Urban development and national growth

This was made by reading an article from Zahn,Markus ( www.urban-is.com)

City planners in Indonesia are more aware that making a better cities affect very much to other parts of the vast nation. And to do this, they have to manage a huge problem which often looks small. Kampungs! Where 60-70% of the city population live. Defined by literature that desa is a kinda suburban living area in rural places, but Kampng is that of a suburban living area in the city. Now back to the first question before we go any further. Cities development can really effect the rest of the nation. I always that rural areas had the bigger role.lets try to peel this banana first okay.

Here’s a nice article I found. It was made by the USAID, you can see it at www.usaid.gov. All this time they’ve been focusing more on rural areas, but now it looks like they are paying a lot more attention on urban areas. Now define urban! Well, there is no single universal explanation for this, it oculd mean administrative borders to one country, an area where most of the population generate income from non agriculture sectors, and it could also be seen from the very high density areas. Well in this article, they use the term “urban” as an area where more than 2/3 of the population get income from non agriculture sector.

Now why urban? First thing is that urbanization, people moving to bigger cities can not be avoided. This is because, like you think, theres more money in the city. Yeah it gets more crowded and poluted and all that. But it turns out theres a benefit to it too actually.

Economic growth is always linked to urbanization. Growth of urbanization makes growth of agriculture surplus.how? because it triggers higher commercialization of agriculture. People who live in the city are still people! They need food. Food is something you can sell for good money when you sell it to the city. Therefore agriculture grows for this higher commercial reson.

And due to increased aglomeration, bussinesses get closer together, factories, and other things do too. Therefore it makes production easier and products cheaper, they can make more, many people get jobs, and so the cycle goes. So the conclusion: urbanization helps the life in the rural areas, and it really does in a way generate national economic growth.

So now we are more opened to the urbanization, we need to figure out all that complicated problems that always follows it. Like usual, housing, water, slump areas, sewerege and so on. There are millions of researches and theories about this, if you print it all out, you can stack it until it reaches the moon and back. But this time lets start from something more Indonesian. A research of urban management with the approach of Kampungs. Kampungs are formed very naturally and has the most traditional influence in the city, things and ideas they brought with them from their home rural areas. Therefore, to understand how to manage kampungs and cities in Indonesia as a whole, we need to find out more about the natural formation of cities in Indonesia.

The Author, Zahn, tried to start from a pragmatic approach. To see the connection between past, current situation, and future. So the developed urban area can have a strong character and link to its past history and context within the natioan. The research looked at 2 major cities in Java. Yogyakarta as an inland developed city, and Semarang as a coastal developed city. They both had multiple layer of influence in the urban fabric. Local layer: Javanese and Hindu influence, second layer, the Asian layer: influenced by Islamic and chinese influence, third layer, the colonial layer: influenced by the dutch/western architecture, and the top layer is the modern/post colonial layer where Indonesia developed as a free nation.

The things observed in the city included

1.Urban solids

2. Urban forms

3. Urban spaces

4. Urban systems, and

5. Urban values

Now, what did they do with these findings from the research? They made a model of the these two cities, describing the main characters of it and the history of its formation, and they, in a way, scaled it down to urban and kampung scale and overlayered it with the original pattern of the Kampung or urban area. It turned out to be much easier to get a direction as in how to develop this, but ofcourse they still needed to work out detailed problems in the design.but it proved to be marvalous simple aproach. Now Indonesia and Switzerland has developed a soft ware call INDOSITY , a program to make models of cities, to help urban planners and designers overlay problems, hundreds of parameters, and physical stuff to predict how things will work out. Kinda like playing Sims city, but in a more professional way.hehe.Thats all for now folks,cu later.

By the way, please fill in comments if you like. I’m not a good writer yet, so I hope to get many critics;p