Where art thou Walter Burley Griffin? Indonesia needs you

By Zatni Arbi

CANBERRA (JP): The Brassey Hotel, Room 250. I was just about to take a quick shower when the phone rang. It was a lady friend who was wishing me welcome to Canberra, a city I was visiting for the first time. I nervously told her that I had just checked in and I was supposed to attend a dinner reception at the National Convention Center in forty minutes. She told me not to worry, as I could get there in five minutes. Five minutes? Is this the capital city?

She couldn't have been more correct. Less than five minutes after I left the hotel, the cab dropped me right at the foot of the stairs leading into the center. I found it difficult to believe. In Jakarta, with good luck, five minutes will only get me from where I live as far as the nearest Hero supermarket. More often than not, five minutes just doesn't get me anywhere.

As I explored Canberra over the next seven days, I became truly captivated by its beauty and efficiency. I was extremely lucky to be there in autumn -- the right time -- when the abundant trees in the even more abundant parks are so brilliantly colorful, and when the air is so pleasantly cool.

Canberra is a city of circles. The streets are laid out in circles that highlight the Parliament House and City Center areas. Being so used to a grid system, I got lost most of the times I wandered around by myself. But getting lost in this city was absolutely rewarding, giving me the opportunity to admire the planning and the foresight that went into the construction of this city, and ponder the what foresight could do for Indonesia.

All the streets and avenues are wide, most have at least two lanes. The houses have large front yards. The man-made lake is calm and soothing, and provides a focus for the city. Public buildings have expansive green lawns.

Several of the main streets have expansive median strips lushly covered with green grass and neatly lined with trees. The driver of a tour bus told me the wide median was put in the city plan to accommodate a mass transit system when or if the need arises. At the moment, with a population of just over 300,000, Canberrans can continue to enjoy its broad medians.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics recently stated that 76 percent of Canberrans drive to work. Parking lots are everywhere, complementing the wide and long stretches of road. It is no surprise that Canberrans share the Americans' passion for cars, whose lives virtually roll on the wheels of their cars. Traversing the Canberra Avenue at nine in the morning requires mounds of patience, as cars stream endlessly pass from the outskirts toward the city center. A traffic jam, however, is as alien as litter.

Canberra is really a beaux arts, but its beauty is just half the story. Initially planned to accommodate 75,000 people, the city has grown without much problem. How? Because the man who designed the city plan, Walter Burley Griffin, was truly a genius.

What amazed me was that Canberra was blueprinted 84 years ago, after Griffin, a young architect from Chicago, won the international competition to plan the new Australian capital.

Today, even with so many people driving around the city every day, there is still heaps of space left. Even if the population explodes, Canberra will still be a comfortable place to live and work. If the day comes when Canberrans need a tram, a subway, or an elevated monorail, Griffin allocated space for it 84 years ago.

To see the result of his work made me wonder. How could he have envisioned as far back as 1912 that the city might one day have to accommodate so much traffic? A lady taxi driver aptly answered my question: Farsightedness.

As I listened to her accounts on how Griffin's work was tremendously enhanced by gorgeous landscape drawings made by his wife, Marion Mahoney Griffin, my mind raced back to my beloved Indonesia.

Today we have more scientific tools for forecasting the future, we have far more data and statistics, we have urban development experts that can draw alternative scenarios, and we have think tanks such as the Indonesian Science Institute. So why do we still make blunders in our decisions, regulations and even laws?

Indonesia is fortunate to have model neighbors to learn from. We can learn about clean governance from Singapore, and we can learn about science and technology development from Australia. Why then, do we keep doing things in our own inefficient and ineffective way?

Take road construction as an example. Numerous overpasses and underpasses have been built all over Jakarta, but traffic is increasingly jammed. There is almost always a horrendous traffic jam along the Tomang to Kebun Jeruk toll road in the morning and in the afternoon because the toll-road contractor did not predict that this stretch of road would be traveled so much -- something it admitted publicly a couple of years ago. After investing so many billions of rupiah, nothing can be done to alleviate the bottleneck.

The Slipi Jaya overpass is another example. Traffic along Jl. Kemanggisan Raya became stagnant the moment the overpass was opened and the public learned to use it. Why? Because the planners did not take into account the need of motorists to turn right immediately after crossing Jl. S. Parman.

The Grogol interchange is most probably the messiest toll road configuration in the world -- it almost looks like spaghetti. The collapsed bridge some time ago illustrates the poor planning that plagues the city.

Unfortunately, a lack of foresight is not limited to city planning, but is also obvious in the passing of regulations and laws. How many times have new regulations created more problems than they solve? Why, for instance, does the government insist on building a nuclear power plant when the public openly admits that Indonesia does not have the right culture for it? Why make discriminatory policies in the national automotive industry that hurt Indonesia's relationships with other countries? The confusing policies have become a public joke.

In education, why set out curriculum that puts high school students at such a gross disadvantage? Worried parents see their intelligent children getting terrible grades. The root of the problem is poor planning.

To really develop, Indonesia must replace ad hoc approaches with foresight, especially now that natural resources are beginning to dwindle and funds are getting scarce. Progress takes legislators capable of looking far into the future to allocate scarce resources to development projects with long-term benefits.

Careful planning and decision making are a must to nation building, and impart a similar attitude into the public. The countless inconsistent regulations and vested-interest decisions has taught Indonesians to be inconsistent and opportunistic. Management by crisis, implemented for too long at the national level, will continue to waste funds, time and energy. Worse, it does not give Indonesians -- and potential foreign investors -- the sense of certainty and security they want and need.

Indonesia has suffered much from this lack of planning ability. How it needs policymakers with Walter Burly Griffin's ability and genius. And, above all, how Indonesians long for more decisionmakers committed to the betterment of the entire nation and not simply their own.