Wired UK - 11.2019

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from rubbish collection to racial harmony to preparing

for a giant earthquake. These challenges grow every year

in proportion to the population; 200,000 people move to

Jakarta annually, drawn by and adding to the city’s huge

economic expansion. “The urbanisation process has been

too fast. We cannot keep up,” Mungkasa says.

His role has hammered home just how fragile the megacity

is. “If something happened in Jakarta, our food only lasts

maybe one week,” he says.

The sinking of the city is one of the most pressing

challenges on Mungkasa’s slate. It is also one of the most

intractable, a complex problem that involves dealing with

some of the city’s longest-standing environmental issues.

It all starts with clean water.

The mechanism by which Jakarta is settling into its

foundations has been understood for decades. The soft soil

underneath the city is held up by the pressure of water in

aquifers and reservoirs deep below the surface. Removing

that water lowers the pressure, and the land above it sinks.

That issue is exacerbated by building heavy structures on

the surface, and by coating it with impermeable materials,

like concrete, which prevent water from seeping back down

and recharging the subsoil reservoirs.

It is a challenge that has presented itself elsewhere,

including in Tokyo and Venice. “They stopped it by simply

starting to regulate this enormous overuse of water,” says

Jørgen Steenfelt, technical director of marine and foundation

engineering at consultancy COWI and an expert on urban water

issues. “At the root, it’s regulation. If you can’t regulate it, you

have no control over what is happening. If it’s the wild west and

everybody does as they please, then there’s no stopping it.”

Even that is just a palliative measure – groundwater levels

would need to be recharged, restoring the pressure deep

underground to prevent further slippage. Tokyo, which effec-

tively halted all groundwater extraction by the late 90s, is still

sinking by around one centimetre every year.

There are examples where restoring these water levels is

being attempted. In Chesapeake Bay, in the US, hundreds of

thousands of cubic metres per day of recycled wastewater

are being pumped into aquifers to stop the subsidence of

farmlands. In the fields around Bangkok, which has also been

sinking for decades, the government has put in place regula-

tions requiring farmers to include reservoirs in their properties

to store rainwater and allow it to seep back into the soil.

However, there is no precedent of anything of this sort

being attempted in a city close to the massive scale of

lagoon fouled with the combined effluent of the megacity

• an environmental hazard in its own right. One hydrologist,
  who worked on the project and asked not to be named because
  he is still working with the national government, says the
  solution was “a completely insane idea” that would have
  resulted in polluted water backing up into the city.
  Some opponents suspected that the land reclamation
  was the whole point. Since the 1990s, developers had been
  pushing for the creation of new land; the 17 new islands were
  planned before NCICD was conceived and hastily brought
  under the umbrella of the project. “It was never about flood
  defence,” says Tubagus Soleh Ahmadi, the executive director
  of WALHI Jakarta, a local environment advocacy NGO and
  campaign group. “This was an economic project.”
  Opposition to the scheme began to grow. Coastal
  communities worried about the destruction of their fishing
  grounds; inland, discontent lingered over the clearance and
  eviction of riverside settlements from the last time that the
  government had “prioritised” flood defence. Work stopped
  and started throughout 2016. In gubernatorial elections
  the following year, one candidate, Anies Baswedan, made a
  moratorium on land reclamation a major part of his platform.
  He won, and stood by his promise.
  The Great Garuda was quietly shelved, although it lingers in
  the city’s imagination, due to the absence of public announce-
  ments regarding any replacement. Reclamation work was
  halted. By the time the moratorium took effect, four of the 17
  islands – including Pantai Indah Kapuk – had been built. The
  developments on top of them are now frozen in time.

AS THE

NCICD PLAN

MORPHED

AND EVOLVED

AND STALLED,

JAKARTA KEPT

FLOODING,

and attention shifted to the other side of the equation Ð

stopping the city from sinking any further.

In charge of that rearguard action is Oswar Mungkasa.

Tall and professorial, dressed in the military-style khakis

of the city’s civil servants, Mungkasa is a 25-year veteran

of national and regional government and Jakarta’s deputy

governor in charge of spatial planning and the environment.

Since 2017 he has also held the title of “chief resilience

officer” – a wide-ranging role that gives him responsibility

for fixing everything that threatens the running of the city,

LEFT: MAKESHIFT HOMES IN

BUKIT DURI, ALONGSIDE THE

POLLUTED CILIWUNG RIVER.

RIGHT: VICTOR COENEN,

PROJECT MANAGER OF

NCICD, WHICH IS PLANNING

JAK ARTA’S NEW DEFENCES

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