Urbanisation, Megacities & Jakarta: From Kampung to Global City?

Opening anecdote underscores the practical and emotional value of having parents/grand‐parents nearby:
- Care during illness.
- Child-rearing support (“it takes a village”).
- Acts as a push-factor for return migration from large cities back to hometowns.
Sets up a contrast: city life is hard; family networks are a coping strategy.

BEFORE colonisation: many Southern cities were already thriving centres of commerce, culture, and governance.
COLONIAL ERA:
- Cities re-engineered to fit imperial trade networks (see earlier "triangular trade" slide mentioned by speaker).
- Necessity for local seats of colonial government (e.g., Jakarta becomes a secondary headquarters for Dutch/French/European rulers because "you can’t run an empire solely from London, Paris or Madrid").
AFTER COLONIALISM (World-Systems Theory lens):
- These urban spaces remain embedded in an unequal global division of labour → still serve as “colonial space-economies.”

Mega-city = sheer size: population so large that US metropolitan areas look like villages.
Global city (Sassen, not required to memorise):
- Node for advanced producer services, finance, HQs, high-end consumption.
- No longer needs a seaport; airports & digital flows suffice (e.g., Dubai, Singapore).
Paul Collier’s port thesis reiterated: coastlines historically confer trade advantages; airports partially substitute today.

Policy & donor landscape: UN-Habitat, Australian AID, OECD, USAID analogues, etc.
Prescriptions include:
1. Formalise private land markets (Hernando de Soto) → give titles, unlock credit, “make capitalism work.”
2. Cities Without Slums campaign (basis for Hong Kong’s reinvention).
3. Safety & streetscape upgrades to court investment and tourism.
4. Sustainable / resilient city frameworks (climate adaptation layer).
Ethical / practical tensions:
- Slum-clearance often = violent displacement, ecosystem destruction, cultural loss.
- Slums/favelas/kampungs provide better shelter than U.S. freeway-side homelessness; they are an informal safety net.
- Upgraded boulevards benefit car-owning elites, not street vendors whose livelihoods depended on the old layout.
- “Means must justify ends” – are we fixing or exacerbating injustice?

Located in Southeast Asia; capital of Indonesia.
Pre-colonial: capital of powerful local kingdoms.
Colonial: restructured to serve Dutch/French administration & extraction; city’s priorities pivoted from citizen-service to empire-service.

Dramatic post-1940 growth (graph shown 1940→2010 spike).
Metro region = Jabodetabek (Jakarta + Bogor, Depok, Tangerang, Bekasi).
- Pre-COVID population ≈ 30 million across ≈2 500 sq mi.
- Quick density calc: $\text{Density}=\frac{30\,000\,000}{2\,500}\approx12\,000\;\text{people/mi}^2$ .
Comparative scale:
- L.A. metro (2019): ~19 million; Jakarta = world’s 4th-largest metro.
- Density heat-map: Jakarta dwarfs London.

Informal settlement = “kampung.”
- Analogue: favela (Rio), kibera (Nairobi), shantytown (Dhaka).
- Extra-legal rather than strictly illegal: land not titled; utilities largely absent (water, sewer, power).
- Surprisingly spacious plots vs typical New York apartment but still unrecognized.

Traffic congestion
- Rush hour scenes rival LA’s 405 at 3 a.m.
- Mixed road users: motorcycles, angkot minibuses, cars, pedestrians.
Air pollution
- Smog so thick DSLR photo appears faded.
- Health impacts: acute respiratory distress, chronic asthma → downstream morbidity.
Climate vulnerability
- Low-lying delta → frequent floods; standing water for weeks → water-borne disease, infrastructure decay.

Gated, resort-style enclaves with “7-in-1” or “13-in-1” living:
- Apartments + mall + school + hospital + recreation in one complex.
- Clean pools, air-conditioned interiors, personal automobiles.
Retail landscape mirrors Dubai / Paris luxury corridors.
Planning blueprints explicitly copy affluent Western & Alpine models (e.g., Pasadena CA, St Moritz CH).
Aspirational narrative: reach Rostow’s Stage 5 ‘age of high mass-consumption.’

Great Garuda Sea Wall + 17 artificial islands (Dubai-style) to combat sea-level rise and reclaim land for high-end real estate.
Backed by multi-scalar coalition: Indonesian gov’t, private developers, bilateral & multilateral funders.
Critique: protects/touts elite waterfront property, rarely addresses flooding in up-river kampungs.

Who is the city for? Majority informal residents or minority consumer class?
Does “cleaning up” equate to social cleansing?
Can inclusive planning reconcile economic growth with spatial justice?
What is lost when informal ecosystems of support are erased in pursuit of a “global city” brand?

World-Systems Theory: Jakarta as semi-periphery node still shaped by core interests.
Collier’s Geography of Growth: port access → global trade; updated to airport age.
de Soto: titling land as key to unlocking “dead capital” (invoked by policy reports).
Rostow’s Stages of Growth: planners explicitly chase Stage 5 imagery.
Sustainable/Resilient City discourse: adaptation projects double as real-estate ventures.

Megacity growth is not inherently beneficial; it amplifies pre-existing inequalities.
Attempts to ‘go global’ often ride on displacement of informal majorities.
Slums function as both problem (infrastructure deficits) and solution (affordable shelter, community).
Inclusive, equitable urban futures demand that means (planning, policy) align ethically with ends (human wellbeing for all, not just the globally competitive few).