ABSTRACT
Few cities in history have experienced the pace of growth and change of Jakarta in the twentieth century. In 1900, the colonial capital of the Netherland Indies, then known as Batavia, was a compact city of approximately 150,000 inhabitants. Over the twentieth century, but especially after 1950, it was transformed into a sprawling metropolis, a ‘megacity’, of more than 9 million in an urbanized region which by 2000 was home to nearly 18 million. How this metamorphosis occurred, and what it meant for the lives of the city's residents, are key questions addressed in the following pages (see Figure 14.1).
