Jakarta, today a metropolis of twelve million inhabitants, was once the center of the Dutch colonial empire. Known in the seventeenth century as Batavia, the “Queen of the East,” the city headquartered the Dutch East Indies Company, one of the world’s first multinational corporations. Following Indonesian independence in 1945, it became the “exemplary center” of Sukarno, the first president of the decolonized nation, who turned the main boulevard of Jakarta into an exhibit of modernist buildings and urban spaces. Today, like many capital cities of Asian countries, Jakarta is a world city and the center of Indonesia’s government, business activity, and cultural life.

Despite all these attributes, in the eyes of many inhabitants Jakarta remains an unplanned city (kota yang tak terencana). Jakarta lacks public transport, and it suffers from high levels of air pollution, traffic congestion, water scarcity, as well as occasional blackout, fire, and flooding. It falls short in housing facilities and sanitation for the large population. The professional culture of planning has been embraced tardily, and only partially, in Jakarta. Development of housing and commercial facilities often violate the scant city planning laws that do exist. Residents of Jakarta thus are both interested and skeptical when city government reveals plans for the city. For instance, the current elected governor seeks to reclaim substantial quantities of land—as much as thirty percent of the city’s territory—for open and green spaces, which at present cover less than ten percent of the city’s 650-square-kilometer territory. Such measure is aimed at promoting the city as both a sustainable “green city” and a “competing city” in the neoliberal world, as many of its political and business leaders desire. The idea of greening Jakarta received various responses from the public. A recent editorial in the Jakarta Post titled “More Green Space!” described hundreds of citizens gathering to commemorate World Town Planning Day amid “a continuing disappearance of open and green space, in Jakarta and elsewhere, greedily used for housing and commercial facilities” (“More Green Space!” The Jakarta Post, 7 November 2009: 6).

For many Jakartans, the creation of open and green spaces promises to mitigate the city’s environmental problems, such as flooding during the rainy season, water scarcity during the dry season, and high daytime temperatures. The commemoration of World Town Planning Day expresses aspirations for a better Jakarta as the city administration finalizes deliberation on new spatial plans and residents wonder whether the city’s governor will deliver on the plan’s commitments. Since a recent turn toward involvement of the public and the city’s communities in planning discussions, “planning” indeed appears to be a new popular keyword to describe the pursuit of a better future for Jakarta however this may be. Yet as this review was being written, the draft of a 2010–2030 city master plan bylaw recently released by the governor for public scrutiny has been massively criticized for its problematic assumptions, vague statements and unrealistic vision, as well as (still) for its lack of the public’s involvement in the drafting process.

In this context, Planning the Megacity: Jakarta in the Twentieth Century is welcome. Written by Christopher Silver, a scholar of urban history who has researched the city since the late 1980s, the book traces the political history of planning in Jakarta. Its primary argument is that Jakarta has been planned less by a professional discipline than by the competing and yet coexisting visions of different authorities who have claimed power through spatial organization. The book identifies many actors in this complex process, including colonial visionaries and technocrats as well as the postcolonial president-architect and postcolonial governors. It also tracks more recent local agents who work under the auspices of international organizations for the post-authoritarian “participatory planning process”—a community-based approach to planning in which members of civil society offer input to local government on issues relating to community and urban development. Silver shows that while planning in Jakarta derives from a European tradition via colonialism and postcolonial dependency, its development “is not something that could have been predicted using Western social science theories and models” (34). Instead the city and its people have transformed Western approaches into something that offers both despair and hope.

Silver’s agent-based approach adroitly captures the dynamic of Jakarta’s planning and unplanning, shaped by the conflation of the city with the nation and its resulting imbrication in national political regimes that use space to register the distribution of power. Through a series of chapters periodized according to successive political regimes, Silver highlights major discourses in urban planning as they were envisioned, contested, and practiced in Jakarta’s urban space. Each chapter details the planning for the modern metropolis within a particular context, even as it describes the limits and partialities of such planning as well as the discriminatory decision to leave a major part of Jakarta outside of this development.

The introduction provides a useful roadmap to the city. It gives a sense of the history, geography, and administration of Jakarta as filtered through Silver’s own experiences there in the late 1980s—the time when land-use controls were relaxed to invite foreign and domestic capitals to play major roles in transforming the city. Particularly valuable for people new to the urban history of Southeast Asia is chapter 1, where Silver situates Jakarta’s transformation within the context of regional urbanization.

Chapter 2 covers the years from 1900 to 1940, when the idea of planning was most visibly implemented in Jakarta. This was when the colonial state established municipal government to dignify the city as a Dutch colonial capital with boulevards, squares, parks, and water supply, among other projects. During this era, architects, planners, and social reformers turned selected parts of Batavia into a “laboratory of modernity.” (See, Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991; and Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norm and Form of Social Environment, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990.) Silver examines several important planning experiments, paying particular attention to the role of residential development as part of the transformation of the racially segregated nineteenth-century city into a modern city organized by the spatialization of class rather than race. He also focuses on attempts to improve the built environment of indigenous communities through the Kampung Improvement Program, an initiative that improved the poor neighborhoods that supply cheap labor for economic growth and urban development.

