I just returned from a week of work in Jakarta, the booming capital city of Indonesia.  Jakarta has an estimated population of 13 million, which works out to about 44,000 people per square mile, compared to about 26,000 for New York City.  Yes, it has a lot of people, and it’s growing.  You can see the growth on the skyline, which has been transformed by high rise development over the past 15 years.  Skyscrapers of mundane design jostle for attention next to some exceptional examples of modern and post-modern architecture.  At least ten cranes dot the skyline as new contenders strive to meet the growing demand for office space, headquarters, and hotel rooms.  Lower to the ground enclosed three and four story shopping malls proliferate – malls that would not look out of place in any large U.S. city, or in Bangkok.  Broad multi-lane avenues like Jalan Jenderal Sudirman carry steady streams of new private cars, taxis, mini-buses, and old public busses at all hours of the day.  Crossing on foot is impossible (and illegal). Pedestrian overpasses are well-used and often funnel long lines of commuters to crowded bus stops along the dedicated busways bordering the central median.  Where the streets cross broad canals, the slow-flowing dirty water reminds you that the global capital of the world’s fourth largest country is sited just barely above the level of the Java Sea.

Why is Jakarta booming?  Well, like many Asian economies, Indonesia’s economy is growing – but not as fast as those of India or China.  The real reason is urbanization.  Indonesia is only 46% urbanized, compared to almost 80% for the world’s third most populous country — the United States.  Like many developing countries with one dominant city, a disproportionate amount of rural-to-urban migration finds its way to that city, and the government struggles to keep up.  The story in Jakarta is the same as the story in Delhi or Shanghai – urbanization is happening far faster than municipal governments can plan for it, build for it, or pay for it.

Does Jakarta hold any lessons for U.S. cities?  Yes, probably.  Although traffic always threatens to overwhelm Jakarta’s street network, the city has chosen to set aside valuable lane areas for the public bus system, and those dedicated rights-of-way make the busses a welcome escape from the slow moving auto and motorbike traffic.  During my stay I met several Jakartans who were proud to say they owned cars but quick to add that they did not use them to get to work – they took the much faster busses even though they were more crowded.  On the downside, Jakarta’s street system is pretty bi-polar – very big roads move most of the commuting traffic, but feed directly onto tiny barely-two-lane neighborhood streets only feet from single- and two-story houses from another, slower era.  There does not seem to be much in between the largest and smallest of streets – the intermediate level of collector streets is often missing.  When arterials get overcrowded in the U.S. commuters seek the collectors as secondary routes, but in Jakarta escaping the boulevards puts heavy traffic on the smallest of streets.

The second lesson is the inevitability of mixed use development.  When cities grow rapidly, they tend to both densify and sprawl.  Even if a competent and effective city government wanted to enforce separate residential, commercial, and industrial development areas on the new growth edge, that would be impossible in the older core.  In Jakarta this plays not only in a mix of high-rise residential and commercial towers along the major arterials, but in a fine grained mix of residential, commercial, and light industrial uses in the one- and two-story buildings immediately behind the towers.  As Jakarta struggles to keep up with its urbanization, the primary focus will almost certainly be on providing roads and infrastructure, with a secondary focus on the scale of development.  Attempting to separate uses will probably be only a minor theme – just as it has declined in importance in the U.S.  The “Mixed Use Middle” that I identify in A Better Way to Zone has always been the norm in most large cities outside North America.