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.