Heading north from the city centre to the coastline, Jakarta
seems to be collapsing in slow motion. The Indonesian
capital sprawls, its black-glass business district giving way
to a low-rise hinterland where the bones of the city jut out;
long spines of pale concrete pillars bearing kilometres of
knotted overpasses and raised highways. In their shadows are
industrial estates in various states of abandonment, stalled
construction sites already succumbing to the creep of tropical
foliage, sluggish waterways clotted with litter, and thousands
upon thousands of houses, from clusters of bare-iron shacks
to landed three-storey homes, none the same as its neighbour.
The chaos runs to the seafront, where waterparks, malls and
luxury condos jostle for space with container ports and fishing
docks crammed so tight with small boats that from above
they look like tangles of rusted wire snagged on the shore.
Some of these docks are now hemmed in by giant walls.
At Cilincing – a northeastern suburb of the city made up
of scattered fishing communities and industrial ports –
five-metre-high concrete pillars have been dropped into the
shoreline, supporting a sloping buttress that blocks all view
of the sea from the land. Less than 50 metres behind it on the
landward side is another wall, constructed less than a decade
ago, that is now redundant; between them, fishermen use a
placid inlet to tie up and maintain their boats.
Twenty kilometres of sea walls have been thrown up around
Jakarta Bay in the past three years, along with many more
reinforcements along river banks, the first phase of a desperate
attempt to fortify the city’s waterlogged northern districts.
Jakarta, a megacity of 30 million people, is sinking. In places
along the coastline the ground has subsided by four metres over
the last few decades. Concrete barricades are the only thing
preventing whole communities from being engulfed by the sea.
Although many coastal cities, from New York to Shanghai,
have been forced by the threat of climate change to build high
walls to protect themselves, there are few places in the world
as vulnerable as Jakarta, where a decades-old problem of land
subsidence has intersected with rising sea levels.
Such is the concern about Jakarta’s future that the national
government is considering bailing out. In April, President Joko
Widodo – himself a former governor of the city – announced a
public search for a new capital for Indonesia, in no small part
because of its environmental problems.
The city’s new walls have bought it some time, but possibly
not enough. Behind them is an alarming case study in how
politicking, greed and vested economic interests can lead
to a dangerous inertia – a microcosm of the global failure
to address climate change. Whether the city saves itself, or
whether it becomes the first megacity lost to environmental
catastrophe, will depend on a combination of ground-level
social change and engineering works of unprecedented scale.
“If we don’t do something, we’re doomed,” says Oswar
Mungkasa, the city’s deputy governor. “We will be leaving Jakarta.”Jakarta has always flooded. With much of the city so close
to sea level, the 13 rivers that flow through the metropolitan
area take a long time to drain into Jakarta Bay. Even relatively
short periods of heavy rain cause water to build up. To
manage this, successive governments have built a network
of canals, most of them glassy in appearance and slow-flowing.
Pumping stations, weirs and run-off reservoirs sit between
malls and offices and in the centre of housing estates.
Over the past decade – oddly, because of a lack of water –
this canal infrastructure has come under increasing stress.THANKS TO ACOMBINATION OFSEA LEVEL RISE,SUBSIDENCEAND POLITICALINERTIA, JAKARTACOULD SOONBE THE FIRSTMEGACITYCLAIMED BYCLIMATE CHANGE.DESPITE ALAST-DITCH PLANTO SAVE IT, THEINDONESIANCAPITAL’S DEMISESHOWS WHAT WILLHAPPEN IF OTHERCOASTAL CITIESFAIL TO ACTBy PETER GUEST
Photography: CHRISTOFFER RUDQUIST11-19-FTJakarta.indd 104 11/09/2019 15:57