Self-sustaining cities help relieve burden on Jakarta
Self-sustaining cities help relieve burden on Jakarta
Abdul Khalik, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
The pursuit and arrest street sex workers by public order
officers has often made headlines over the past few months.
Deputy head of city public order agency Jornal Effendi Siahaan
said that problem of sex workers was only one of many problems
his office had to deal with every day.
"The number of sex workers increases every day on the streets.
They come from many areas in West and Central Java. I think
thousands of them operate in the capital now," he said.
Besides sex workers, Siahaan said, they also have to deal with
around 100,000 scavengers and beggars who sometimes turned to
theft or robbery in order to get money to buy food.
He said that his office has had to find ways to deal with
around 200,000 street vendors, who often occupy pedestrian lanes
and even encroach onto streets, causing traffic jams across the
capital.
Traffic jams were also worsened by the rapid increase in the
number of vehicles on the streets, far outpacing the amount of
new roads being constructed in the capital.
Between 1999 and 2003, for example, the amount of roadway in
the city increased by only four percent, while the number of cars
and motorcycles jumped by around 10 percent.
Jakarta, with at least 2.5 million private cars, 3.8 million
motorcycles and 255,000 public transportation vehicles on the
roads, is the world's third most polluted city after Bangkok and
Mexico City.
With migrants continuing to pour into Jakarta, unchecked
urbanization is often cited as a major factor in many of the
capital's woes. It is estimated that around 200,000 people come
to earn a living in Jakarta every year.
And with the current population of 8.5 million people at night
and 14 million during the day, the buffer areas around Jakarta's
perimeter are may offer some remedies to the city's problems.
City planning expert Mohammad Dannisworo of the Bandung
Institute of Technology (ITB) said that many new satellite and
self-sustained cities, including Bumi Serpong Damai (BSD), Lippo
Karawaci in Tangerang, Banten province, as well as Jababeka and
Lippo Cikarang in Bekasi, West Java, could absorb some of the
capital's burden.
"The fact that they absorb around 5.5 million of people at
night proves that these satellite and self-sustained cities help
Jakarta a lot. They also employ hundreds of thousands people both
in the formal and informal sectors," he told the Post.
Satellite cities, such as Bintaro and Depok, refers to an area
in which people reside, but where most work in another city, in
this case, Jakarta. A self-sustaining city, including Lippo
Karawaci, Cikarang or Jababeka, refers to newly-built city that
has an economic and industrial base aimed at exporting its
output.
"To become a self-sustaining city, one has to be far enough --
around 40 to 60 kilometers -- from a bigger city, and it must
have all the facilities a city supposed to have. So, its
residents don't have to come to Jakarta," Dannisworo said.
However, the function of these new cities has not been optimal
as each of them was built by different developers, and hence
lacked unity, he said.
"Each developer built their own complexes without any
coordination with each other and without a unified system of
settlement. This leads to other problems, including floods and
bad sanitation," Dannisworo said.
He proposed that Jakarta, Banten and West Java work together
to unify their spatial planning.