Members of the Citizens Coalition for Jakarta on the 2030 spatial plan say the city's public consultations do not address the real demand for public participation in the planning process.
"The meetings a merely a formality held because the coalition demanded it," M. Amry, an architect with the Settlement Forum (Forkim), a part of the coalition, told The Jakarta Post on Friday.
He said the meetings did not reach a wide audience, as most people attending them were from the city administration.
"The Jakarta Development Planning Agency *Bappeda* was not serious about holding the meetings as they always issued invitations only a few days before the meetings," he said.
The first public meeting for the Jakarta 2030 spatial planning draft at the city's housing agency office in Central Jakarta was attended by 20 residents and 30 city officials.
Amry said he attended the first meeting and another meeting on flood control and water management system but received no minutes of the meeting or conclusion.
"The minutes should have been published or made available at the official website of the spatial planning draft," he said, adding that the website was not updated.
At last check, the website's community forum was full of spam messages.
Amry said he did not attend the meeting on transportation because there was no clear notification on whether recommendations from the previous meeting would be included in the 2030 spatial planning draft.
He said Bappeda did not address the coalition's demand that the public be involved in the draft process because the meeting did not result in a mechanism for involving the public.
"The city administration could at the very least conduct a public survey in strategic locations. The coalition is willing to help for free," he said.
Shanty Syahril, another coalition member, said the coalition's had conducted its own small survey of 2,000 online users and the public.
She said survey participants included people from various backgrounds representing all the districts in the city, as 80 percent of them lived in the city, with the rest residing in Jakarta's satellite cities.
"We hope the number of respondents increases because we can still conduct a survey while analyzing the draft," she told the Post via telephone.
The preliminary analysis, Shanty said, showed that middle- and upper-income respondents complained of floods and traffic congestion, while informal workers were mostly worried being evicted.
Shanty said the coalition wanted the city to conduct a survey to gauge current conditions, which would be used as a basis to draft the spatial planning.
The 2007 Spatial Planning Law requires each province to submit proposals on new spatial planning two years after the law is issued, while regencies or cities have three years.
As of February, only 10 provinces, including South Sulawesi, Bali, Lampung, North Maluku, West Java and West Papua had secured approval from the Public Works Ministry.
Jakarta is one of five provinces that hasn't submitted a proposal on to the ministry.
