Jakarta (in transit)

Narita, Japan (in transit to Jakarta, 2004)

Below is an email reply, somewhat modified from the original, to an email I was sent recently.

I will be in Jakarta next month, in April, for about three weeks. There are a few people I need to see. Check out my cognative map and take photographs.

If you are still planning to write your article about blogging in Indonesia here are some ideas.

I confess I have not the slightest idea what blogging is.  

I don’t know how I know this but I have read that blogging has been around for about seven or eight years. It is not new, and it seems, just by the shear volume of blogs listed in search engines on the internet, that a lot of people are doing it these days.

The web site Indonesia Matters has a list of 500 blogs with their subject being Indonesia.

I came to be a blogger from a project I worked on in a Human Geography course at the University of Hawaii, Hilo, in 2007.

As I  was working on a presenation about monuments in Jakarta  I found one web site named deviantArt. This is not a blogging site but it is a site where people post their writing, artwork, and photography. If you go to that site and search “Indonesia” or “Jakarta” you will see some very remarkable art that Indonesians and Jakartans are producing. Some of the finest photos I have ever seen are on that site.  I have used photos from deviantArt in Jakarta Urban Blog, always to asking permission first (no one has turned me down so far, thanks).

My current university course  is urban geography or urban studies.  The notion that I could create a blog to use in this course seemed a logical  way to share information and my interests. 

 Before I knew it I had acquired readers from all over the world.

If you write, make your money that way, you know that it is not an easy thing to do. Writing takes time and it takes thinking. I have a full time job, part time school, a house, a wife, two cats, and a this blog.  All need attention. And so does my Support page.

As I am busy posting images, keeping up a links list, keeping the weatherpixie happy, I am also writing from a distance. I am not in Jakarta.

Mostly what comes out of Jakarta seems to be bad news. The city has more than its fare share. But that is the character of news, is it not? Urban centers are increasingly becoming more and more important in the larger scheme of things.

The planet will live or die by cities.

 Cities on the edge of chaos …>go to site

“It is one of the most seismic changes the world has ever seen. Across the globe there is an unstoppable march to the cities, powered by new economic realities. But what kind of lives are we creating? And will citizens - and cities - cope with the fierce pressures of this new urban age? Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum and author of a major new report, asks if the city of the future will be a vision of hell or a force for civilised living? “

 Sudjic states, “Cities are made by an extraordinary mixture of do-gooders and bloody-minded obsessives, of cynical political operators and speculators. They are shaped by the unintended consequences of the greedy and the self-interested, the dedicated and the occasional visionary. The cities that work best are those that keep their options open, that allow the possibility of change.

The ones that are stuck, overwhelmed by rigid, state-owned social housing, or by economic systems that offer the poor no way out of the slums are in trouble. A successful city is one that makes room for surprises. A city that has been trapped by too much gentrification, or too many shopping malls, will have trouble generating the spark that is essential to making a city that works.”

Which brings to mind Sukarno. Such a different time.

“Comrades from Jakarta, let us build Jakarta into the greatest city possible. Great not just from a material point of view; great, not just because of its skyscrapers; great not just because it has boulevards and beautiful streets; great not just because it has beautiful monuments; great in every respect, even in the little houses of the workers of Jakarta there must be a sense of greatness… Give Jakarta an extraordinary place in the minds of the Indonesian people, because Jakarta belongs to the people of Jakarta. Jakarta belongs to the whole Indonesian people. More than that, Jakarta is becoming the beacon of the whole of mankind. Yes, the beacon of the New Emerging Forces.”

-Sukarno as cited in Abeyasekere 1987: 168 

What happened?

Now, more people live in cities than at anytime in the history of humanity. 

This  is the subject of the web site Urban Age. From this  The Endless City  edited by Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic in collaboration with the London School of Economics and the Urban Age Project will be published soon.

The problems of cities are ultimately going to be solved by the people who live in them.

I do not entirely despair that Jakarta is so broken that it cannot be fixed.  If not fixed then understood. And to understand you must see. There are many scholars, journalists, human rights workers, bloggers, and Jakartans whose central interest is the welfare of the city.

I am looking forward to seeing them.

 

Jakarta (megalopolis)

 Photo by mizsz

 Review

Jakarta Megalopolis: Horizontal and Vertical Observations

Arjan van Helmond and Stani Michiels, Valiz Publishers, 2007, 179 pages.

What were we doing? Now I remember, we were headed to Gambir Station to buy tickets to Perwokerto and then after that just burning time before we had to take the new Toyota van my wife’s brother had just purchased back to his house in Depok and meet him there after he was finished working for the day.

It must be a tradition in Indonesia that when you purchase a new vehicle the first thing you do is loan it out to family member.

So then, it was Budi, the husband of my wife’ sister, and I, with the new van, heading out from Citayam on an early sunny morning and headed into Jakarta for the day. We drove out of the neighborhood and onto the main street winding past shops, stores, and businesses packed to the very edge of both sides of the road and which seemed to stretch away like an endless film loop, then on past the Citayam train depot bottleneck, on through Depok, and then finally taking the back roads all the way into Jakarta.

By this time I had been to Jakarta so many times that I had lost count but with out doubt on every occasion there seemed to be a new way to go and new things to see. This day was no different. Budi was taking me on the maximum tour. Down streets I never knew existed, past apartment complexes, malls, embassies, cemeteries, monuments, and a lake where he said he had once seen monkeys. “But maybe no more“, he added. I really liked the notion that there was a lake with monkeys. I filed that away in my head where the idea has rooted into a life of its own to this day.

Jakarta - Lake - Monkeys

Just like that.

Budi clearly knew what he was doing and where he was going. He only mentioned once or twice, out of sincere humility, that he was lost as a result of on the spur of the moment experimenting with a new shortcut. Still, we were back in good order in a snap.

I was there for the ride and the pleasure of watching Jakarta float by my window. But I wondered how he knew where he was going and where we were.

“Budi, how do you know where we are and where we are going?”

“When I first moved to Jakarta I just drove around and around the city day after day”.

Budi had, through time, experience, and experiment created in his head a mental map of Jakarta. He could not survive there with out it. He had made place out of Jakarta’s urban space. He had worked up his own internal geography.

Whether I realized it or not this is what I was also doing. Through most of our day I had no landmark I could anchor myself to in the warren of Jakarta’s densely complex streets punctuated by crazy intersections where no pedestrian would dare to tread, until I saw, in the long distance, hovering in the sky like a signal, the National Monument. I knew then Gambir Station was not far off.

I think it was at that time that Jakarta started to click in my mind

There is an occasional moment or two during the day when all this comes back to me. Out of the murk it comes to the surface like a fish in a pond and rolls its back once or twice. There I am magically arriving at Gambir Station or stuck in the jammed traffic around Blok M or picking out the landmarks heading back Citayam, home, the mosque across the street, the beautiful faces of the children returning from school.

How do you know Jakarta?

 the review is continued here …> go to page

 

In case you missed it.

World Population Becomes More Urban Than Rural

ScienceDaily (2007-05-25) — There’s no big countdown billboard or sign in Times Square to denote it, but Wednesday, May 23, 2007, represents a major demographic shift, according to scientists from North Carolina State University and the University of Georgia: For the first time in human history, the earth’s population will be more urban than rural. … > read full article