Where art thou Walter Burley Griffin? Indonesia needs you

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.