The City Is Not Broken: Land, Debt, and the Logic of Urban Form in Indonesia

Written with the assistance of an AI

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INTRODUCTION

Colonialism happened in America, Africa, and Asia but they did not take a single uniform shape; it adapted to local ecologies, demography, and economic opportunity.

In the Americas, European expansion produced plantation economies and the trans-Atlantic slave trade; in parts of Africa and the Indian Ocean world colonialism consolidated systems of large-scale servitude tied to maritime commerce; in much of Southeast Asia, by contrast, widespread hereditary slavery did not become the dominant regime—instead a variety of labor and land relations persisted (debt bondage, forced-labor, household servitude, tenant systems) that fit different ecological and political constraints.

The reason for these divergent outcomes is not cultural accident but selection: dominant actors choose the extraction mechanism that yields the highest surplus at the lowest political and logistical resistance under given conditions. Seen this way, the broad form of a society—its political institutions, labor regimes, and spatial arrangements—is a material expression of what secures surplus for the dominant class in that historical moment.

The Externalities

 

Five well-respected experts are mingling in a glamorous fund raising party. An engineer, a city planner, a psychologist, a medical doctor, and an economist.

A father is collecting scraps, pulling a cart, where his daughter is asleep.

“If you strip it down, he’s basically the prime mover in a very inefficient system—high rolling resistance, bad load balance, no mechanical advantage. The energy cost per meter is huge, and the cart adds instability without contributing anything functionally. From a systems perspective, it’s a design that guarantees fatigue and failure.”

His wife, her mother, left them long ago. They've got no shelter to go home to.

“What you’re seeing isn’t an exception, it’s a predictable output of the urban system. When housing supply, zoning, and safety nets don’t intersect, households fall out of the formal grid entirely. Unsheltered families are not a moral anomaly; they’re a planning externality.”

He just doesn't care anymore about anything else.

“That level of detachment suggests affective shutdown rather than emotional processing. After prolonged exposure to uncontrollable stressors, motivation collapses into narrow, instrumental routines. Caring stops being adaptive once the cognitive system concludes outcomes are invariant.” 

His daughter is having a lethal sickness. She has months to live.

“A lethal pediatric diagnosis with prognosis of months usually means the disease has crossed the threshold where curative treatment is no longer viable. At that point, medicine shifts from intervention to trajectory management and symptom control. The timeline is probabilistic, but the clinical direction is already fixed.”

He's working just to get enough money to bury his daughter later.

“He’s allocating labor toward a known, unavoidable future expense rather than consumption or investment. That’s not choice in the classical sense; it’s constraint-dominated behavior under extreme poverty. The labor produces zero long-term economic return, only cost coverage.”

Manufacturing Demand: Urban Growth, Financialized Land, and the Misreading of Housing Needs in Jabodetabek

Written with the assistance of an AI

Introduction: When Growth Stops Explaining Itself

Urban growth in the Jabodetabek metropolitan region is often presented as an inevitable response to demand. Rising populations, household formation, and economic expansion are assumed to naturally translate into the proliferation of new towns, gated communities, and peripheral housing estates. Development, in this narrative, is not only necessary but self-justifying: if units are built and sold, demand must exist.

Yet beneath this apparent progress lies a persistent contradiction.

Housing affordability remains out of reach for large segments of median-income households and housing backogs remain large. Long commutes, spatial fragmentation, and underutilized urban areas coexist with relentless outward expansion. The volume of development continues to increase, while fundamental housing and spatial needs remain unresolved.

This article argues that this contradiction is not accidental. In Jabodetabek, urban growth is increasingly shaped by a feedback loop between financialized land and property markets, policy frameworks that incentivize asset ownership, and developer strategies that rationally respond to these incentives. Within this system, urban planning and development function less as mechanisms to meet functional socio-economic needs, and more as instruments that stabilize and legitimize investment-driven urbanization - resulting in the systematic production of urban space that manufactures demand while leaving core needs unmet.

AI, Productivity, and the Question of Public Good

Written with the assistance of an AI 

Artificial intelligence is often presented as a neutral engine of progress. Faster processes. Better decisions. Lower costs. Higher productivity. The promise is almost mechanical: introduce AI, and prosperity follows.

