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Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

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Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#31

Post by catlover76 »

b112 wrote: post #6
skx001 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The West just refuses to build anything. Whereas in Asia its not uncommon to build entire cites from scratch.

Yes, it's easy to build entire cities from scratch in a centrally managed society, such as a dictatorship or communist nations. It's also easy to have cities grow fast, if you're primarily a rural/agrarian nation, and suddenly have a transition to become urban. This was (for example) Canada in the 1900s. Mostly rural, yet now it's mostly urban. Canada saw fast growth of cities back then. It's maintaining large cities…

> Yes, it's easy to build entire cities from scratch in a centrally managed society, such as a dictatorship or communist nations.

This is generally true, but Indonesia is neither

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#32

Post by duffyjp »

decimalenough wrote: post #17

I used to spend a lot of time in Jakarta for work, and it's an underrated city. Yes, it's hot, congested, polluted and largely poor, but so is Bangkok. Public transport remains not great, but it's improved a lot with the airport link, the metro, LRT, Transjakarta BRT. SE Asia's only legit high speed train now connects to Bandung in minutes. Grab/Gojek (Uber equivalents) make getting around cheap and bypass the langua…

I was there ~20 years ago. I had made friends with some Indonesia students in college and joined them on a trip home. We were mostly in Surabaya, but did spend some time in Jakarta as well. We had a great time.

The language is a hidden gem, you can learn enough to get around on the flight over which I can't say about any other SEA language. Phonetic spellings, Latin alphabet, no tonal sounds, dead easy grammar and a million loan words you already know.

Jakarta is definitely for the adventurous though, and you had better have an iron stomach.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#33

Post by vkou »

awongh wrote: post #26
skx001 wrote: post #4

Alternative Link: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/jakarta-world-s-most-p... Key Facts: Number of megacities, urban areas with 10 million or more inhabitants has quadrupled from 8 in 1975 to 33 in 2025. Jakarta is now the world’s most populous city, with nearly 42 million residents. The current population of Indonesia is 286 million. In 2019, Indonesia said it will be moving its capital to Nusantara, a new city…

To add some more detail regarding the new capital, Jakarta has some structural governance problems in the sense that it's very hard to improve infrastructure improve / stop the sinking of the city (mostly caused from over reliance on ground water pumping and permitting corruption / bad river management). Those problems might never be solved. And separate of it's economic power it remains a center of power where the c…

New capitals also help prevent revolutions and uprisings. It's a lot easier to have a government that's insulated from the unrest of the masses, when everyone in its capital is loyal to it.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#34

Post by jasonthorsness »

decimalenough wrote: post #17

I used to spend a lot of time in Jakarta for work, and it's an underrated city. Yes, it's hot, congested, polluted and largely poor, but so is Bangkok. Public transport remains not great, but it's improved a lot with the airport link, the metro, LRT, Transjakarta BRT. SE Asia's only legit high speed train now connects to Bandung in minutes. Grab/Gojek (Uber equivalents) make getting around cheap and bypass the langua…

What is the air quality like to actually breathe in your experience? I have noticed Jakarta on lists of poor AQI and it doesn't look great [1] but I think the AQI number is kind of an abstraction.

[1] https://www.aqi.in/us/dashboard/indonesia/jakarta/jakarta/hi...

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#35

Post by markus_zhang »

decimalenough wrote: post #17

I used to spend a lot of time in Jakarta for work, and it's an underrated city. Yes, it's hot, congested, polluted and largely poor, but so is Bangkok. Public transport remains not great, but it's improved a lot with the airport link, the metro, LRT, Transjakarta BRT. SE Asia's only legit high speed train now connects to Bandung in minutes. Grab/Gojek (Uber equivalents) make getting around cheap and bypass the langua…

Thanks for sharing. I’m wondering whether they have a large retro computing market?

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#36

Post by parpfish »

skx001 wrote: post #5
metalman wrote: post #3

Canada has less people, even with a 10% increase in the last 4 years through imigration, some of which is from Indonesea presumably including a significant number from Jakarta, where the civil infrastructure must be epic

The West just refuses to build anything. Whereas in Asia its not uncommon to build entire cites from scratch.

I don't even know what it would it even look like to "build a city" from scratch in the US. who does the building and puts together the central plan?

does the government build a bunch of public housing and a publicly owned commercial district? i guess they kind of have experience doing this with military bases, but at some point you need to encourage a bunch of private development and ownership, right?

or would the government just incentivize private developers to start building in the middle of nowhere and hope that a city arises as an emergent phenomenon? that approach seems like it would be rife with abuse and waste.

seems like this would be a lot easier to do with an authoritarian regime that could just decree "we're building a city here. the following industries will move their headquarters"

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#37

Post by throwaway290 »

Froztnova wrote: post #25
superconduct123 wrote: post #13

I'm always surprised how big the population of Indonesia is yet it seems culturally underrepresented in the world compared to a lot of smaller countries Almost 300 million people but it rarely comes up in the news or pop media

I also did a double take when I learned that they were Muslim-majority too. It flies in the face of a lot of assumptions.

Why? It's a big religion in the world and I heard it grows at 30% per year

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#38

Post by lurk2 »

ecshafer wrote: post #14
ghaff wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also imagine a lot of people who are admiring these megacities have never been to one. Jakarta has oceans of scooters and, when I was there to visit some customers with our country manager, she had a driver. With some exceptions like Singapore, SE Asian cities are horrible to get around.

Other than Singapore. I am not sure why SE Asian cities aren't going as all in on mass transit like China. Jakarta has a single subway line for 42 million people. They have some light rail line and buses. If you compare this with Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing its really night and day.

The usual patterns that crop up are:

1) Lack of institutional knowledge. No one even knows how to get started and bringing in foreign expertise may be prohibitively expensive.

2) Economics don’t pencil out even in higher income countries compared to BRT systems, especially because high density and heavy traffic means the lines usually have to be grade-separated which adds additional costs compared to an at-grade system.

3) Corruption makes development impossible. No well-established processes for expropriation exist, or the country is given over to clientelism such that landlords won’t give up what they own and hamper the development process via political connections.

BRT is usually the most effective solution in places where grade-separated rail is not yet viable as it allows a right-of-way network to be established that can later be upgraded to rail. This doesn’t solve problem 3, which requires a comparatively authoritarian approach to overcome the incentive problems at play; this is why the Chinese have generally excelled in the space over the last 20 years.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#40

Post by cdmckay »

Froztnova wrote: post #25
superconduct123 wrote: post #13

I'm always surprised how big the population of Indonesia is yet it seems culturally underrepresented in the world compared to a lot of smaller countries Almost 300 million people but it rarely comes up in the news or pop media

I also did a double take when I learned that they were Muslim-majority too. It flies in the face of a lot of assumptions.

Which assumptions are those?
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