Indonesia Plans to Move Its Capital Out of Jakarta, a City That's Sinking | Hacker News Reader

Indonesia Plans to Move Its Capital Out of Jakarta, a City That's Sinking

npr.org

188 pointstshannon57 comments

I've read both Salt Dreams and Water for a thirsty land : the Consolidated Irrigation District and its canal development history. The first is roughly the history of the Colorado River and water issues in Southern California. The second is the history of water development and water rights in Fresno County, California.

Fresno has a surprisingly rich history in that regard, one I never hear about outside of reading that one book. It is basically the modern day equivalent of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

When settlers first arrived in the area, it was mostly desert with some greenery along the rivers. After canal development, it became a lush landscape. The book contains incredible before and after photos.

After canal development, low lying areas turned into de facto lakes. They eventually turned some into groundwater recharge ponds.

During some years, Fresno has actually raised the ground water level, though it only gets 11 inches of rain per year. The county played a critical role in the creation of water rights laws in the state of California, as well as in the history of water development tools and technology. Multiple patents were developed in Fresno County.

If you are concerned about these issues or do work related to such, I highly recommend reading the book.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/water-for-a-thirsty-land-the-...

(Salt Dreams is also an excellent read.)

For those interested in the topic, Cadillac Desert is also a great read: https://amzn.to/2J4eQDK

It's more encompassing of much of the water development projects in the American West and contains very interesting and entertaining history. Like a watered down Chinatown.

> When settlers first arrived in the area, it was mostly desert with some greenery along the rivers. After canal development, it became a lush landscape. The book contains incredible before and after photos.

Except for the photos, this is a good match for the development of Iraq several thousand years ago. As far as I understand, it's back to being desert everywhere today.

> As far as I understand, it's back to being desert everywhere today.

Not entirely. The once massive Mesopotamian Marshes (which were largely drained by Saddam to destroy the local Shia population) have been partially restored, from about 10% of the original size to about 50%. It will probably take many decades for the ecosystems to be restored, but it is nonetheless good news.

Edit: Worth seeing here https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse#v=31.16454,47.12287...

> Jakarta's problems are largely man-made – the area's large population has extracted so much groundwater that it has impacted the ground levels, and many surface water resources are polluted.

A similar disaster is playing out in Mexico City: https://www.npr.org/2018/09/12/647180486/mexico-city-thirsty...

A similar disaster is playing out in Bangalore: https://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/bengaluru-is-facing-a-te...

A similar disaster is playing out in Tehran: https://www.livescience.com/64235-tehran-is-sinking.html

And the "water tanker mafia" in Karachi:

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/09/10/6455253...

Which inspired a VR game I made.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/510930/Thirst_VR/

Have you read this? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23209924-the-water-knife

No but that looks awesome. The VR game is based on a screenplay I wrote that is Blade Runner meets China Town. Water Knife looks like something I'd like. Adding to vacation reads list! Thanks!

It is a good book. Here's a copy/paste from the wikipedia article about the author's previous book, also set in a dystopian post-environmental-disaster environment.

The work won the 2010 Nebula Award[3], the Campbell Memorial Award[4], and the 2010 Hugo Award (tied with The City & the City by China Miéville for the Hugo Award), both for best novel.[5] This book also won the 2010 Compton Crook Award and the 2010 Locus Award for best first novel.

Paolo Bacigalupi is a good writer with a creative take on world building. Both The Windup Girl and The Water Knife (on topic for this thread) are good reads. His short stories collected in Pump Six and Other Stories are worth digging into as well if you like his novels. He goes into the potential effects of widespread gene modification and excessive patent protection of crops as well.

Really cool!

And Bangkok: https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/southeast-asia/article/216240...

There's a good deal of sinking happening in California as well.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/18/californ...

Not causing sinking, but if we drain this, agriculture in the US will be severely impacted:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer

Since the 1940s, pumping from the Ogallala has drawn the aquifer down more than 300 feet (90 m) in some areas. Producers have taken steps to reduce their reliance on irrigated water. Streamlined operations allow them to produce significantly greater yield using roughly the same amount of water needed four decades ago. Still, losses to the aquifer between 2001 and 2011 equated to a third of its cumulative depletion during the entire 20th century. The Ogallala is recharged primarily by rainwater, but only about one inch of precipitation actually reaches the aquifer annually. Rainfall in most of the Texas High Plains is minimal, evaporation is high, and infiltration rates are slow.[24] "

Subsidence is a widespread problem in the US:

Subsidence is a global problem and, in the United States, more than 17,000 square miles in 45 States, an area roughly the size of New Hampshire and Vermont combined, have been directly affected by subsidence.

https://water.usgs.gov/ogw/subsidence.html

I can't readily find anything stating outright that there is subsidence associated with the Ogallala Aquifer, but my recollection is I have seen such in the past.

