that reached the rafters. Since then, it has never reopened –
although it has been used as a set for several horror movies. The
city government ignored these districts, and residents either
adapted to the perennial floods or learned to accept them.
The calculus was changed by two disasters. In 2007, four-me-
tre-deep floods swept through the city. In Bukit Duri, Lupus
remembers the water reaching waist height on the second
floor: “We had to sleep on the roof,” he says. During the floods
the city was inundated both by rainfall and by seawater coming
in from the coast – the land had subsided so far that storm
surges carried water inland, engulfing whole neighbourhoods.
More than 300,000 people were evacuated and 80 died.
Then, in 2013, sustained rainfall overwhelmed the
flood management infrastructure. Canals collapsed and
clogged, and the flooding spread beyond the poorer areas
of the city and into the central business district. Around 45people died and thousands of households were evacuated.
The then-governor, Joko Widodo – now Indonesia’s
president – ordered a large-scale renovation of the city’s
rivers, reservoirs and flood canals, which had become fatally
clogged. Controversially, under an initiative euphemistically
called “normalisation”, some informal settlements on river-
banks were bulldozed to widen the waterways.
In Muara Baru, a four-metre-high wall was built on one
bank of the Ciliwung, protecting the community on that side
of the river from most of the smaller floods – although water
still spills over regularly during the wet season.
At the same time, the national government began to look
at coastal defence in earnest. It launched a new project, the
National Capital Integrated Coastal Development, or NCICD,
and called in a coalition of international experts, most of
them from the Netherlands, which has turned its own centu-
ries-old experience of protecting its low-lying shoreline
into a global industry. Among them was Victor Coenen.As the city grew after the 1970s oil boom – the population
of the wider metro region has more than tripled in 50 years –
it spread far faster than its supporting infrastructure. Piped
water services only reach around 60 per cent of the population
and are concentrated in the relatively wealthy areas in south
and central Jakarta. The rivers, which should provide fresh
water, are largely unusable due to unregulated dumping of
waste, from untreated human excrement to industrial effluent.
Residents and businesses – even some government buildings- have sunk boreholes into the aquifers beneath the city.
“People are pumping out too much groundwater, and because
of the rapid urbanisation over the last 30 years, the permeable
surface in the city has decreased to a point where you don’t have
enough recharge [from rain] to the groundwater,” says Kian
Goh, assistant professor of urban planning at the University
of California, Los Angeles, who has studied Jakarta in depth.
Pumping out groundwater has lowered the city’s founda-
tions, causing widespread subsidence. Some areas in the north
have sunk four metres in two decades; they’re so far below the
level of the bay that there is nowhere for water to drain out.
Climate change is likely to compound this problem. The
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that
“business as usual” carbon emissions would drive a one-metre
rise in sea levels by 2100. In the more hopeful scenarios
envisioned by the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change - temperature rises of 1.5°C or 2°C – sea levels are predicted
to increase by 0.4m or 0.46m, respectively.
In Jakarta, where so much of the city is already low-lying,
the margin for error is nonexistent. “I’ve seen several studies
that say that if the trend of sea level rise continues, by 2030 the
north of Jakarta will be flooded, including the international
airport,” says Arief Wijaya, who heads the climate change
programme at the World Resources Institute Indonesia.
Jakarta is already hit by storm surges and heavy rain from
annual cyclones; added to this is the threat of unpredictable
and extreme weather, made more frequent by global heating.
Successive administrations have been aware of the problem,
but have felt able to ignore it, largely because the consequences
impacted poorer areas of the city, such as the southern district
of Bukit Duri, which straddles the Ciliwung River. There, on one
bank, wood-framed houses lean on stilts over the water, which
is filthy and clogged with plastic waste; on the other, more
solid structures show signs of constant patching and repairs.
Lupus, a resident of the district for more than 50 years,
shows me around the inside of a ruined government building,
which was abandoned in the 1970s after being gutted by a flood ADDITIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY: PETER GUEST
LEFT: OSWAR MUNGKASA, JAKARTA’S
DEPUT Y GOVERNOR. RIGHT: THE NEW SEA
WALL RUNNING ALONG THE BAY – THE
PILES OF “GRAVEL” ARE MUSSEL SHELLS,
DISCARDED IN THEIR MILLIONS BY LOCAL
MUSSEL-PICKING INDUSTRIES11-19-FTJakarta.indd 106 17/09/2019 14:28