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The Main Challenges Facing Jakarta’s Long-term Future

Jakarta has bloomed significantly over the passage of time. It has established its name as the hub of globalization and urbanization. However, as it is a well-established fact, globalization and urbanization come with their own set of unique challenges. This phenomenon is vivid in the challenges that are facing Jakarta’s long-term future.

One such challenge is overpopulation. According to a recent report by Euromonitor International, Jakarta is likely to become ‘the world’s most populous city by 2030’ (Future Directions International 2019). Both, globalization as well as urbanization has contributed to Jakarta’s increasing population. Since Jakarta is the hub of development in Indonesia, a huge number of people have migrated from rural areas to Jakarta in search of employment (World Bank 2011). This trend has burdened Jakarta’s land beyond its capacity. Hence, overpopulation is one of the biggest challenges that Jakarta is facing right now. It is expected that this challenge will become even more detrimental for Jakarta in the near future.

Another such challenge is poverty. Jakarta has been suffering from the menace of poverty since quite some time. Recently, this menace has become even graver than ever before. Again, it is one of the many drawbacks of urbanization ad globalization (World Bank 2011). Yes, it is true that globalization brings development and prosperity. However, it is also true that the benefits of globalization are not equally distributed among the masses; some groups prosper at the expense of other groups. Same has been happening in Jakarta. Even though it is the hub of globalization, poverty has escalated in the area. That is why government has been forced to lay out poverty alleviation programs for the underprivileged (World Bank 2011).

Apart from this, Jakarta has been on the forefront of environmental changes. The city is constantly under the threat of natural hazards such as floods and extreme weather conditions.  The intensity of danger presented to the city because of climatic changes is such that:

It is amongst the cities with the highest flood risk in the world. Its flood hazard is driven by land subsidence, soil sealing, changes in river discharge, and—increasingly—sea level rise. As all of these trends are set to continue, Jakarta’s flood hazard is expected to intensify in the future. Designing and implementing large-scale risk reduction and adaption measures therefore has been a priority of risk practitioners and policy-makers at city and national level (Garschagen, Surtiari & Harb 2018).

Therefore, Indonesia’s government has been trying to relocate the communities that live in Jakarta. This is because the land has constantly been drowning under the sea and relocation is the only viable option for countering the threat presented by climatic changes (Takagi et al. 2016).