Many of us were flabbergasted upon learning of the plan to build a gigantic new shopping mall at Taman Ria Senayan in South Jakarta. We were even more aghast when hearing the hottest news on the plan to build a 36-story skyscraper as the new headquarters for our House of Representatives, which is also located in Senayan. Our dismay is reasonable.
As far as my memory serves me, founding president Bung Karno designed the Senayan area as an green open space (GOS) with sport activities as its main focus. The Senayan Sports Stadium with its full oval-roof shape, believed to be the first in the world at that time, became a significant landmark.
The fast-paced economic growth of the New Order era upped the pressure of development with commercial interests in this strategic area. Step by step, new buildings emerged in the forms of hotels, apartments, malls, plazas and department stores at the expense of green space.
This massive layout distortion continued to grow, spiraling almost out of control. One of the reasons is the absence of stipulations in Spatial Planning Law (SPL) No. 24/1992, which regulate penalties against building permit officials and developers who break the rules.
That is why, when asked by the minister of public works to participate in the preparation of the new SPL, I was adamant that regulations on the penalties had to be introduced. Now, SPL No. 26/ 2007 governs penalties, both for building permit officials and developers.
When many people were talking about intellectual, emotional and spiritual intelligence, a New York Times reporter, Daniel Goleman, published a book titled Ecological Intelligence (2009).
He reminds us that human behavior and action all over the world is causing a disaster in the form of ecological deficit, which immensely endangers our planet’s existence.
In Indonesia, SPL No. 26 /2007 mandates every city to set aside 20 percent of its urban land for public GOS and another 10 percent for private GOS. But according to my notes, only 9.8 percent of public GOS in Jakarta remains. Therefore, Jakarta has broken the law. True, there have been some efforts by Jakarta officials to return the function of the GOS, including tearing down some gas stations built on land designated as parkland.
But that is pretty insignificant. What is more important is to guard the parks and playgrounds all over the city to prevent them from being plundered by what is popularly called the “robber barons” or “urban cowboys” who are land-hungry developers.
It is highly unreasonable that the elites, who sit on the coveted chairs as the people’s representatives, turn a blind eye and pretend not to hear the resounding protests of the people who reject the plan to build a costly, super lavish building on designated green space in Senayan for their own convenience. If the skyscraper is still being built, we all can call our representatives ecologically ignorant.
They set a very bad example because green open spaces in Jakarta — which is already cramped — would become narrower and narrower, a side effect of which would include more severe flooding in Jakarta. The air temperature would also be higher due to the “urban heat island” phenomenon in the Senayan area. It is within reason for the people to raise concerns about the environmental justice that seems to be abused by their representatives.
When Prof. Emil Salim launched his new book on the commemoration of his 80th birthday a while ago, I had the chance to express some of my grievances, one of which was why the people invited were those from campuses and NGO environmental activists, who mostly already possess high awareness toward environmental balance.
Why were entrepreneurs, high-ranking executives and House of Representatives lawmakers not on the invitation list?
The private sector (which sounds like a profit sector), government officials and the House of Representatives tend to lack awareness of sustainable development, just as the case of Senayan has revealed.
Prof. John Rennie Short, a geography professor from the University of Maryland, in his newest book Cities and Nature (2008) reveals the brutal urbanism phenomenon. He points his finger at developers who collude with government officials and politicians to rob urban land extensively and systemically on a gigantic-gargantuan scale, destroying the urban ecology.
If we all are united in our protest against the construction of the luxurious skyscraper for the House of Representatives in Senayan, it is not solely due to the high cost and sumptuousness, but more to the urbanism brutality, which will adversely impact on the ecological balance and sustainability of our beloved city.
When the ecological ignorance of those who hold power is unmoved, all we can do is to wait for our city’s civilization to crumble. The latest news is that the program has been postponed, while it would be more appropriate if it were canceled for the sake of Jakarta’s future.
The writer is head of the Forum Keluarga Kalpataru Lestari (Fokkal), member of Indonesian Academy of Sciences (AIPI).
