ABSTRACT
South-East Asia’s dominant megacity, Jakarta, was founded by the Dutch in 1619 as the waterfront city of Batavia to advance its commercial aspirations in the region. Up through the early nineteenth century, this compact city interlaced with canals maintained a symbiotic relationship with its vast river network. From the early nineteenth century through to independence after 1950, however, city development moved away from the waterfront, filled in many of the canals and allowed its rivers to become dysfunctional owing to overdevelopment. The search for an alternative to continued urban sprawl and new development opportunities led to plans to revitalize the dilapidated waterfront area into a new waterfront city in the 1990s. But this would require massive displacement of its low-income residents. Moreover, Jakarta’s leadership also recognized that its development processes over the previous three decades had served to exacerbate the problem of flooding throughout the city. Historic floods in 1996, 2002, 2007 and nearly every year thereafter, added another rationale to revitalization of the waterfront region, namely to find a way to mitigate the incidence of flooding, and to counter what was recognized as a serious problem of land subsidence because of excessive reliance on ground water extraction to sustain the city. This led to modification of 1990’s waterfront plan to serve as the Jakarta Coastal Defence Strategy. As with the earlier waterfront plan, this also generated substantial concerns from an array of stakeholders who were not part of the planning process.
