I

n 1853, Seine administrative chief Georges Eugene Haussmann assisted the rebirth of Paris from a cramped and polluted medieval city into the modern beauty that it is today.

Inspired by the open space and beautiful parks of London, Emperor Louis Napoleon envisioned to free the capital city from poor housing and sanitation that had caused cholera outbreaks.

This resulted in a city of large and straight boulevards with rows of buildings under the cartecian order in the heart of Paris, a design that now is treated as a holy grail that has kept modernists outside the downtown to manuever with big development projects.

The irony of Haussmann reform is that it has caused social disintegration among Parisians ever since. The grand boulevards and the strict order of building sizes have kept middle-lower classes from the city center because of limited space and high rents.

The problem with Paris, accoding to architectural critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, is its own beauty, which has caused the demolition of many of its centers. In 1971, the city administration demolished Les Halles, the city’s old wholesale market, to make way for a sophisticated underground shopping area, Forum des Halles.

As its architecture is considered part of its national identity, historical Paris has avoided everything modern and ugly since high-rises were banned from the center since 1977.

Unlike Paris and other urban centers that attempt to keep citizens away from these area through underground public transport and open spaces, Jakarta has never been quite parted from the popular class.

Jo Santoso’s The Fifth Layer of Jakarta archives the history of a cosmopolitan port city that serves as a trading center for the 16th century Demak Kingdom to the present-day emerging Asia metropolis accomodationg more than 10 million population.

In the pre-Dutch colonial era, Jakarta, then known as Jayakarta, was a multi-ethnic enclave in which indigenous Javanese, Malays and Buginese blended with Chinese, Muslims and Hindus from India and the Middle East.

Traditional quarters, known as kampungs, existed to house immigrants, something which was adopted by the Dutch administration when it developed the region as Batavia.

Traces still exist today as some regions are called Kampung Bandan (for people from Banda), Kampung Manggarai (for people from West Flores) and Kampung Bali (for people from Bali), despite resindential areas being no longer exclusive for any ethnicity.

The Dutch introduced segregation in their urban planning by dividing areas into beboude-niet (non-built) and beboude kom (built). It started to develop the Old Batavia area in the northern part of the city with the construction of a Town Hall in the early 18th century. The building is still there today as the Museum Fatahillah or Jakarta History Museum.

The Dutch did not methodically build the rest of the region but rather developed areas that were considered important to support the initial urban system. Neither did the British or French occupations that existed at the beginning of the 19th century.

Integration between the built and non-built areas started only in the early 20th century amid the growing of agro-industrial exports from the city.

The Menteng residential area and Central Hospital (now Cipto Mangunkusumo Hospital) and Pasar Baroe commercial zone were established to synergize the pre-existing urban system, including the railway network as well as prominent structures such Emmanuel Church (now Jakarta Cathedral).

In the Sukarno era, grand projects to modernize the city evolved with the idea to build the nation, which tended to neglect the kampungs from the city system.

 Modern housing projects spawning in Kebayoran Baru, Pejompongan and Tebet in South Jakarta and Grogol, West Jakarta, were meant to eradicate the ethnic segregation of the previous eras. But they were built in new parts of the city instead of developing old parts, making the old areas more abandoned rather than integrating them with new developments.

The construction of the city center along Jl.Sudirman-Jl.Thamrin boulevard and grand statues like the National Monument in Central Jakarta and the The Dirgantara Monument, popularly known as the Pancoran statue, in South Jakarta were in the same spirit of modernizing Paris, to create national pride and identity.

The blank, abandoned, spaces that Sukarno left behind in his stampedes of development has caused slightly different effects Jakarta than what we have seen in Paris. It has made the city develop two parallel trajectories, for the upper and lower-middle classes, blended into one with only thin transparent social walls between them.

Another beauty of Jakarta is the city as an alternative to the conventional definition of modern megacities, equipped with modern transit systems and high-cultured urban life. Unequal developments were continued in subsequent eras, bringing the city to face its present challenges of massive traffic congestion, housing and sanitation issues.

A partial sewer system, a legacy of the Dutch, is defenseless against the floods and tidal waves in northern and southern parts of the city. The absence of proper sanitation systems have made tropical diseases such as dengue fever frequent occurences in the city. The recent avian influenza outbreaks in the city also posed a threat to the hygiene of the urban poor, with housing areas intertwining with chicken coops and abbattoirs.

The city’s roads are far from effective. Traffic congestion has become worse amid the blooming of shopping malls and business centers on the main streets.

Jo Santoso, an urban planning scholar from Jakarta-based Tarumanegara University, proposed the further integration of kampungs with main urban developments by creating business centers as well as a strict separation of “working and living” areas.

He also highlighted the importance of an urban economic council, a forum of different stakeholders, to encourage public participation in the development process.

What the book may lack is an emphasis on the emergence of the city’s large population, regardless of the public participation that Jo Santoso advocates.

Framing the city as layers of unconnected developments would sustain the fallacy of the previous eras, which led to inefficient developments and waste of resources.

What it urgently needs is the rapid expansion of capacity that can keep up with the population in the form of an efficient and high-dense urban system that can provide proper living to citizens and commuters.

Major redesigning may be required, just as what happened in Paris. Of course, this would not be for the bourgeoisie of the city, but rather for the rest of the population.