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akarta needs its people. That is the simple but fundamental argument to urge the government to redo Jakarta's 2010-2030 Spatial Masterplan through a participatory process.

Jakarta needs its people to own the plan so that they will participate in implementing it willingly. Participation builds a strong link called "ownership" between making and implementing a plan. They can only do so if they participate in the making of basic strategic options and decisions.

This means deployment of a true participatory process that goes beyond passive "consultative participation" where people are merely asked their opinions about options and decisions that have been made or predetermined by others, usually the bureaucrats and their consultants.

Judging from its content, the draft bylaws (RAPERDA) on the 2010-2030 Spatial Masterplan clearly shows that Jakarta needs its people not only for their aspiration, but also for their inspiration, information, knowledge and know-how.

A coalition of citizens, just after a couple of weeks of scrutinising the draft bylaws, easily discovered many disturbing mistakes, from repeated typos, misleading projection of population growth (as it is based on raw aggregated trends), up to misuse of floor area standards as land area standards.

It is ridiculous that the drafting of master plan of the capital of Indonesia was conducted recklessly.

The city authorities need to learn from Sydney, Melbourne, London and New York City, because those four cities just completed their plans for 2030.

They are all participatory in process and the results are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound), which is not the case with Jakarta's. New York City and Sydney employed the same Jan Gehls, a senior architect that in the past 40 years has been influential in the making of pedestrians- and cyclists-friendly Copenhagen.

The most primary of all, the "vision" of Jakarta, has been formulated as "a service city that is comfortable, prosperous and sustainable".

There is no record about how it was formulated and on what grounds, be it on the people's aspiration or on Jakarta's factual potentials.

Those words are heavily loaded, cannot be treated lightly, because they can mean different things to different people. For example, for many people, inner city toll roads are certainly not "sustainable", and yet the government is going ahead with them. The same problem also happens with the MRT plan; there is no thorough explanation about the program.

Our contemporary world is such that production of knowledge is no longer concentrated only in a handful of consultants and university professors.

A staff member at an international NGO can access and analyse the whole globally available knowledge, as much as a university professor can do.

A well-travelled business man would have known more cities in the world to compare with Jakarta than a bureaucrat, even if he/she had gone for many wasteful "comparative study trips".

Jakarta's 2010-2030 Spatial Masterplan is a long-term plan. It is a generation's chance, which comes only once in 20 years. It will outlive many politicians' careers. Therefore, they cannot just decide on it by themselves. They need to involve all stakeholders of the city.

The involvement of the stakeholders is a must, not an option. We should do our best to invent ways to conduct it properly. Many citizens are willing to "help" the government to do that, because they really want to feel they own the plan and the city.

A structured participatory process is not difficult to conduct even when it comes to large-scale planning such as for a metropolis like Jakarta. There are techniques and technologies that can be used to design a structured and phased participatory process.

Different forms of meetings -large and small focus groups discussions, opinion surveys, questionnaires - can be taken to formulate and decide on different levels of issues. It is not that "we just go out and ask the men on the street".

In the 30 years of modern history of city planning in Indonesia, no city has really got better because of its plan.

Implementation is often blamed for the failure of planning, which is often defended by the expression that "the plan is fine, but the implementation is bad".

The truth is that a good plan should include a good workable implementation strategy. One cannot blame implementation without blaming the planning approach, which has two basic faults.

First, it has not been participatory enough to develop sense of ownership that would encourage popular support in implementation.

Secondly it has never been SMART and transparent enough, which made it easy to corrupt. These are all understandable under Soeharto's regime, but not now.

Obviously, the hardest and most bitter pill to swallow is that Jakarta can only reverse its downturn if we change its planning approach. We are going nowhere with a business-as-usual attitude, and without the courage to make fundamental changes in the current planning approach.

Indeed, a participatory process is a new way of building city. The old ways have failed; at least they will not be able to respond properly to immediate and future problems. Jaime Lerner, former mayor of Curitiba, knows that, and often said, in a different context, that building a city is building its society.

We cannot just copy the result. We need to exercise a participatory process to come out with authentic solutions unique to Jakarta. Citizens are ready and aspiring to it.