Sustainability
of Java’s mega-urbanization
Tommy Firman ; A professor of urban and regional planning at
the Bandung Institute of Technology; Currently, he is a senior research
fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, the Ash Center for Democratic Governance
and Innovation, in Cambridge, Massachusetts
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JAKARTA
POST, 13 Desember 2014
Southeast
Asia’s big cities have experienced tremendous population and physical growth
in the last five decades, including in the fringe urban areas, owing to
economic development in the urban centers.
This
“mega-urbanization” refers to urban development characterized by a mix of
different economic activities, including industrial estates’ new-town
projects and agricultural activities, and through the expansion of built-up
areas from the urban centers to almost all directions.
The 2000
and 2010 National Population Censuses revealed that Indonesia’s urban
population grew from 85.2 million in 2000 to 118.3 million in 2010 with an
annual growth rate of 3.33 percent.
However,
the distribution of the urban population is extremely uneven, in which about
68 percent of the urban population lived in Java in 2010. Java’s urban
population grew at an annual rate of 3.17 percent in 2000-2010, whereas the
national to total population growth rate was only 1.34 percent per year over
the same period.
The
above figures indicate fast and dense urban population growth across all
provinces in Java. Many scholars predicted in the 1950s-1960s that Java would
become the Island of Cities, and even now it is growing with its massive
urban belts connecting large cities.
In the
population censuses of 2000 and 2010, the smallest administrative unit of a
village is considered “urban” or “rural” on the basis of population density;
percentage of households engaged in agricultural and urban facilities and
physical distance to reach them.
The
number of urban localities in Java increased from 2,533 to 3,641 during
1980-1986 and the number continued to increase from 7,510 to 9,239 during
2000-2010. In 2000, urban localities reached about 30 percent of the total
localities in Java. In 2010, the figure increased to nearly 37 percent. For
Indonesia, the figure was only about 18 percent and 20.5 percent in 2000 and
2010, respectively.
By 2010,
there were 12 cities with populations of 1 million or more in Indonesia, but
nine of those cities were in Java, namely Jakarta, Surabaya, Semarang,
Bandung ,Tangerang, South Tangerang, Bekasi, Bogor and Depok. Interestingly,
five of the big cities in Java are located in Greater Jakarta.
This
resulted in about 20 percent of Indonesia’s population living in Greater
Jakarta in 2010. The Greater Jakarta urban population constituted about 31
percent of Java’s urban population, which makes this metropolitan region the
largest in the nation, or a primate city.
The low
population-growth rate of Java’s large cities, including Surabaya, Bandung,
Semarang and even Jakarta, is largely due to suburbanization, which has
caused faster population growth on the city outskirts.
The most
obvious one is suburbanization in Greater Jakarta. The annual population growth
rate in Jakarta reached only 1.40 percent during 2000-2010, whereas the
annual population growth rate in the peripheral cities was much higher,
including Bekasi (4.70 percent) and Depok (4.33 percent). In comparison,
Jakarta’s annual population growth rate once reached 5.5 percent during
1930-1961.
The
ratio of Jakarta’s population to the Greater Jakarta population declined from
55 percent in 1990 to 43 percent in 2000, and decreased further to 36 percent
in 2010. Meanwhile, the lifetime in-migration in Jakarta itself, indicated by
place of residence being different from place of birth at the time of census
enumeration, was 4.1 million in 2010, in contrast to the lifetime
out-migration which reached only approximately 3 million.
Jakarta
thus experienced negative lifetime migration during 2000-2010. This most
likely also reflected the change of destination place of in-migration from
Jakarta to its outskirts.
Another
case is the Greater Bandung area, in which the annual population growth rate
of Bandung city was only 1.11 percent during 2000-2010. In contrast, its
outskirt cities grew much faster, including Cimahi (2 percent) and Bandung
(2.5 percent).
In
comparison, the annual population rate of growth of Bandung itself reached 5.9
percent during 1930-1961. Like Greater Jakarta, the proportion of Bandung to
the total population of its metropolitan area declined from 34 percent in
1990 to 29 percent in 2000 and decreased further to only 28 percent in 2010.
The
recent physical development of the Bandung and Jakarta metropolitan areas is
marked by the urban corridor of about 200 kilometers from Bandung to Jakarta,
characterized by a mixture of activities, including industries, residential,
and agricultural activities, which blurred the rural-urban distinction in the
areas. Millions also commute daily between Jakarta and the adjacent areas.
Similarly,
annual population growth in Surabaya reached only 0.53 percent during
2000-2010, whereas the city had an average population growth rate of as much
as 3.5 percent during 1931-1961.
The
fringes of this metropolitan area experienced higher annual population
growth, such as Gresik (1.59 percent) and Sidoarjo (2.21 percent). Also, the
fast development of the Surabaya-Malang urban corridor also shows the recent
urban transformation in East Java.
The
growth of the urban population in the peripheral big cities in Java not only
resulted from in-migration from the city center to the outskirts but also
from reclassification of localities previously defined as “rural” to “urban”.
This
clearly indicates the continuity of mega-urbanization in Java as indicated
since almost 25 years ago. This process is unstoppable along with social and
economic development, but the problem in Java is that this development is
largely uncontrolled and unsustainable, which could very soon result in
serious
environmental
ramifications including flooding, air and water pollution, loss of prime and
irrigated agricultural land and traffic congestion, if no action is taken to
cope with the problems .
There
are spatial plans from the national, provincial to the sub-city level, but
unfortunately most of the plans do not work effectively and many are even
violated because of mounting pressures, especially from the businesses and
political interests.
Now the new government has an Agrarian and Spatial Planning Ministry,
and therefore one of its priorities should be to ensure the consistency of
plans and their implementation, as well as to strengthen local government
capacities in implementation planning — which is badly needed at the moment. ●
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