Globalization, Mega-projects and the Environment

Abstract

The geographical pattern of the expansion of a city has a direct relationship with its environmental quality, particularly water flows and flooding. A key question for urban policy and planning is how to direct these changes in ways that minimize environmental impacts and risks by, for example, steering urban expansion away from forested upland areas or regional aquifers. Answering this question in Asia is made all the more problematic by, first, the tremendous rates of population and economic growth that have focused on a few mega-urban regions (MURs) and, second, the intensity of urban transformations linked to processes of globalization. From the early 1980s the Indonesian government began to attempt to guide the direction of the expansion of the Jakarta MUR ( Jabodetabek) to better ensure its environmental sustainability. The tools used for implementation in the early 1980s could not, however, cope with the advent of a new age of megaprojects and global consumption coming to the region along with the bubble economy of the 1990s and neoliberal policy turn thereafter. With massive flooding an increasingly frequent event in Jakarta, the need for more effective means of guiding urban growth and change becomes ever more apparent.