Overview

Jakarta, one of the largest metropolitan areas in Southeast Asia, has grown from 150,000 residents in the first half of the twentieth century to more than 31 million in 2024. This explosive growth has reshaped the Jakarta Metropolitan Area (JMA), also known as Jabodetabek, presenting complex challenges and highlighting the critical role of urban planning. This edited volume explores Jakarta’s evolving urban landscape through the lens of post-suburbanization. While the city exhibits traits of post-suburban development, its central areas continue to attract population and investment, suggesting a unique, early-stage form of post-suburban growth. Across the inner city and surrounding suburbs, physical, social, and economic transformations are underway—marked by uneven patterns of inclusion, displacement, and redevelopment. The book adopts a multi-dimensional perspective, examining changes in residential, industrial, and commercial development, alongside impacts on employment, infrastructure, environmental degradation, and social dynamics such as segregation and gentrification. As the first comprehensive study of Jakarta’s post-suburbanization, this volume brings together twenty-two contributors, including academics, planners, urban designers, and architects, to assess planning practices and policy responses. Organized into four thematic sections—economic development, environmental challenges, housing and public space, and gentrification and displacement—it offers critical insights and forward-looking strategies for shaping the JMA over the next twenty years. A vital contribution to urban planning literature in Indonesia, Growth of a Megacity provides a timely and accessible analysis for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners navigating Jakarta’s complex urban future.

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Table of Contents

Reviews

""The meticulously crafted and insightfully argued contributions to this fresh new Rukmana/Roitman study of Jakarta explores the megacity’s profound spatial, demographic, economic, and political transformations over the past two decades. The contributors examine the economic restructuring of the urban periphery, environmental degradation and accompanying climate hazards throughout the metropolis, and gentrification processes occurring both inside the city and its increasingly urbanized suburbs. Most important, the contributors identify not just those benefitting from post-suburbanization but also the larger share of those still being left out. Growth of a Megacity pinpoints the interventions needed to realize an inclusive post-suburban metropolis."" - Christopher Silver, professor emeritus, University of Florida ""One of the most alluring and studied megacities of the Global South, Jakarta’s myriad complexities and evolving challenges continue to intrigue scholars. Rukmana and Roitman have curated laudable attention to less appreciated contemporary dynamics shaping this behemoth, which, as they argue, embody a unique ""post-suburban"" phenomenon emergent in southern urban planning and development. The book’s historical and prognostic insights into its spatial, ecological, institutional, and equity dimensions are instructive for familiar observers and the uninitiated alike. The welcome contributions by emerging scholars of Indonesian urbanization should encourage further inquiry into cities undergoing post-suburban turns elsewhere, on the archipelago and beyond."" - Ashok Das, professor, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

Author Information

Deden Rukmana is a professor and the director of the Master of City and Regional Planning program at the University of Texas at Arlington. Sonia Roitman is associate professor in development planning at the University of Queensland, Australia.

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