11:10

Tonight’s sold-out event at the Goethe-Institut, brilliantly hosted by Marco Kusumawijaya, was a roaring success, one that felt at times more like a TV comedy variety show – due in no small part to David Nurbianto, the 26-year-old comedian who was a fountain of wit and wisdom.

As David said, Jakarta is suffering from an identity crisis, its Betawi roots lost – “Even on the rare occasion that we have a smart Betawi like JJ Rizal [the historian and fellow guest], we stereotype him as being less good” – and he urged Jakartans to learn about their history and beware their civic duty. “People come to Jakarta only to earn money, but I hope they don’t just exploit the city and then leave because they can afford to live somewhere else nice. What about us, who have an emotional connection to Jakarta? Where can we go if they ruin it for us?”

Gugun Muhammad, meanwhile, whose kampung cleanup project David Munk wrote about earlier in this blog, brought down the house with his rousing calls for the poor to rise up.

“Jakarta now is like Seoul in the 1970s,” he said, citing the Cheonggyecheon river revitalisation that has transformed it into a thriving destination. “Here, people get sick and die alone in apartments because everyone’s cut off from community. The only way to improve the city is for people to get together, to organise, to form urban villages. Who cares about the city – the people or the government?”

Evi Mariani, the Jakarta Post city editor whose assistance to Guardian Cities has proven absolutely invaluable so far this week, put the boot into Jakartans’ shallow imagination.

“Why do we always look to Singapore as the model? Why is that our dream, the only way we think a good city can look?” She explained she was worried about a life for her 3-year-old son, Kun-Kun. “I want to send him to a secular school, but the only ones are private and too expensive – and so I worry he won’t have the diverse background I want for him. I can’t imagine the future: it makes me depressed.”

Guardian Cities (@guardiancities) "Jakarta is a stressful city. But you always want to come back despite its insanity"

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Kartika Jahja, musician and cafe owner (who Mike Herd interviewed earlier in this blog) agreed. “If Indonesia is a dysfunctional family, then Jakarta is the neglected stepchild. We’ll never get any help from above – so we’ve had to get used to doing everything ourselves. When there’s an accident, do we call the cops? No. When there’s a theft, we hit the perpetrator ourselves. Because government is dysfunctional, Jakartans have had to develop a DIY culture.”

Amid all the clear-eyed (if slightly grim) reality, environmental scientist Alan Koropitan added a rare positive note, pointing out that Vietnamese cities’ efforts to turn their waterfronts into tourist attractions and economic drivers could be replicated in Jakarta ... if only the authorities don’t screw up the Great Seawall project. (More on that tomorrow.)

And Ign Susiadi Wibowo, whose vision of a “zero waste” Jakarta seems a long way off, pointed out at that these things often do. “We just start with ourselves: could you live without a bin for two weeks? What would you do differently?”



To a final question from the audience asking what kind of leader Jakarta needed, Marco concluded the panel by bringing down the house: