Download Indonesia’s capital Jakarta is so polluted and overpopulated that people are beginning to think it has reached saturation point.
It is the world's largest city without an underground transport system so the road traffic moves at an average speed of just 13 km an hour.
Indonesia's president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, has suggested the only solution is to move the capital of 10 million people.
This is not the first time.
Detailed plans to transplant the city were actually drawn up, by the Dutch, a hundred years ago.
Pauline van Roosmalen is a Dutch architectural historian.
Our reporter, Esther de Jong, met her in the main square in Kota, the old part of Jakarta.
“Is it a good idea to move Jakarta? It has been tried in the 1910s. Governor van Limburg Stirum suggested it, because Batavia was so unhealthy it might be a good idea to move all the departments from Batavia to Bandung. An extensive extension plan to Bandung was designed.”
Traditionally, Europeans would flee, to spend the overwhelmingly hot summers in the cooler climes of Bandung – a city 180 kilometres from Jakarta situated in the hills of Java, surrounded by green tea plantations.
One of the sites proposed by Indonesia's president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, is on the way from Jakarta to Bandung: Jonggol a cluster of small villages where most of the 140.000 people work in factories or rice paddies.
There is only one paved road in Jonggol. The others are dirt. Rice paddies and coconut trees ring the town.
In front of the town hall is a makeshift bus station filled with a few stalls.
Most people here think Jakarta definitely should move to Jonngol.
53-year old bus conductor Uya explains why it is such a good thing:
“I hope there will be visting more people, not like today with all the rain it is very quiet. When Jakarta moves to Jonggol there will be more passengers and that will be much better.”
Further up down the Town square music blears from an illegal CD shop.
It’s here that 35 year old Ade Mustafa sells fruits and vegetables to passersby.
He was born in Jonggol he has his doubts about his home becoming the national capital:
“We were informed about the move a couple of months ago. A lot of people here are afraid. Afraid they will be evicted from their homes and that they have no place to go to. They have no idea what they would do, were they would move too.”
Ade doesn’t need to worry anytime soon. At this stage moving the capital is still in early planning stages.
The President has asked his team to consider three possible scenarios for saving Jakarta.
Under the first, the government would stay put and confront the challenges. Under the second, only the central government would move out, either elsewhere on Java or to Kalimantan, Borneo.
Jakarta would remain the business and administrative capital.
The third and most radical solution would be to transfer all the capital's key aspects to central Kalimantan, part of which is still covered by jungle.
“In the current situation moving a capital for Indonesian context would cost tremendously.”
Marco Kusumawijaja is a renowned urban planner. He believes the idea of moving the entire capital is absurd:
“It is a delusional idea, but to criticize it rationally we have to see what the intention is. As far as I know the president only mentioned freeing Jakarta from traffic jam, that is where I think it is delusional, because you cannot free Jakarta from traffic by just moving the national government function, because that it is very little compared to the whole activities in Jakarta that cause traffic jam. The real cause of traffic jam are the increasing number of commuters. We have now approximately three million commuters meaning that daytime population is approaching 12.6 million. While the night-time population of Jakarta is 9.6 million people. So you have three million people coming into the city every day, that is the big push for the traffic jam. It has has nothing to do with national government at all.”
Traffic was not that bad a hundred years ago in Batavia, but the city was hot and unhealthy and malaria was rife.
The Dutch governor, Van Limburg Stirum, decided to move certain government departments to Bandung, placed as it was in a valley surrounded by hills.
“And then it more or less stopped. Because of financial problems, aftermath of the First World War, and the economic crisis here. So it has been tried and it is difficult.”
So, the wish of the Dutch governor never became reality. Indonesia became independent, Batavia became Jakarta and the city kept on growing.
Now nearly 12 million people live in this city. Traffic jams determine everything: where people live, where they shop, where their children go to school.
In the north of Jakarta flooding occurs regularly and studies say that Jakarta is sinking.
Yet moving Jakarta is still a long way off.
