thoughts on jakarta

small parts of a massive place

no one told me it could be like this

it has been a few months since i’ve written but i am back with some thoughts about jakarta. one of the first things i heard about jakarta was the saying “jakarta keras boss”, which means “jakarta is rough”, with extra emphasis on the “rrrrougghhh” part - and it is. the roads are constantly filled with cars and swarms of motorbikes, the air is filled with a steady growl of engines and the smell of fumes. it’s like the entire city is a lurching beast but instead of blood pumping through its veins, it pumps motorists throughout its body.

i noticed that everything is used. every single inch of road has someone on it, every city block has a building built into the pavement and almost spilling onto the road. there are people everywhere, sitting down and smoking, pushing food carts (sometimes up highway ramps), waiting for the bus, stopping cars for other people to cross the road.

the sheer number of people also means that there is always someone ready to do something for you/your money. cafes i’ve been to seem to have more staff than customers. one manifestation of this i noticed was that there seems to always be a “pak” at a desk. like in front of a restaurant or a mall or just anywhere with a desk sized space, there’s a pak sitting or sleeping there. just people everywhere doing things or doing nothing at all.

i can’t help but constantly compare jakarta and kuala lumpur, two of the major cities of this part of the world. flush with money and a desire to create a domestic car industry (for national pride), malaysia subsidised petrol and the construction of locally made cars. combined with an overbuilding of highways to accommodate these cars, kuala lumpur has turned into a spaghetti maze of flyovers. for better or for worse, jakarta never had the money to mess itself up the way kl did and although the gridlock is horrendous, i find it a lot less disturbing than the traffic jams of kl. there is always an option to actually exit your vehicle and walk, but being stuck in the sky with no out is something i would never get used to.

this is not AI, this is an actual highway in kuala lumpur

jakarta being human scale is something that i appreciate very much. even being stuck in traffic, the wall next to the road has flowers that are painted on and above that beautifully kept bushes. the gardening by the roads is something i will always admire and it’s something i don’t think money, or a generic urban public policy, could ever achieve. it’s not something i’ve seen in the same way in any other city.

monsteras i saw

amongst the flowers there is a doom that lurks in jakarta. the city is sinking and everyone knows it but it is such a large and intractable problem that it’s unclear where to even begin, just like the traffic and just like the politics. in a way, jakarta like indonesia is so large and so complex that it’s a miracle anything functions at all and when you do look a bit closer you can see that the functioning parts like the sudirman central business district is actually just a privately owned corporate park, or gojek which is also a private company.

when i wander through the smaller streets of the quieter and quietly rich neighbourhoods, i could almost forget that i was in the belly of a metropolis. time seems slow and the trees bend over the walls like old friends reaching for a hug. orchids hang like jewels off frangipani branches.

someone plant some orchids

then i also wonder about the people in those beautiful houses. even in the splendour, i think it would take me many lifetimes to understand the wealthy who call jakarta home. what is the point of having generational amounts of money only to breathe toxic air, to drink out of plastic bottles, to sit in cars to get anywhere and what breaks my mind the most: to have the home as a refuge from the city instead of having the city as a home. it will always be the strangest thing to me.