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Jakarta is not fortunate enough a city to have a legacy of beautiful things. We did not have a king to gift us with a park in the city’s center, as King Rama VI bestowed Lumphini Park upon the people of Bangkok, or as the British crown did with the eight Royal Parks that comprise London’s lungs. Nor did our famously cheap Dutchmen spend too many guilders to seriously beautify our city — certainly nothing on the level of the British redevelopment of New Delhi, which Edwin Lutyens planned in tree-lined imperial splendor.

Nor, it must be said, have our citizens shown too much energy to push the government into building dense canopies of trees within our city, as US citizens did in the early 20th century, creating leisure spaces like Central Park in New York, or the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.

Unfortunately, Jakarta is a dump by historical circumstance. As an unremarkable port from which the Dutch extracted produce from the rest of the country, it was never built according to any plan. The modern city as we know it started in the northern harbor and sort of leaked inward. Today it is a congested but bland menagerie of concrete towers, slums amid gaudy villas and shiny malls.

The good news is that it is probably only a matter of time before Jakarta will have large urban green spaces for its residents. History shows that rising wealth causes people to demand more time and space for leisure, and usually a park is the most obvious way it happens.

When the architect Horace Cleveland was trying to persuade Minneapolis’s authorities to build a park, he encouraged them to “look forward for a century, to the time when the city has a population of a million, and think what will be their wants. They will have wealth enough to purchase everything that money can buy, but all their wealth cannot purchase a lost opportunity.”

Jakarta is about to waste an opportunity. If you think we’re crowded now, keep in mind that by some projections, Greater Jakarta will have around 35 million people by 2025. If you think buying land is expensive now, just think what it will be like then, when all our new friends move in. The longer we wait, the more expensive it becomes.

Sure, we already have the park surrounding the National Monument as well as Lapangan Banteng, but for our large population and by global standards, they are too small. Bogor’s Botanical Gardens — built by the Dutch — are splendid but hardly count due to the distance from Jakarta.

Moreover, the man who designed Jakarta’s urban plan in the 1960s now says that the city has been illegally unzoning green spaces and replacing them with commercial developments. Jakarta was supposed to have just under 30 percent of greenery but now has only 10 percent — just the usual blend of shortsightedness, greed and civic disregard.

But how should this be done today? Parks, of course, do not just happen. Natural areas don’t automatically protect themselves from development. We still need government to coordinate everyone to work in the city’s best interests.

One way is to have enough public pressure bearing on the government so that it flat-out purchases land. The first public figures to champion the need for open spaces in New York were newspaper editors and owners. Within a decade or so, both of New York’s mayoral candidates were receiving full public pressure — mostly by the elites, who were glancing enviously at London or Paris — to purchase and lay out a park “on a scale which will be worthy of the city.”

In the 1850s, New York, according to one observer, was then a place where “coal smoke polluted the air, there was no means of sewage disposal, the streets were unpaved and filled not only with people and carriages, but also with geese, chickens, pigs and sheep.” Sound familiar?

After three years of debate over the site and cost, the New York legislature used both money and eviction laws to acquire more than 700 acres of land in the center of Manhattan. Then a public competition was created for the design of the park.

That’s one way to do it. Another way is through conservation easements. Here, a private landowner might promise the government to restrict future development on his land in a way that binds all the property’s future owners. The land would still belong to the landowner, and in return, he might get a tax incentive or a gift from the government to mitigate the cost of his decision, but it is zoned permanently. This way of creating green spaces is voluntary and light on the public coffers, but it only works if you have enough wealthy and patriotic citizens and if they have enough concentrated land in the city. My guess is both are scarce in Jakarta.

Whatever method is finally picked, there is every reason to do it now. Environmental arguments — better air quality and increased water catchment areas — exist, as do arguments from equality — that green spaces attract both rich and poor in a way that creates a shared sense of community. There is also the natural beauty argument: that human beings must sometimes be reminded that they are a part of a larger world, and be prepared to steward what they have not already destroyed.

Finally, and perhaps most important for Indonesia, is the credibility factor. Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, who devoted an entire chapter of his memoirs to the greening of Singapore, once shared this experience. The best way to convince visiting CEOs to invest in Singapore, he wrote, was to “ensure that the roads from the airport” to their hotels “were neat and spruce, lined with shrubs and trees.”

“When they drove into the Istana domain, they would see right in the heart of the city a green oasis, 90 acres of immaculate rolling lawns and woodland,” he wrote. “Without a word being said, they would know that Singaporeans were competent, disciplined and reliable.”

What does the state of Jakarta say about the rest of country?

Artha Prameswara is a journalist based in Mumbai.