Our urban future

After days of haggling, the UN Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II) closed in the small hours of Saturday with the adoption of a plan for better living conditions in the world's rapidly growing cities. The final document, known as the Istanbul Declaration, calls on governments to ensure affordable shelter for all and to strive to make human settlements safer, healthier, more livable, equitable and sustainable.

To the casual observer the two-week conference in Istanbul, with all the bickering over minor matters unrelated to the central issue on the agenda, may have seemed like little more than a talking shop; abortion rights, land mines, the family, the occupied territories in the Middle East and other such issues seemed to dominate this conference, which was supposed to concern itself with the future of our increasingly urban world.

Yet there can be no denying the importance of the meeting. Urban life creates a web of complex linked problems which require simultaneous attention. Therefore, even though it may be true to say that the final document produced by the conference is basically just a statement of political will, the Istanbul Declaration at least pinpoints the problems facing us.

One does not have to look far to realize that even at the present rate of urbanization the problems of cities need tackling urgently. One of the premises of the conference was that by the turn of this century half of humanity will live in urban areas. One of those urban areas is Jakarta.

According to UN projections, Jakarta, which now has a population of more than nine million, will become the fifth most populous city in the world in less than 20 years time -- by the year 2015. With a projected population of 21.2 million it will by that time have surpassed Sao Paulo, Karachi, Beijing, Dhaka and Mexico City. With more than 30,000 people on each square kilometer of land, assuming that the projections are correct, it is easy to imagine the complexity of the problems which Jakarta will be facing. There will be 15 new urban areas with populations of more than one million, and four of them will have more than five million, the UN says.

Although our own government's projections do not always agree entirely with those made by the UN, they support the basic assumption of rapid urban growth in the coming decades. According to a National Development Planning Board population expert, for example, 60 percent of the Indonesian population will be living in cities by 2019, which is when the current second long-term development period comes to an end.

The magnitude of the problems which our city planners and the authorities will be confronted with in the coming decades is daunting. Our cities' facilities and administrations will be stretched to bursting point. Ways must be found to mobilize the entire community -- the private sector in particular -- to tackle urban development problems.

The Istanbul forum has achieved its goal of focusing attention on the sheer magnitude of the issue before us.

Hopefully, the message of Habitat II will be heard.