http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/01/20131306461717780.html
'Sinking' Jakarta pins hopes on rising star
New governor is promising to redress mounting civic woes of Indonesian
capital built on a swamp.
Melati Kaye Last Modified: 04 Feb 2013 10:50
inShare
About 300,000 families in Jakarta live in illegal settlements [Melati
Kaye/Al Jazeera]
Jakarta, Indonesia - As a mega-storm flooded Jakarta last week and
stranded half the city, its new governor Joko Widodo stood by his vision for
the Indonesian capital.
"No traffic jam. No flooding. No poor."
With a population of 10 million, Jakarta ranks as one of Southeast Asia's
fastest-growing and most-congested cities.
Thousands fled inundated homes, the central business district was
paralysed, and drenched commuter rail tracks left half the city stranded. The
new governor had to declare a 10-day emergency - an anticlimactic end to his
first hundred days in office.
If Widodo - or "Jokowi", as he is popularly known, can deliver on his
promises to address the city's social, economic and environmental problems, the
governor could become a major star in Indonesian politics.
But if he fails, the city could seize up in terminal gridlock. The Japan
International Cooperation Agency has predicted traffic will bring the city to a
complete standstill in a little over a decade.
Jakarta is the nerve centre of an economy predicted to overtake Germany
and the UK by 2030. Yet a receding water table is causing the megalopolis to
sink by an average of 10 centimetres a year. The city is built on a swamp that
weaves through 13 converging river deltas.
Its population has been growing at an average rate of nearly 3 percent a
year since Indonesia's independence in 1945. Many of the migrants who move from
the countryside to Jakarta in search of a better life find housing along urban
waterways, which turn into flood zones almost every rainy season.
Contradictions
Jokowi pledged not to evict people, but his draft plan calls for
relocations to subsidised flats [Melati Kaye/Al Jazeera]
This points to the inherent contradictions in Jokowi's promised trifecta:
the three goals could prove mutually exclusive. How to rationalise traffic and
rein in floods while at the same time preserving the livelihoods and
communities of the city's poor?
In less than a decade, Jokowi has risen from being a furniture dealer in
Central Java to one of Indonesia's most popular politicians. Just eight years
ago, with the backing of the National Furniture and Handicraft Association, he
won the mayoral race in his hometown of Solo. His populist style immediately
set him apart; and his anti-corruption battles won many admirers.
Whereas previous administrations cleared out street peddlers with
eviction notices and police batons, Jokowi switched to community forums. After
listening to vendors, he eventually persuaded them to join in a "relocation
parade" to a designated "traditional mall" where they could sell their wares.
With a similar sense of fanfare, he convinced urban squatters to resettle
elsewhere.
Jokowi brings the same sense of showmanship to his new post in Jakarta.
In December, right after assuming office, he unveiled a draft of his plans for
the megalopolis.
He wants to move food vendors off streets and sidewalks to Solo-style
malls. Urban rivers would be dredged to speed rainwater drainage. He will
revive a long-neglected 2007 commitment to set aside 30 percent of city land as
green space. He has bought more public mini-buses and recommitted to building a
monorail and an elevated subway. To guard against rising sea levels and sinking
land, he will erect a giant sea wall.
These grandiose plans were promptly dubbed "Joko-Wows" by local media.
Unconvinced
But some of his constituents remain un-wowed. Jakarta's Urban Poor
Consortium estimates that the city has 300,000 families living in illegal
settlements. Squatters currently inhabit two-thirds of the 43 acres Jokowi
plans to convert into green space and many more live along the riverbanks.
Jokowi signed a campaign pledge not to evict people, but his draft plan
calls for relocations to subsidised flats or centralised "superblocks". In
places like the North Jakarta slum of Muara Angke, however, many residents have
no intention of moving, despite drainage ditches so choked with garbage that
stray cats appear to be walking on water.
"As long as I can eat, I plan to stay put," Muhayati, a local resident,
said. "My in-laws are here, as are my kids. This is my home, my village." Nor
does her husband plan to move his motorcycle sticker vending business from an
unlicensed curbside pushcart to a regulated mall.
To appease such constituents, Jokowi has allocated a fourth of his
proposed $4.83bn city budget to services for the poor. In November, he began
distributing health cards entitling residents to free service at city
hospitals, a programme expected to reach half the population by year-end. Under
his "Jakarta Smart" programme, students from poor families receive $20 a month
for school fees.
Could such programmes placate lower-income constituents?
"For the moment, yes," Jokowi told Al Jazeera in one of his trademark
on-the-fly sidewalk interviews, a hallmark of his media relations style. "After
all, it's only been three months."
Jokowi's grace period with anti-poverty activists has not yet ended. "So
far, he's just saying things to the media," Edi Saidi, of the Urban Poor
Consortium, said. But he wonders if the new governor can overcome his
underlings' bureaucratic inertia.
"Jokowi is open to peoples' proposals but there is no [administrative]
bridge" to implement his promises, Saidi worries. A crucial test looms soon
enough: when Jokowi entered office, gave his sub-district officers until
mid-March to tend to their jurisdictions as graciously as "banks serve their
customers" or face dismissal.
Wait-and-see
Experts on flood control and traffic management - the two other planks in
the governor's platform - have adopted similar wait-and-see attitudes.
Yayat Supriyatna, a hydrologist at Jakarta's TriSakti University, hails
Jokowi's anti-flooding measures as prudent and long overdue. "The river needs
space to move," he said, adding that long-term benefits from dredging would
require 15- to 50-metre no-development zones along the entire length of urban
rivers. Politically, this could be a tough sell.
Ofyar A Thamin, a civil engineering professor at Bandung's Institute of
Technology, is all praise for Jokowi's public transportation initiatives, but
laments his recent decision to build six elevated toll roads in the inner city.
"Traffic makes Jakartans move and plan their lives one and a half times
slower than is normal," Thamin says. "Toll roads will only incentivise buying
cars and aggravate the problem."
Sixty to seventy percent of the city’s personal vehicles are owned by
medium- and lower-income wage earners. "This should not be cost-effective for
them," Thamin commented, pointing out that as a result, individuals are
spending more on fuel and cars while cutting back on other purchases. More cars
also lead to more pollution - and thus more health problems.
Reconciling the contradictions of Jokowi's agenda will take finesse and a
fair amount of time. But the governor, a member of the centre-left Indonesian
Democratic Party for Struggle (PDI-P), looks like a man on the move. Already
there's talk of a presidential bid in 2019, and some wonder whether he may
leave his work in Jakarta unfinished.
At his gubernatorial inauguration, the PDI-P paid food vendors to make
meatball soup for all the attendees. But, for the sake of his own political
future and that of his beleaguered city, Jokowi will have to enrich the recipe
over the rest of his term - more meatballs, less broth; more achievement, less
verbiage.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
