Simon Pitchforth

Metro Madness: Picturing Jakarta Without People

Browsing through the racks of the charming Aksara bookstore recently, I chanced upon a couple of interesting items. My first purchase was a handsome foldout “Green Map” of Jakarta, which indicates some of the city’s places of interest and greenery.

Alas, the only sizeable green areas on the map are Ragunan’s large but otherwise rather drab and dilapidated zoo and the pubic topiary that surrounds Sukarno’s great erection (i.e. Monas park).

Other listed areas of greenness are almost laughable in their diminutive footprints. Menteng’s Taman Suropati, for example, is often promoted as a city park while it in fact more closely resembles a traffic island in size. In fact, let’s be honest, it is a traffic island. The woeful lack of green spaces in Jakarta has been well documented, of course, and is brought into even sharper relief when one contrasts our megalopolitan warren of concrete rat runs with the stunning rural beauty to be found elsewhere in the archipelago.

My second purchase afforded me the opportunity to drift off into a reverie of a rather greener Jakarta, albeit a Jakarta without people in it. “The World Without Us,” by Alan Weisman, is a bold thought experiment that looks scientifically at what would happen to the planet, its great cities and feats of human engineering if the entire population was suddenly removed from the equation, never to return. Resembling a more analytical, nonfiction version of one of recently deceased futuristic prophet JG Ballard’s early disaster novels, “The World Without Us” is food for thought indeed.

I thought I’d draw on the book and try to paint a picture of what would happen to the Indonesian capital over the years and millennia if its 15 million residents were to be suddenly abducted by a presumably extremely large spaceship.

First, Jakarta’s houses and residencies would unravel themselves after just a few short years. Indonesian housing is often of a poor quality, with many houses seemingly built out of breakfast cereal instead of bricks, and this would hasten their ultimate doom in the absence of human intervention. In Indonesia’s humid climate, spores would quickly penetrate the city’s houses, turning hardboard to paper, rotting studs and floor joists and generally munching them to bits. Ants, roaches and small mammals such as Jakarta’s huge army of rats would soon complete the job.

Moisture and rainwater would enter roofing panels around the nails, loosening their grip. Eventually, gravity would do its work, joists would cave in to the pressure and the city’s roofs would collapse. An Indonesian house would probably last 20 or 30 years with no people around to look after it. Only bathroom tiles, the chemical property of their fired ceramic not unlike that of fossils, would remain relatively unchanged.

Meanwhile, as buildings crashed down, lime from crushed concrete would raise the soil pH level, inviting in trees and regreening Jakarta in a way that would make even Ragunan Zoo look like chicken feed. The city’s open sewers would jam up with plastic and other human detritus (as they pretty much do anyway). Jakarta’s depleted groundwater would also rise again and thus soil would be sluiced away and roads would crater.

A global warming sea level rise of an inch per decade, combined with the fact that Jakarta’s marshy coast is sinking (the airport toll road has allegedly sunk by more than two meters since 1980), would ensure that most of the north of the city ended up in a watery grave. In fact, 20 percent of Indonesia’s 17,000-odd islands are set to disappear by 2050. On the other hand, the city’s denuded and decimated mangroves would reappear and regreen the new coastline, wherever it ended up being.

As for Jakarta’s best known icon, Monas, the destabilizing ground would see even this hubristic testament to one man’s pride topple. In fact, fast-forwarding tens of thousands of years after our imaginary spaceship incident, the only testament to the urban sprawl that was Jakarta would probably be the man-made, and as yet nonbiodegradable, complex polymer plastics that humanity has churned out around one billion tons of since World War II.

Maybe 100,000 years hence, microbes will have evolved the enzymes needed to break down our plastic gift to the planet, but until then those BlackBerry casings, Hero shopping bags and even the pen I’m writing this with will be the longest surviving human artifacts and the only things that remain to indicate a human presence when all other vestiges of our lives have long since been blown to the four winds.

In this apocalyptic context, the recent Situ Gintung dam burst disaster is a metaphorically perfect embodiment of our precarious position here on this swampy floodplain. Scary stuff, I know, but look on the bright side, at least we will get to go on a spaceship.

Simon Pitchforth has lived in Jakarta for 12 years. His Metro Mad Jakarta blog is at metromad.blogspot.com.

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