Colonial planning strategies shaped the post-Independence era even as postcolonial nationalism introduced new approaches. While Silver ignores the important period of Japanese occupation during World War II, as well as its aftereffects, he dedicates four chapters to the city-building of presidents Sukarno (1950–1967) and Suharto (1967–1998). Silver shows the profound influence of political leaders, including the series of governors, in making Jakarta a symbolic center of power while managing the growing urban population by force, coercion, and consent to fit within the schemes of national development. As Indonesia liberalized its economy in the 1980s with particular focus on export-oriented growth, a new spatial practice was implemented, one that brought together paradigms of both the past and the present. Silver presents the retrieval of planning schemes from the colonial past (including the Kampung Improvement Program), which were combined with the adoption of ideas from America’s automobile-based urban sprawl and shopping malls as the city sought to become a “world city.”

Central to these chapters is the role of private (domestic and foreign) developers in proposing new towns, industrial estates, and highways while claiming thousands of hectares of agricultural land (by displacing peasants) in greater Jakarta in the name of developing the capital city for national glory. Silver records the various modes of the oligarchic private-public partnership that has turned Jakarta into a visibly divided city in which the poor and the rich, the informal and the formal sectors, coexist in a paradoxical high-tension interdependency. Silver shows how this tension results in seemingly contradictory projects of infrastructural and visual improvements, on the one hand, and demolition and eviction on the other, as the planning for the modern metropolis required “a mass relocation of traditional urban residential functions to the periphery of Jakarta” (151).

Planning the Megacity shows that what underlies the continuing transformation of Jakarta is the desire to become not only a modern metropolis but also a world city—to make Jakarta “a showcase for the Indonesian development miracle” on par if possible with Singapore and Hong Kong (187). However, it argues that this desire has also produced its own contradictions, such as the expression of greed and power at the expense of planning a better society and environment. The Suharto family, Silver points out, has been directly involved in many of the business enterprises related to the physical development of Jakarta. All six Suharto children owned a significant portion of industrial and financial businesses in the city, and the president’s relatives and cronies acquired large areas of land for commercial developments. Backed by the political regime, these directors were ready to embrace the idea of turning Jakarta into a place that would create for them a favorable business climate.

The final chapter documents the rise of participatory planning in Jakarta’s culture of governance. Titled “Planning in the New Democratic Megacity,” it traces the impact of political change since 1998 as Silver recounts the attempts by city government (along with members of civil society) to create “a humane, efficient, and competitive capital supported by a participative, prosperous, well behaved and civilized society in a safe and sustainable environment” (DKI Jakarta, Rencana Strategis Daerah Propinsi: DKI Jakarta Tahun 2002–2007 (Strategic Plan of Jakarta Province), Jakarta: Jakarta Metropolitan Government, 2002, 37 [cited in Silver, 16]). This is a wishful ending of the book which seeks to open up a new chapter for the planning of the megacity.

Despite the aspiration for “planning in the new democratic megacity,” Silver’s book explains just why, despite all the modernization and expansion, Jakarta remains fragmented and “unplanned.” This legacy is inherited from both the colonial past and the recent history of postcolonial Jakarta when planning was meant for the privileged few and touched the poor only when it was economically necessary (to serve the city with cheap labor) and politically strategic (to prevent unrest and—today—to win electoral support).

The current concerns about open and green spaces stem from the legacy of this “unplanning” tradition. Reading Silver, it is possible to speculate that planning in Jakarta is deliberately fragmented and inadequate, as such inadequacy allows for a flexibility in urban transformation that benefits opportunism and extralegal initiative. In the 1965–85 spatial planning bylaw, for instance, the city set out to provide 37.2 percent of the city for open and green space. By the 2005–2010 bylaw, the target had been reduced to just 13.94 percent (“More Green Space!” The Jakarta Post, 7 November 2009: 6). Such change, which incrementally accepted the consequences of excessive development, exemplifies Jakarta’s regime of inadequate planning as a mode of governance. This, in turn, serves the powerful; yet it also offers the urban poor the chance to practice their own kind of planning as they, too, take advantage of inadequate development to encroach creatively into open spaces.

In such circumstances, Jakarta continues its tradition as a contested urban arena. The call for the reclaiming of open and green spaces in the new spatial planning of Jakarta 2010–2030 requires clarification as to whose spaces are being discussed, what “green space” means in Indonesia’s capital, and the role of planning in Indonesian history. Those who are grappling with these questions will find Planning the Megacity a helpful book. It offers a comprehensive account that invites reflection on how planning has worked for power and how it could become a device for challenging this power in one of the world’s largest cities.