Slum areas to get community parks, official says
Slum areas to get community parks, official says
Damar Harsanto, Jakarta
Jakarta Parks Agency director Sarwo Handhayani says that the city
administration plans to establish a 500 square-meter-park in
every subdistrict, prioritizing slum and densely populated areas.
"These parks are meant to become open spaces for communities
to hold their activities in," she told The Jakarta Post over the
weekend.
To date, according to Sarwo, the agency had constructed around
60 community parks, described as "interactive parks", across the
city.
The Post has observed that some of the community parks had
serve to host residents' leisure activities at weekends, though
most of them are poorly maintained.
Residents were seen partaking of a variety of sports,
including badminton, soccer and cycling, at the Rawabunga park
near the Rawabunga subdistrict offices in Jatinegara, East
Jakarta, and at the Proklamasi Monument park in Central Jakarta.
At the Situ Lembang park on Jl. Lembang in the upmarket
residential area of Menteng, Central Jakarta, many residents were
seen enjoying their free time over the weekend by consuming
modest dinners served by sidewalk vendors there. Meanwhile, some
other residents were fishing in the small lake.
Sarwo asserted that the agency would stick to the target set
by the Jakarta administration in the Jakarta Master Plan 2000-
2010 to reserving a total of 9,155.8 hectares, equal to 13.94
percent of the city's total area of 65,680 hectares, for open and
green spaces by 2010.
She said that the administration currently had established at
least 5,911 hectares of open and green spaces, or 9 percent of
the capital's land area.
She denied a report made last Monday by the Jakarta Planning
Agency (Bapeda) that revealed that open and green spaces in the
capital had decreased by 14 percent over the last 19 years.
"The report might include open and green spaces owned by
private parties which have been converted to other purposes, like
construction, for instance," Sarwo said.
In its preliminary evaluation of the Jakarta Master Plan 2000-
2010, Bapeda reported that open and green spaces in the capital
currently constitute around 21.5 percent of the city's total
area.
That figure is smaller than the 1996 figure of 16,361 hectares
of open and green spaces, or 24.9 percent of the total area of
Jakarta. In 1985, open and green spaces accounted for 18,910
hectares, or 28.8 percent of the city's area.
"This declining trend is not in line with our 2000-2010 master
plan," the agency remarked.
Environmentalists have repeatedly said that, ideally, green
areas should account for about 30 percent of the city's total
area to help ease flooding and reduce air pollution.