Photo: The Jakarta Globe (“Cities are [supposed to be] developed for people, not for cars. The city of Jakarta provides only for cars and motorcycles.” –Milatia Kusuma Mu’min, Indonesian country director of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy.)
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The Gray Wave of the Great Transformation could be used to describe Jakarta. However this is the title of a lecture I will be attending next week here at the University of Hawaii, Manoa.
The lecture will be presented by Marc Imhoff, Ph.D., Earth Scientist, NASA’s Goddard Research Center.
Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecture: Gray Wave of the Great Transformation: A Satellite View of Urbanization, Climate Change, and Food Security
As the announcement states:
“Land cover change driven by human activity is profoundly affecting Earth’s natural systems with impacts ranging from a loss of biological diversity to changes in regional and global climate. This change has been so pervasive and progressed so rapidly, compared to natural processes, scientists refer to it as “the great transformation”. Urbanization or the ‘gray wave’ of land transformation is being increasingly recognized as an important process in global climate change. A hallmark of our success as a species, large urban conglomerates do in fact alter the land surface so profoundly that both local climate and the basic ecology of the landscape are affected in ways that have consequences to human health and economic well-being. Fortunately we have incredible new tools for planning and developing urban places that are both enjoyable and sustainable. A suite of Earth observing satellites is making it possible to study the interactions between urbanization, biological processes, and weather and climate. Using these Earth Observatories we are learning how urban heat islands form and potentially ameliorate them, how urbanization can affect rainfall, pollution, and surface water recharge at the local level and climate and food security globally.”
One can sniff these things out using a particular kind of technology but what one really needs is a social transformation in the way people think. Sometimes it takes a certain kind of political will which come from the bottom up and not the top down.
For example The Jakarta Globe has just run a five part series on the Jakarta ‘environment’. Here are three below…
11.3.2008
Jakarta’s Lack of Open Spaces Could End Up Choking City
The growing number of indoor futsal courts and fitness centers inside Jakarta’s gleaming malls may be a sign of the sprawling Indonesian capital’s booming prosperity, but in reality it reflects the alarming lack of open spaces for residents to do outdoor activities.
Nirwono Joga, an urban planning expert from Trisakti University, told the Jakarta Globe that the city was facing an impending “ecological suicide.”
He said Jakarta had only managed to preserve 9.79 percent of its land as green open spaces, far less than the 30 percent allocation as outlined in the 2007 spatial planning law, which was adapted from the recommendations of the UN’s 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
The 30 percent designation had aimed for 20 percent of the green areas to be public, such as parks and green belts, while the remaining 10 percent was to be covered by individual gardens in private homes and office spaces.
The worrying trend, critics have said, would soon deprive Jakarta’s residents of the fresh air and clean water that should be available if there were enough green open spaces and water catchment areas to function as an environmental buffer.
“In the long run, there will be more citizens with respiratory diseases as there are no green areas that can filter the pollution,” Nirwono said, adding that the lack of open ground needed to absorb rain would also lead to water shortages during the dry season and exacerbate problems with flooding during the rainy season.”
11.4.2009
Greening Jakarta’s Concrete Jungle
“Reusable shopping bags may be all the rage with trendy Jakartans these days, but experts say this small measure doesn’t come close to saving the capital from an impending ecological disaster. A major shift to “green buildings” is also needed.
Nirwono Joga, an urban planning expert from Trisakti University’s civil engineering department, said that the city’s high-rises — with their massive energy and water consumption — contributed significantly to the environmental problems found here.
“Jakarta is headed toward ecological suicide if nothing is done,” he said.”
11.5.2009
Residents, City Pay For Jakarta’s Need for Land
“Tiresome court hearings and regular visits to government offices have become an unwanted part of Ayu Sinaga’s life. The 28-year-old employee of a private company has had to help her family deal with a dispute over their land, a 3,800-square-meter plot in Pondok Kopi, East Jakarta.
The land, now estimated to be worth Rp 4.4 billion ($462,000), had been bought by her late father in 1974.
Despite holding all the title deeds and having faithfully paid land taxes every year, other claimants began to surface when the government needed to purchase the land to construct the East Flood Canal.
Three years have now passed but the court case concerning the dispute over the land’s ownership remains unsettled. “My family doesn’t mind if the land is not purchased, but if the administration really needs it, then we only want our rights,” Ayu said.
City’s Insatiable Appetite
With skyscrapers, shopping malls, entertainment centers, markets and roads sprouting up at an unbelievable pace over the past quarter century, the Indonesian capital is incessantly gobbling up land, leading to problems and disputes over land ownership, prices and compensation.
