Jakarta fails to reform bureaucracy

By Marco Kusumawijaya

JAKARTA (JP): All city problems that bedevil Jakarta stem from its incompetent governance and lack of leadership integrity.

In fact, learning from other cities' development, local and foreign, there is no single condition in Jakarta that cannot be improved provided that its bureaucracy manages to reform itself.

As global competition lurks, Jakarta is under pressure from numerous urban problems both chronic and urgent in nature.

The listing of best Asian cities in the Dec. 15, 2000 issue of Asiaweek ranks Jakarta a lowly 28th out of 40 others. It only just behind Manila (25th) but far behind Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh (17th), Bandar Seri Begawan and Kuala Lumpur (7th), and Singapore (third). Jakarta only excels over cities like Phnom Penh (31st) and Vientiane (36th).

No offense is intended but it is certainly humiliating to find Jakarta in the league of these two cities.

The survey also recorded a rise in the unemployment rate in 2000 compared to the previous year from 12 percent to 16.8 percent. Annual income per capita declined to US$ 7,269 from $7,665; GDP growth dropped to negative 1.3 percent from positive 3.1 percent; and commuting time has become as high as 79 minutes.

The methodology and the accuracy of the survey is open to debate but the truth remains: Jakarta is rated very low in a weekly that gives basic information to global investors.

In the public transportation sector, for example, commuters are well aware that there is no hope for improvement even with an addition of 4,000 buses imported from China.

Acquiring new buses won't solve the problem, if a better system and management are not installed.

Flood-prone areas are not shrinking, if anything, they are enlarging. Spatial planning is not conceived to support fundamental improvement in the mass transport system.

Indeed only a conforming spatial and land-use plan can support a paradigm shift in transport planning: from demand-led to demand-control approach.

We are not even sure that the less than sound plan will not be made even worse by violations that may be justified in the next plan. Environmental problems, such as the lowering of the water table, diminution of mangrove forest and others, requires even tougher management.

The decline in the number of housing stocks in the city with concurrent flight of the middle class to the suburbs will soon, for the first time, present Jakarta with the classic problem of urban center degeneration, as it will lose an important tax base and motivation for maintenance.

Density is often claimed as the source of problems in a metropolis like Jakarta. Whereas the reverse is also true: density is a source of life for a metropolis.

Density, when smartly managed, will be a blessing, as it will not just be 'numbers', but more specifically, enriching diversity.

The renowned, Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas celebrates this as 'programmatic density' in his theory and works. Indeed people migrate to Jakarta for both productive (work, opportunities, career paths) as well as consumptive ('city lights', among others) diversified density.

Prof. Peter Hall, a British historian of urban civilization and planning theories, in his book Cities in Civilization (1998) discovered that diversified density is crucial for innovative and creative processes, comparable to bio-diversity and cross- breeding that yield an ever improved species.

He argues that in their respective golden years the metropolises of the world have had diversified density and interaction as key success factors.

Berlin, for example, in the period 1920-1933 became the world capital in terms of all forms of art and economy. Its density was 608 persons per hectare.

Jakarta's density is less than 150 per hectare. The number and variety of print-media in Berlin during the period showed an intensity of communication among the population. It surpassed that of any other city. Berliner Morgenpost alone has a circulation of 600,000 (for a city of 4 million people).

But of course density of population, capital, and ideas are only useful when mobilized into channeled potentials. This is why we need popular participation in the governance of Jakarta.

It is not only because participation is a basic social- political right of the citizens (whose etymological origin means those of a city), but also because it is the only way to nurture broad-based creativity.

Moreover, some fundamental decisions that need to be made, such as on the integration of land-use and public transport plan, must be based on wide-range consensus to guarantee success at all. This requires that the citizens be well informed as early on as possible.

This way they will be empowered and motivated to think collectively. They should not be told only after decisions are made in a fait accompli manner through a misguided process of so called 'socialization', which is itself an abused concept.

The New Order has indeed turned off diversity and initiative, even though Ali Sadikin (Jakarta governor from 1966 to 1977) had encouraged them in his own style. The reformation movement should be an opportunity to revive them, and to harness a participatory process to establish 'new deals', both horizontally and vertically.

We need to also broaden our concept of urbanization to include more social and cultural events. This has taken us some time to realize, after the developmentalist and reductionist concept of urbanization imposed by the uninspiring regime.

The people not only have a right to a city that does not only expand endlessly in an ad-hoc manner but they also need to know how to build, inhabit, and use the city in a civilized way.

One needs to learn to be an urban dweller, to behave and socialize in a way urbanites should. Urban spaces will have to be pregnant with clear, qualified architectural concepts to facilitate that learning process.

One example, one cannot be forced to reduce the use of private cars unless sidewalks are made convenient, safe, nice to look at, and given sufficient space.

Architecture, urban design, design competition, urban landscape, need to be an obsession within the metropolitan society, if it is to compete at all -- with at least the other Asian capitals.

Efforts must start somewhere. Could it be that transparent and participatory urban governance naturally pre-requires a clean house of bureaucracy?

Our mistake so far has been to believe that political change will automatically bring changes at the bureaucratic level. Of course new legislators and governors have been elected through of a 'new system'.

But the situation is akin to garbage in garbage out!

Decentralization and autonomy have been put into motion. But there is no significant change in the daily administration of the city.

The political leaders have failed either to assimilate the spirit of reform or to channel it into actions. This is indeed the greatest delusion. While in other countries significant changes are easily brought about with even less dramatic political struggle, here it is business as usual.

The only way out is then to balance it with horizontal decentralization and autonomy: citizens need to get involved directly with daily decision making processes.

This can be done by way of public debates both with the legislative as well as executive bodies; participatory, bottom-up programming and budgeting; and other forms of participation.

In summary: a more populist democracy. Why not? It is the 'demand' side that needs be made dynamic, not the supply, as this latter side will only follow the first. Parties will have to make efforts to prepare better candidates, when the citizens' demand increases.

The writer is an architect-urbanist.