Djakarta-The First "Closed City"

Djakarta-The First "Closed City"

Three months ago Lieutenant General Ali Sadikin, the governor of Djakarta, declared that because of the flood of incoming islanders and country people had reached "proportions endangering the safety and order of life in the capital," Djakarta would henceforward be "a closed city to new jobless settlers."

It was the most drastic action yet taken by a great Asian city to try and stem the flow of urbanization.

General Sadikin privately admits that his action, at least for now, has been largely for psychological impact, to try and discourage rather than physically prevent people from coming into Djakarta. ("We cannot, after all, arrest somebody for entering the nation’s capital," he says. "We are trying to reduce the flow, we know we can’t stop it.")

But in Bombay there has been a heated debate over how to create a workable system to actually keep all new migrants out. This has raised legal questions since the Indian Constitution provides for freedom of movement. Other Indian cities are studying Moscow’s apparently successful method of holding its population growth in check through a work certificate system. But this requires an extensive police apparatus to say nothing of the curtailment of civil liberties it implies.

All of which is evidence of the mounting desperation shared by urban planners all over Asia, Africa and Latin America as they are faced with the seemingly insurmountable task of providing water, sanitation, housing, education, transportation, law and order and, above all, jobs, to exploding urban populations.

Even if migration into the cities in the developing countries came to a complete halt, natural population increases at present rates of up to 3 per cent (Djakarta’s is 2.5 per cent) would double the number of urban dwellers by the end of the century. But migration from the countryside is not halting, it is accelerating by the rate of at least 5 per cent a year as population pressures build up in the villages and at least some landless laborers are displaced by the green revolution. So the planners’ desperation seems understandable.