Yet the massive development of recent years has left the city yearning for more. With 665 square kilometers already covered by a concrete jungle, Jakarta continues to harbor big dreams of development.”
There has been much hand wringing and turmoil in Jakarta as far as this very persistent narrative goes. Soon there will be more articles on flooding. This is as predictable as, well, as the flooding.
So, Jakarta. SNIFF this!
It smell likes fresh air and green stuff. You remember what that is right?
View of the botanical gardens in Curitiba, Brazil. The city is a model for modern urbanisation. Photograph: Carlos Cazalis/Corbis
Common sense and the city: Jaime Lerner, Brazil’s green revolutionary
Mike Power Thursday 5 November 2009 12.41 GMT guardian.co.uk
The ex-mayor of Curitiba used massive creativity and tiny budgets to create the world’s greenest city
There are times in life – admittedly very few indeed – when you really wish Boris Johnson was in the same room as you. Last night was one of them as the revolutionary Brazilian ex-mayor, Jaime Lerner, spoke at London’s British Film Institute as part of its Of Dreams and Cities season.
“You have to keep things simple, and just start working … You have a lot of complexity-sellers in this life. We should beat them, beat them with a slipper,” said the 70-year-old former mayor of Curitiba, the world’s most environmentally friendly city. He has the look of an ex-boxer and a military bearing, softened by a ready and guttural laugh. Lerner was there to see A Convenient Truth, an inspiring film by Giovanni Baz del Bello showing how Lerner and successive mayors have over the past 40 years made Curitiba, a city of 3 million in southern Brazil, one of the world’s most livable urban spaces – using only massive creativity and tiny budgets.
“You get creative when you take a zero from your budget,” says Lerner. “But sustainability starts when you take two zeros from your budget. Many other mayors tell me their budget is small. For many things, we had no budget.”
His first major coup was pedestrianising the main central shopping street in 1972 – in a weekend.
“We started one Friday night, and finished on Monday morning. If we’d had to stop and do things regularly, I wouldn’t have made it, and I could have been fired. So we took the risk. By the Monday night, business was so good, the head of the local businessmen came to me and he gave me a petition and said: ‘We want the whole street pedestrianised.’”
Lerner heard about a possible protest by drivers who planned to drive through the newly pedestrianised thoroughfare. So, he enlisted hundreds of children, armed them with paintbrushes and paper, and set them to play in the street. The protest never materialised.
Using three-section bendy buses in dedicated bus lanes, the city’s transport system carries passenger numbers comparable to an underground – 2 million a day – but at a cost of $1m per kilometre rather than $100m. Fares are flat, and the city was encouraged to grow along the bus routes, so any Curitiba resident is never more than 400m from a bus stop. Only the cars get stuck in traffic jams.
Soon, Lerner hopes to launch the Dock-Dock, a 60cm-wide and 130cm-long car – the smallest in the world. “I can fit inside it,” he says. “It will run at less than 25kmh with a range of 50km. But you won’t own it.” It will act as publicly owned feeder vehicles for public transport. Lernert says he’ll test drive it in Rio next week.
Recycling in Curitiba is perhaps the most radical reform of all. In 1989, residents in a nearby favela were dumping their trash in surrounding rivers and fields, as there were no collections from their narrow streets. Lerner arranged for a truck to visit the favela at fixed times each week, and residents’ rubbish was exchanged for bus tickets, football tickets and shows. Soon, the locals were cleaning the rivers and fields of old rubbish to sell. Schoolchildren were given new plastic toys for old bottles and bags in a scheme called “Garbage that’s not garbage”.
Separation of organic and non-organic waste improved efficiencies further. Local homeless people and alcoholics were employed at the recycling plant, where they also retrained on computers they rescued from the city’s bins. Curitiba’s fishermen were paid to fish for rubbish.
Floodplains surrounding the city were bought up and converted to parks with boating lakes acting as overspill areas. This solution, far cheaper and more effective than culvetting rivers with concrete, increased the green space available for residents from 0.5 square metres each in the 1960s to over 50 square metres per resident today.
Housing was tackled in a similarly simple, revolutionary way. Land next to the electricity company’s lot was converted into housing estates, and residents were encouraged to redesign their interiors, so they felt more pride and ownership over their properties.
Lerners’ reforms have been widely popular and they appear to have improved the peoples’ lot. GDP per capita in Curitiba is 60% higher than the average in Brazil. “Those that were most against us transformed into our greatest supporters – they just needed to see the results. Now they are proud of their city.”
There are some important lessons to learn here. I understand that the Jakarta ‘planners’ will be meeting next week.
Be careful to watch what they say.