From the listed article, a 9% draw down since extraction started in 1950. I consider this a concern and actions should be taken. But it seems like there is plenty of time to take action, and there will be lots of continuing warning signs such as wells that need deepening. I'm for taking action, but I think global warming is a larger problem. Oh hey, global warming will probably exacerbate the Ogallal situation!

Also, in evil mind frame here, if USA loses out on cheap food, perhaps it will deal a blow to the obesity epidemic.

Currently in the US, 8% of grown corn is the stuff we eat, and 11% is devoted to sugar production (and some other stuff) - with Ethanol production and livestock feed accounting for 60% of the total usage[1]. If there were droughts we'd probably see Ethanol become price inefficient first, then livestock, and it's that 11% of corn that gets transformed into sweeteners that is really driving obesity in the modern world.

The other issue that seems to be related to obesity is the weird chemicals we're imbibing - both knowingly through food consumption[2] and unknowingly by their entrance into the food chain[3]. The USA really needs to get it's act together about finding out wtf is poisoning all of the people there and fix that. I'd love it if they could get their stuff together about fighting obesity - there is something fundamentally wrong with the western diet that is more prevalent in cheap foods and making some greedy people a quick buck while setting society up for a really heavy cost in the near future. A recent decrease in activity certainly contributes, but it's more than just a lack of exercise.

[1] Corn usage... leaning on wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_production_in_the_United_...

[2] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/325034.php

[3] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3mzve/human-wast...

I'm not sure that cheap food, by itself, causes obesity. I suspect that it's more like flavor-enhanced food, and food that has calories but little other nutrition, cause obesity.

> “Decades of living dangerously in terms of water resource management, urban planning, waste and wastewater management, is taking its toll on the megacity. This is made possible by poor city planning, environmental and conservation policies, enforcement and practices.”

What are the chances that Indonesia’s incompetence won’t be incompetent at managing the environmental impact of their next capital city?

I recently had the chance to visit Jakarta after over 10 years away, and they're finally starting to get some things right. The recent emphasis on public transport is particularly promising: the first MRT (subway) line finally opened this year, there's a lot more on the way, they've beefed up the commuter railways, Jakarta airport T3 is head and shoulders above the old ones, etc. Some bloggage on the topic:

https://driftingclouds.net/2019/03/28/jakarta-by-rail-mrt-op...

https://driftingclouds.net/2019/04/01/jakarta-by-rail-airpor...

Much of the credit goes to recently re-elected president Jokowi, who's the least incompetent leader Indonesia has had in a while (possibly ever/since independence?) and who's also the prime mover behind the new capital idea. That said, I'm not entirely sold on the idea myself, the track record of other SE Asian countries trying this -- Putrajaya in Malaysia and particularly Pyongyang-in-the-tropics aka Naypyidaw in Myanmar -- are not encouraging.

http://www.thebohemianblog.com/2017/07/naypyidaw-myanmar-gho...

Yeah, and Putrajaya barely qualifies as moving the capital, given it's still part of KL's metropolitan area.

Forward thinking isn't in high regard in Indonesian culture.

Zero, but things will eventually adjust out of necessity.

I don’t have any links, but a large area around Johannesburg, South Africa was dewatered as a result of diamond mining.

I'm pretty sure that would be gold mining.

The plan to move Indonesian capital city has been around since Sukarno's era (1957) [0]. I hope that it will really happen this time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_future_capital_city...

It better, they only have 3 decades left...

> Jakarta faces massive challenges. As the BBC has reported, it's the fastest-sinking city in the world, with almost half of its area below sea level.

> "If we look at our models, by 2050 about 95% of North Jakarta will be submerged," Heri Andreas, an expert in Jakarta's land subsidence at the Bandung Institute of Technology, told the broadcaster.

People should really stop growing megapolises and start developing smaller cities, interconnection infrastructure and regional decentralization (decentralization is already fine in the US with its states system but near-zero in e.g. Russia (Moscow everything) and I dunno about Indonesia).

Basically all of Java is as dense as a mid-sized American city. Java (2903 / mi^2), Atlanta (3547 / mi^2). Here, Java's population density includes its 12000-foot peaks. Or, to give an alternate picture, it's a third of the size of California, with four times as many people.

It is a complete understatement of how bad it is. Traffic is unreal. Getting to the airport from a hotel that would be 20mins away with no traffic takes 4+hrs.

I wonder what the cost comparison looks like between moving and trying to fix sinking issue

Moving makes sense I think, not just because of environmental issues but because it's not healthy to have all the country's leadership and wealth concentrated in one place. Hopefully they can figure out a way to move the capital that results in less consolidation of power and not more, and that isn't bad for the people and environment around where the new capital is placed.

