Southeast Asia's big cities have experienced tremendous population and physical growth in the last five decades, including in the fringe urban areas, owing to economic development in the urban centers.



This 'mega-urbanization' refers to urban development characterized by a mix of different economic activities, including industrial estates' new-town projects and agricultural activities, and through the expansion of built-up areas from the urban centers to almost all directions.



The 2000 and 2010 National Population Censuses revealed that Indonesia's urban population grew from 85.2 million in 2000 to 118.3 million in 2010 with an annual growth rate of 3.33 percent.



However, the distribution of the urban population is extremely uneven, in which about 68 percent of the urban population lived in Java in 2010. Java's urban population grew at an annual rate of 3.17 percent in 2000-2010, whereas the national to total population growth rate was only 1.34 percent per year over the same period.



The above figures indicate fast and dense urban population growth across all provinces in Java. Many scholars predicted in the 1950s-1960s that Java would become the Island of Cities, and even now it is growing with its massive urban belts connecting large cities.



In the population censuses of 2000 and 2010, the smallest administrative unit of a village is considered 'urban' or 'rural' on the basis of population density; percentage of households engaged in agricultural and urban facilities and physical distance to reach them.



The number of urban localities in Java increased from 2,533 to 3,641 during 1980-1986 and the number continued to increase from 7,510 to 9,239 during 2000-2010. In 2000, urban localities reached about 30 percent of the total localities in Java. In 2010, the figure increased to nearly 37 percent. For Indonesia, the figure was only about 18 percent and 20.5 percent in 2000 and 2010, respectively.



By 2010, there were 12 cities with populations of 1 million or more in Indonesia, but nine of those cities were in Java, namely Jakarta, Surabaya, Semarang, Bandung ,Tangerang, South Tangerang, Bekasi, Bogor and Depok. Interestingly, five of the big cities in Java are located in Greater Jakarta.



This resulted in about 20 percent of Indonesia's population living in Greater Jakarta in 2010. The Greater Jakarta urban population constituted about 31 percent of Java's urban population, which makes this metropolitan region the largest in the nation, or a primate city.



The low population-growth rate of Java's large cities, including Surabaya, Bandung, Semarang and even Jakarta, is largely due to suburbanization, which has caused faster population growth on the city outskirts.



The most obvious one is suburbanization in Greater Jakarta. The annual population growth rate in Jakarta reached only 1.40 percent during 2000-2010, whereas the annual population growth rate in the peripheral cities was much higher, including Bekasi (4.70 percent) and Depok (4.33 percent). In comparison, Jakarta's annual population growth rate once reached 5.5 percent during 1930-1961.



The ratio of Jakarta's population to the Greater Jakarta population declined from 55 percent in 1990 to 43 percent in 2000, and decreased further to 36 percent in 2010. Meanwhile, the lifetime in-migration in Jakarta itself, indicated by place of residence being different from place of birth at the time of census enumeration, was 4.1 million in 2010, in contrast to the lifetime out-migration which reached only approximately 3 million.



Jakarta thus experienced negative lifetime migration during 2000-2010. This most likely also reflected the change of destination place of in-migration from Jakarta to its outskirts.



Another case is the Greater Bandung area, in which the annual population growth rate of Bandung city was only 1.11 percent during 2000-2010. In contrast, its outskirt cities grew much faster, including Cimahi (2 percent) and Bandung (2.5 percent).



In comparison, the annual population rate of growth of Bandung itself reached 5.9 percent during 1930-1961. Like Greater Jakarta, the proportion of Bandung to the total population of its metropolitan area declined from 34 percent in 1990 to 29 percent in 2000 and decreased further to only 28 percent in 2010.



The recent physical development of the Bandung and Jakarta metropolitan areas is marked by the urban corridor of about 200 kilometers from Bandung to Jakarta, characterized by a mixture of activities, including industries, residential, and agricultural activities, which blurred the rural-urban distinction in the areas. Millions also commute daily between Jakarta and the adjacent areas.



Similarly, annual population growth in Surabaya reached only 0.53 percent during 2000-2010, whereas the city had an average population growth rate of as much as 3.5 percent during 1931-1961.



The fringes of this metropolitan area experienced higher annual population growth, such as Gresik (1.59 percent) and Sidoarjo (2.21 percent). Also, the fast development of the Surabaya-Malang urban corridor also shows the recent urban transformation in East Java.



The growth of the urban population in the peripheral big cities in Java not only resulted from in-migration from the city center to the outskirts but also from reclassification of localities previously defined as 'rural' to 'urban'.



This clearly indicates the continuity of mega-urbanization in Java as indicated since almost 25 years ago. This process is unstoppable along with social and economic development, but the problem in Java is that this development is largely uncontrolled and unsustainable, which could very soon result in serious

environmental ramifications including flooding, air and water pollution, loss of prime and irrigated agricultural land and traffic congestion, if no action is taken to cope with the problems .



There are spatial plans from the national, provincial to the sub-city level, but unfortunately most of

the plans do not work effectively and many are even violated because of mounting pressures, especially from the businesses and political interests.



Now the new government has an Agrarian and Spatial Planning Ministry, and therefore one of its priorities should be to ensure the consistency of plans and their implementation, as well as to strengthen local government capacities in implementation planning ' which is badly needed at the moment.

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The writer is a professor of urban and regional planning at the Bandung Institute of Technology. Currently, he is a senior research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, the Ash Center for Democratic

Governance and Innovation, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.