In a efforts to control the seasonal influx of newcomers to the capital, Jakarta Governor Fauzi Bowo recently urged the public not to bring friends or relatives back with them after the Idul Fitri exodus.
“In Tambora there are so many people that you trip over children when you walk,” Fauzi said as quoted by beritajakarta.com at a fast-breaking event in the district last week.
Each year the city administration organizes campaigns to check citizens’ ID cards several days after the holidays, when the flow of people into the capital reaches its peak.
This period traditionally sees a surge in migration to Jakarta from other regions, with many people joining the post Idul Fitri flow back to the capital in search of work.
The latest census data shows that Jakarta is home to around 9.6 million people, or 4 percent of the total population of Indonesia, the fourth-most populous nation on the planet.
The city itself has more people during daylight hours, with an estimated 2 million workers commuting to the city each day. This means it is much easier to get around the capital after hours. But with an average population density of around 14,500 people per square kilometer, and a population that continues to increase, many have questioned how much further Jakarta can grow.
“We calculate that Jakarta will only have a capacity for 10 million people in 2030,” Andi Oetomo told The Jakarta Post via telephone recently.
Andi, a spatial planning expert from the Bandung Institute of Technology who helped make the city’s 2030 draft bylaw, said Jakarta would be prone to various accidents and disasters if it failed to control its population growth.
“It will be suicide. The population forecast considers the city’s capacity in 2030 based on a successful application of technology such as the polder [land reclamation] system,” Andi said.
The forecast also takes into account the availability of clean water, housing areas, earthquake and flood vulnerability, he said.
By reclaiming land in the northern part of the city, Jakarta could accommodate another 2 million people, he said.
Andi said the city should adopt serious measures to address population growth by working with other nearby areas to control urbanization.
“The city should not try to cater to everyone. Jakarta should apply growth management, not development,” he said.
Trisakti University urban expert Yayat Supriatna shared the similar views on the urgency of controlling development in the city,
which he said should ideally have a population of 5 million people, like Singapore.
“Seeing the current situation, any further development of Jakarta will add to the problems,” he told the Post.
Yayat was referring to Jakarta’s polluted groundwater, inadequate coverage of clean water access and densely populated and fire-prone slum areas.
However, he doubted that the city’s population would grow by only 400,000 people over the next 20 years because of the massive disparities between Jakarta and other provinces.
Rather than doling out the responsibility to local administrations, the central government needed an agency that handled population control specifically, he said.
According to a report from the United Nations Population Fund, more than half the world’s population were living in cities in 2008. By 2030, almost 5 billion people would be living in urban areas, seeing the urban population in Africa and Asian cities doubling. The report says policy makers can reduce the pace of growth by supporting measures such as poverty reduction initiatives, education and healthcare, including reproductive health and family planning services.
It warns that urbanization is unavoidable and that action must be taken now to prepare cities for growth before it is too late.
The government says with its current growth rate Indonesia will achieve a demographic “bonus”, where the number of people in active ages (15-65 years) is higher than the number of people at dependent ages.
Trade Minister Mari Elka Pangestu said the “demographic dividend” would last for the next 10 to 15 years, creating ideal momentum for businesses to establish a base in Indonesia.
University of Indonesia Demographic Institute director Sonny Harry Harmadi said the demographic bonus could be a double-edged sword.
If the active population had no work there would be a social conflict and instability, he said.
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