No City of Angels

(First published in Bali Advertiser, Jan. 13, 2010)

“I'm tired of this dirty old city.
Entirely too much work and never enough play.
And I'm tired of these dirty old sidewalks.
Think I'll walk off my steady job today.”
-- Merle Haggard

Jakarta does no favors for itself. It’s disheveled, mismanaged, clogged with traffic, and full of people so disconnected from any larger community that their own comfort and convenience trump any consideration of the needs of others or the common good. It is a brutal and fetid place.

But like it or not – and some do like it – it is one of the great cities of the world. The population of the city proper -- which can’t be tabulated accurately because of the number of people living on the streets or in illegal slums -- is probably just shy of 10,000,000, putting it somewhere in the middle of the 20 most crowded cities on earth; while the population of its total metropolitan area puts it comfortably in the top 10 largest gatherings of people on earth. As such, it probably has just as much in common with Sao Paulo, Mexico City and Mumbai as it does with its smaller sister cities scattered across Indonesia.

For those drawn to this great clumping of the unwashed hordes, Jakarta and its bright lights and broad, choked streets can mean great triumph or great failure. New hopefuls arrive in steady streams to push down or get pushed down by those that came before. Here, whole villages live underneath bridges and overpasses; camp out in plywood and sheet metal dwellings alongside black rivers; float precariously just centimeters above the ever-rising waters of north Jakarta.

The broad Ciliwung river delta is filled with a heaving mass pushing up, striving and struggling with one another to support the relatively few that can live in the world of chauffeur-driven cars, sparkling malls, clean apartments and an abundance of food and clean water. Here, the daily fight for survival is life is up close and personal, and just as desperate and capricious as in the depths of any tropical jungle. This city is not for the weak; the way here is to get strong or die. Jakarta has no soft, touchy-feely side.

Now for the bad news: Get used to the idea that Jakarta and places like it are the future.

In the past two years, the world’s urban population has finally caught up to and surpassed the number of people living in rural areas. Many developed countries passed that milestone in the 20th century – the U.S., for instance, became more urban than rural numbers-wise before 1920 – and we are increasingly looking at this as the world-wide model of living. Most population studies indicate that the world is on its way to a population of 9 billion by sometime around 2050. It is estimated that by then about two-thirds of that number, that’s 6 billion people for the mathematically challenged, will be living in cities.

In terms of Bali, if its population grows at the proportional average of the rest of the world over the next 40 years, the island will have a population of 4.7 million at the middle of the century, up from a current population of around 3.5 million. That’s another couple of Denpasars and another two Singarajas to fit somewhere on the “last paradise.” And that’s not even trying to account for the shifting (and rising) populations of tourist arrivals and off-book expats hiding out in the hills. Think of Bali with the whole central southern rice plain filled in from the Bukit to Ubud with the same jumbled mixture of commercial and residential operations now in the Kuta-Denpasar-Sanur triangle, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what’s coming over the next two to three decades.

I suppose now would be the time for me to offer up my solutions to prevent the coming chaos that 9 billion people will bring, or at least to jump up and down screaming that we’ve GOT to DO something to keep it from happening. Sorry, I don’t have anything in the quiver. A population juggernaut is headed our way, that is all, pretty much no matter what we do short of having another really good world war or two. We are going to have to learn how to deal with it individually and as groups, until such a time as a Mayan scourge or some other natural or man-made disaster knocks us back to sustainable numbers … or fewer.

Have a good day.


Copyright © 2010 Lee Roy LeRoi