the capital city of Jakarta.

The northern coastal area of Jakarta has been contaminated by heavy metal waste, which has killed thousands of fish while abrasion has also been found in over 50 percent of the area. The sky of Jakarta has become increasingly grayer, an indication of a high level of air pollution, following the increased felling of trees growing in the city's green belts, the rapid growth of motorized vehicles and a rise in traffic congestion. Unless a comprehensive and integrated revamping of the entire city is conducted, it is predicted that Jakarta will experience total traffic congestion in 2014.

Also waiting to be thoroughly settled are the problems related to the threats of floods during the wet season and fires in the dry season, environment-related diseases such as dengue fever, avian influenza and diarrhea, due to the lack of environmental sanitation, and garbage management.

A green city, in the sense of a city with parks or a city where trees grow in abundance, must be the longing of all residents of Jakarta. The key words are environmental awareness. Unfortunately, these two words have served only as an oft- repeated discourse on the concept drawn up for the sustainable development of Jakarta. Various development projects -- not development plans -- are based more on discourse rather than on studies and well-prepared, comprehensive, profound and long-term planning devised to solve various urban problems.

The provincial administration of Jakarta has not been consistent in its efforts to establish a green city despite the various green programs that it has introduced, such as the Urban Green Movement, 1970, the Jakarta Teduh, Hijau Royo-Royo and Berkicau Program, a program launched in 2000 to turn Jakarta into a shady and green city marked by chirping birds, or the Green Jakarta Program, 2003.

Various development projects have led to the felling of many trees. Take, for example, the construction of busway corridor II from Pulo Gadung to Monas. For this project to go on, as many as 248 of 1,510 trees growing along Jl. Perintis Kemerdekaan and 564 trees growing along Jl. Letjen Suprapto have to be cut down.

More trees have to be removed for the construction of busway corridors III and IV -- VII in 2007, the establishment of the blue and green monorail lanes and the Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) flyovers. The trees are felled at an acceleration of 10 trees a day (or 3,650 trees annually), which is all the more reason why the target of planting 6,202,816 trees of a total of 10,812,500 trees planned in the city's 2010 spatial layout design plan will become ever more difficult to reach.

The emphasis on urban planning is given only to how to prevent people from experiencing more serious traffic jams. City residents are considered, therefore, as mere objects or goods that must be delivered from one place to another as quickly as possible without the slightest thought that these people need to enjoy their journey in a comfortable urban landscape space.

The busway project has led to a significant drop in the quality of air and visual landscape of major roads in Jakarta. Areas prone to traffic congestion and alternative routes with a limited capacity to accommodate the traffic continue to sustain more serious traffic jams.

It has been proven that trees can lower temporary, chronic or lethal disturbances to health caused by air pollution, such as giddiness, nausea, acute respiratory infection, asthma, lung cancer or acute blood cancer. Health costs incurred by air pollution stood at some Rp 2 trillion in 1999 and will double by 2010 unless the degradation in the quality of the environment is addressed by, for example, tree planting, the construction of comfortable pedestrian lanes, the provision of urban mass transportation means and the imposition of a restriction over the mobility of private vehicles, according to studies conducted by the World Bank in 1995 and by the Japan International Cooperation Agency in 1996.

In this respect, the Jakarta administration has instead reduced its green open spaces. According to the Jakarta Master Plan for 1965 to 1985, this green open space constituted 37.2 percent of the city's territory. In Jakarta's general spatial layout design plan for 1985 to 2005, however, the percentage shrank to 25.85 percent and in the present territorial spatial layout design plan, 2000 to 2010, the percentage has gone even lower to just 13.94 percent or a total of 9,545 hectares. Meanwhile, the area of green open space on the ground, in comparison with the total area of the city, has continued to drop to only 6,900 hectares 9.12 percent in 2004. By comparison, the ideal standard percentage for a healthy city is about 30 percent.

The green open space planning in some of the world's metropolises, which are densely populated and crowded with buildings, is much better than in Jakarta: New York (25.2 percent, 2020), Tokyo (from 29 percent to 32 percent, 2015), Singapore (19 percent, with a reserve green space accounting for 37 percent of the city state's total area, 2034) or London (39 percent, 2020).

The government of Singapore is applying tightly the standard of 0.4 hectare of green open space for every 1,000 people in a real estate/housing compound, or a park measuring 10 hectares in area for every district or area of the same level or 1.5 hectares for every block of apartments/hotels. For a compound of condominiums/apartments/hotels the green basic coefficient is set at 60 percent.

If Jakarta applies the standard of 7.81 m2 of green open space for every resident, it will need 15,897 hectares of green open space (or 21.45 percent of the city's total area) as a water catchment area or 23,500 hectares of green open space (36 percent of the city's total area) to control air quality and absorb airborne pollutants.

As Jakarta's green open space is planned to be only 13.94 percent of the city's total area, in 2010 this green open space can catch only 54 percent of the water that comes to this city, leaving the remaining 46 percent of the water to flood the city, and can control only 40 percent of the city's air, leaving the city with only one urban "lung".

Double standards, inconsistency and corruption have made the provincial administration of Jakarta turn upside down its priorities in the establishment of the city's green open spaces. Corruption in urban planning has led to nonsustainable urban development oriented only to short-term economic considerations as well as to plots of land originally designated for the city's green open space being turned into roads, real estate, apartments, hotels, malls, shopping centers, flyovers, underpasses or even toll roads.

A green city as an asset, a potential and long-term investment, characterized by its economic, ecological, educational and esthetic values, as its own sales value and therefore "necessitates" the involvement of all parties, be they urban planners, city administration, urban developers or city residents.

In good urban planning, the designation of plots land for the construction of buildings, the designation of the green open space, a transportation system and the circulation of pedestrian lanes must form a harmonious synergy. Regardless of the grandness of the transportation megaprojects and the construction of infrastructure, people will finally have to walk to the buildings they visit.

The establishment of a macro transportation pattern (busway, monorail, subway, waterway) must be balanced with the establishment of comfortable pedestrian lanes along the corridors, and the construction of stations or bus stops that are integrated into the urban network structure.

It is obviously impossible to build a green city that is leafy, shady, comfortable and beautiful in the absence of serious and professional efforts to manage the green open space and conserve urban trees. A green city can be built only in dozens or even hundreds of years.

The writer is chairman of the Study Group of Indonesian Landscape Architecture.