"because it's not healthy to have all the country's leadership and wealth concentrated in one place."

Has there been any research on this? It seems a pretty common pattern to have the gov't capital, financial center, largest population center and largest GDP producing cities all be the same place. This holds true in (more or less) stable industrialized countries like France, Japan, S. Korea, etc. as well as in many 3rd world countries.

I have a vague feeling its unhealthy, but that's admittedly probably at least partly because I grew up in the States, where it isn't the case and gives me something of a bias against it. And presumably there's a reason its such a popular model, even if it hasn't been a conscious decision in most cases.

I was going to say it's pretty common not to have the major city (largest finance/population/GDP, pretty much all correlates of one another), but it's actually not. Excluding countries that explicitly moved their capital from the largest city (e.g., Brazil), the major countries with this setup are Australia, Bolivia, Cameroon, Canada, Ecuador, Morocco, New Zealand, South Africa, Switzerland, Turkey, UAE, US, and Vietnam. And most of those countries boil down to "we took several regions and agglomerated them into one entity," where the capital is either unchanged from one of the old constituents (e.g., Turkey--Ankara was the capital during the Turkish rebellion) or was sited in a middle point to not favor one constituent (e.g., Canada).

It's just that I'm more familiar with the exceptions than the rule.

This list is suspiciously incomplete, how are China and India not on it? In both of the world's most populous countries, the largest city and indisputable financial centre is not the capital. I would guess the majority of the world's population lives in countries where this is the situation, so it's not just you.

The commercial cities in question, Mumbai and Shanghai, have never been the capitals of India or China.

Delhi was built as a new capital by the British Raj, taking over from Calcutta. Beijing's history is long and complicated, but it has been the capital of unified China since 1421, give or take a few blips during wars.

In India, the metropolitan region of Delhi is larger than the metropolitan region of Mumbai, even if the cities proper are reversed. For China, I wasn't certain of the metropolitan region comparison between Shanghai and Beijing.

I don't know of any specific research. I've been to Jakarta and have friends who live in Indonesia, so my opinion is based largely on their impressions of the political situation there, that it's a basically a geographical hierarchy: Jakarta is where the money and power are, Java is fairly modern and somewhat middle-class and is where the majority of the population live, and the other islands are mostly treated as primitive and as a source of natural resources to be exploited.

I don't know if that's still true or if Indonesia has made progress in recent years in balancing out the political power.

Congrats for identifying a potential bias and trying to address it. It’s out of topic (albeit at the core of the reason they try to move Jakarta, so worth studying), but more importantly, extremely large amounts of people, even among very clever ones even on HN, forget to identify the bias that they may not notice because they’re inside it. Would you have any guess on what gave you this reflex?

I believe I took this reflex by moving to 4 different countries. It makes it easy to notice locality-based bias. But I always wonder how people learnt, when they notice a potential political or environmental bias.

Alternatively, if you move the capital from where most of the people are, there's less opportunities for the governed to interact with the government, and more murky behavior can happen in odd corners of the faraway capital.

Yeah, if they move the capital to, say, a private estate in New Zealand, that would be bad. Or anywhere similarly inaccessible to average Indonesians.

There is no such thing as average Indonesian though. Sure, around 50% of Indonesian population lives in Java Island (where Jakarta is) but I won't call people in Java "average Indonesian".

Keep in mind that Indonesia is a large archipelagic nation so wherever the capital is, chances are its "inaccessible" to the majority of Indonesians.

Interesting. It looks like Korea and Egypt are also moving their capitals.

https://qz.com/1608402/indonesia-like-egypt-and-south-korea-...

I wonder if it is due to overcrowding or to separate business and political centers?

I am glad that the politicians finally want to do something about it.

The capital also unnecessarily pulls all of the country's resources into that one city causing even worse wealth inequality and poverty.

A city on Samosir, on the island of Lake Toba would look spectacular but quite impractical.

not sure what do you mean by spectacular, but Lake Toba already got plenty of problems with its environment [1].

[1]. https://aquaculturemag.com/2018/09/25/indonesian-fish-farmer...

Miami next.

And New Orleans.

Miami sits on porous bedrock. It has much less of a chance of survival than New Orleans.

Maybe.

"After a $14.6 billion-dollar upgrade, Army Corp engineers have confirmed that New Orleans’ levees are sinking. Today, 11 months after one of the largest public works in world history has been completed, the system could stop providing adequate protection in as little as four years."

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/weather/topstories/new-orleans-lev...

Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19696096

Imagine all the swim-up bars though!

And dive bars!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com