Wired UK - 11.2019

THE ISLAND OF

PANTAI

INDAH KAPUK^

is linked to the Javan mainland by white half-helix bridges

that, uncharacteristically for Jakarta, are clear of traffic and

lined with neat pavements. In the glare of the dry season

Sun, it looks like a Florida resort village. Multi-storey condos

overlook a food court with bright-coloured awnings, while

plastic corporate art adorns the grass verges and roundabouts.

The finished buildings are clearly unoccupied, and away

from the bridges all work has stopped and the remaining land

is fenced off behind high construction hoardings. Idle earth

movers are lined up in neat ranks, watched over by security

guards, and several sites are going to seed, the bare steel poles

of rebar rusting where they jut out of unfinished foundations.

Pantai Indah Kapuk is a vestigial piece of the first – now-can-

celled – plan for Jakarta’s flood defence, and an emblem of

how commercial concerns hijacked the city’s attempts to

secure its coastline; it is one of 17 islands that were due to be

reclaimed from the bay using millions of tonnes of sand and

concrete. Those islands were due to stud the inner curve of

Jakarta Bay, providing homes for hundreds of thousands of

residents, as well as office space, malls and even a new airport.

Out in front of them, the plan called for a massive series of

sea walls which, viewed from above, would make the shape of

the Garuda, a mythical bird that is the emblem of Indonesia.

Artists’ impressions show a city on the sea, a tropical Dubai.

However, the project, which was unveiled in 2014, was out

of control from the very beginning.

“The consultants at that time were given the boundary

conditions that the Indonesian government should not invest

one penny in this,” says Peter Letitre, a groundwater expert

from Dutch hydrological institute Deltares and an advisor to

the NCICD project. “A typical Jakarta project. The only way

to finance it was through land reclamations.”

The project, which Letitre calls “megalomaniac”, became

self-perpetuating: each new part needed more infrastructure

and more defences, which meant raising more money, which

meant yet more reclamation to make land to sell to devel-

opers. As it grew, it began to suck in other projects onshore

and offshore. Local media reported that the total cost of the

project would be $40 billion (£31.5 billion), and although the

engineers and architects disputed that figure, it stuck.

“All of the things that were needed to improve the infra-

structure of Jakarta were put under the price tag of the

NCICD project. So the amount became higher. And the only

way that you could make money back was through more land

reclamation,” Letitre says. “That was the trap... it became

so huge and massive and expensive.”

The project was flawed beyond the price tag. To manage the

difference in water levels on either side of the sea wall, it called

for deep reservoirs on the land side that would have collected

the runoff from the rivers, with huge pumps that would have

transferred the excess out to sea. However, Jakarta’s rivers are

some of the most polluted in the world. Without a drastic – and

frankly unrealistic – improvement to the city’s water quality,

the area behind the “Great Garuda” could have become a giant

Coenen, a tall, genial Dutchman, moved to Jakarta six

years ago to head the project with Witteveen+Bos, a Dutch

engineering company. His first job was to weigh up the possible

scenarios, starting with simply giving up on north Jakarta.

“There are places on the north coast of Indonesia where

abandoning is the cheapest way,” Coenen says. “Like in the UK,

coastal areas are now being given back to the sea because it’s

simply too expensive to protect them.” His team calculated that

the economic cost alone would be around $200 billion (£158

billion), before the human cost of moving between two and

three million people was taken into account. “But where would

you relocate [the people]?” he says. “So that abandonment

scenario was quickly: ‘Forget about it. That’s not possible.’”

The second option was to build defences onshore. After

the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan in 2011, its

government ordered the construction of nearly 400km of sea

walls on the country’s northern coast. Those walls, some more

than 12 metres high, cost more than $12 billion (£9.5 billion).

For Jakarta, Coenen and his team calculated that they would

need walls five to seven metres high, stretching the length of the

bayfront, with massive pumping stations behind the walls and

deep reservoirs for overflows. That would still mean moving

large numbers of people and buying up large areas of land.

“The urban impact of such an on-land solution is huge,”

Coenen says. “Imagine seven-metre-high sea walls on the

coastline. It’s like a reversed aquarium, with the water outside.”

An onshore project would be prohibitively expensive, socially

disruptive, and not a long term answer. They had to go offshore.

Construction soon began on a short-term fix: upgrading

the existing sea walls, adding 1.5 to 2.5 metres on top of

existing structures and filling in gaps in the defences,

while ever more engineers, consultants and government

agencies began to work on the shape of the offshore plan.

Fairly soon, however, Jakarta’s politics started to get in the way.

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