But productivity alone has never guaranteed public good. And in the case of AI, this assumption deserves closer scrutiny.

What AI undeniably does is create capacity - the capacity to predict, generate, coordinate, and optimize at a scale previously impossible. Whether that capacity improves collective wellbeing is a different question altogether.

To answer that, we must first understand what AI actually costs, how it is financed, and what kinds of value it is structurally incentivized to produce.

“Bencana Alam” yang Tidak Alamiah

 

Menyebut apa yang terjadi di Sumatera belakangan ini sebagai “bencana alam” adalah kekeliruan - atau setidaknya, penghindaran dari kenyataan yang lebih pahit.

Hujan lebat, banjir, atau tanah longsor yang terjadi di tengah belantara tak berpenghuni tidak akan kita sebut bencana. Itu adalah metabolisme alam, proses normal dari suatu sistem yang hidup dan dinamis.

Sebuah peristiwa baru berubah menjadi bencana ketika manusia terdampak. “Bencana” adalah istilah yang sepenuhnya antroposentris. Hujan adalah peristiwa alami; yang menjadikannya tragedi adalah kerentanan manusia.

A World of Abundance, Unequal Access

Abundance Without Equity

We live in an age of unprecedented abundance. Never in human history have so many people had access to so much food, technology, and material goods. Ironically, instead of being told to eat more, millions are now urged to reduce calorie intake. Obesity has become a global epidemic—over 1 billion people worldwide are obese, including 650 million adults, 340 million adolescents, and 39 million children, according to the World Health Organization (2023).

Yet malnutrition persists. In 2022, an estimated 735 million people—nearly one in ten—faced chronic hunger, with the highest concentrations in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and parts of Latin America (FAO, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2023). This contradiction exists despite the fact that the world produces more than enough food: over 9.8 billion metric tons annually (FAO, 2023). Meanwhile, food waste has reached staggering levels—over 1.3 billion tons of food is wasted each year, about one-third of all produced (FAO, Global Food Losses and Food Waste, 2011).

The issue, clearly, is not production capability or production per-se. It is misalignment. We produce more than enough, but the right kinds of food don’t reach those who need them, and too much of the wrong kinds flood areas already oversupplied.

Spatial Abundance, Unevenly Shared

The same logic applies to space. People need it—to live, to learn, to access services, and to rest. But across the world, the spatial environment suffers from two core problems: the spaces created are often not the kinds people need, and they are not located where they are most needed.

Sprawling: An Inherent Trait of New Town Development

We can't expect high density development in our suburbs because sprawling is an inherent trait of Indonesian new town development.

1. Indonesian suburb new town developments are mainly working on a massive area of land bank.
   
   
2. Their business model usually involves buying the land at a very low price and selling it at an extremely high price to allow a high margin of profit. That price are basically not set by market valuation but instead engineered by the developers.

The Human Animals

I overheard the sky said to the sun,

"look at the trees. They seem chaotic but they are very logical.

Now look at them, the human animals, they seem well arranged and established but many times lack of logic and reason. Sometimes none whatsoever.

Pity. They buried too many things deep inside their minds."

The Altar of Wisdom

 
The lines on his serene face silently tell, there were many things that the old man had endured in life. His soft smile tells that he fought well. His sharp eyes tell that the fire is burning bright still inside him.

He was holding the little hand of his grandson, in front of stacks of books, the source of knowledge, solemnly, like in front of the altar of wisdom.

There he prayed. He prayed through the breathes that he took into his lungs, flowed to his blood with every beat of his heart, into the veins of his hand.

"May my grandson have all the needed knowledge and skill and courage to be great at telling lies, to be an expert in fooling and manipulating and exploiting people, and to profiteer out of them."

In Defense of Jaywalking (in neighborhood street)

Have you ever being in a car that passes through a narrow strip of street where people seems to have low sensitivity of the presence of vehicles? They walk close to the middle of the street, they cross without looking, children carelessly stroll, in short, jaywalking.

Especially for the person that's driving, it must be an awkward situation or even stressful. The narrow street becomes even narrower with the presence of the people, the vehicle can only move very slowly, and the driver got to make sure that they don't hit anyone.

This piece would argue that that is exactly how a neighborhood street should be: People walk freely, how they want to walk, without fear of being grazed by motorized vehicles.