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.