ABSTRACT
One of the biggest risks in specifying national urban policy goals in spatial terms is that national urban policies may be viewed, to a greater or lesser extent, as independent of the country's development strategy and overall planning process. The national urban system is the spatial plane on which almost all macro- and sectoral plans and policies are directly or indirectly projected. There are two main dangers if national urban policymakers are shunted off to the side tracks of the national planning system. First, they are more likely to fall into the trap of setting spatial policy objectives that have only tenuous links with societal goals. Second, they may tend to focus exclusively on narrowly defined urban investment programs and on explicit spatial policy instruments and to ignore the urban impacts of possibly contradictory policies and programs promoted by other sectors. Indonesia offers the prospect of a national urban policy that satisfies the efficiency-equity compatibility criterion.
