City profile - Jakarta

With a metropolitan population of more than 20 million and rising, Jakarta is one of the world's largest cities, the biggest city by a wide margin in Southeast Asia, and the commanding urban center of Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous country. It is also an outstanding example of an overburdened Third World metropolis struggling with problems of overpopulation and inadequate housing, employment, transportation and environmental quality. At the same time, the city aspires for recognition in its Asian region and the world more widely as an emerging leader among the world's great metropolises. Yet, the city has received comparatively little attention in English-language literature in urban studies and urban planning, and is not particularly well understood beyond Indonesia outside a circle of specialists. Two notable exceptions are special-focus profiles of Jakarta that appeared in recent years in this journal, one in 1994 by Hadiwinoto and Leitmann (Cities 11(3) (1994) 153) about the city's environmental problems and the other in 1998 by Firman about economic restructuring and land use. This profile adds to those studies by reviewing Jakarta's history of growth and development, its social geography, and its major challenges for urban planning and management. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.