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A Model of Indonesian City Structure
Larry R. Ford
Geographical Review
, Vol. 83, No. 4. (Oct., 1993), pp. 374-396.
Stable URL:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0016-7428%28199310%2983%3A4%3C374%3AAMOICS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-M
Geographical Review
is currently published by American Geographical Society.Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtainedprior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content inthe JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/journals/ags.html.Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers,and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community takeadvantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.http://www.jstor.orgTue Aug 28 16:07:30 2007
 
A MODEL OF INDONESIAN CITY STRUCTURE
LARRY
R.
FORD
ABSTRACT.
With approximately thirty cities of more than a quarter-millionpopulation, including seven with more than one million, Indonesia is a primaryfocus for the study of the city in Southeast Asia. By occupying a position midwaybetween the hyperdevelopment of Singapore and the isolation of Burma, In-donesian cities provide insight into both continuity and change in the region.A morphological model identifies political and economic trends that influenceurban form through time. Based chiefly on large, coastal provincial capitals, themodel applies in some degree to all cities in Indonesia.
I
NDONESIA is the fourth-largest country in the world, with an area ofalmost 2 million square kilometers and more than 185million inhabitants.More than 50 million Indonesians are classified as urban, a figure that isexpected to increase to more than 70 million by 2000. It is estimated that in1992 Indonesia had seven urban areas surpassing one million people andtwenty-two other cities with populations in excess of 250,000 (Sensus pen-duduk 1990).Many Indonesian cities have been expanding very rapidly inrecent years, with a few exceeding a growth rate of 6 percent annually. Animportant limitation in examining urban trends outside the largest cities isthat only fifty-foururban places, a small minority of the total, have municipalstatus, which means that they are the only ones with official boundaries andpopulation counts. Most population clusters, even some with more than100,000 people, are still categorized as
desas,
or collections of villages, andlack local government. They are administered from the provincial or higherlevel of authority. In 1980,Indonesia had an estimated three hundred urbanplaces with more than 20,000 people (Hamer, Steer, and Williams 1986).Inother words, if anything, the degree of urbanization in Indonesia isunderestimated.Indonesia is not a homogeneous country: diversity includes numerouscultural groups and a territory that is a vast archipelago. Its cities reflect thisdiversity. On Javaand Sumatra urbanization dates back to the eighth century
A.D.,
when Srivijaya,near present-day Palembang,was the center of a tradingempire on the Strait of Malacca. For the next
five
centuries, various inlandsacred or palace Hindu-Buddhist cities dominated the islands that constituteIndonesia (Reed 1976). Mataram, Kediri, Borobudur, and, more recently,Jogjakarta and Solo are examples of the once Indianized, but now Islamic,cosmic cities on Java alone. Traditional, religious-inspired urban form stillcharacterizesa fewsettlements, most notably the sultan's capitalof Jogjakarta,
--
-
DR.
FORD
is a professor of geography at San Diego State University, San Diego, Cali-fornia
92182.
Copyright
O
1993
by the American Geographical Society of New York
 
375
ODEL
OF
INDONESIAN CITY STRUCTURE
and this form is also a feature of some coastal trading cities that are nowcommon throughout the urban hierarchy.Most of the large coastal cities are provincial capitals. Given the far-flungand disconnected physical geography of Indonesia, the role of regional cen-ters is especially important, from Medan in North Sumatra to Manado inNorth Sulawesi. The central government has long been caught in a dilemmaover the role of these disparate capitals. On the one hand, the most efficientway to control an effective national territory in a new and somewhat arbi-trarily defined country is to create a system of dynamic, reasonably auton-omous cities. They would provide the needed infrastructure to help spreadthe fruits of economic development throughout the country and wouldminimize the core-periphery problem of hypergrowth in Jakarta, the nationalcapital. On the other hand, Indonesia has long been reluctant to encouragetoo much regional autonomy because of troublesome secessionist move-ments, especially in the country's remote extremities (Drake
1989).
The cen-tral government carefully controls linkages such as international air routesand trade patterns, although in recent years this grip has loosened to thebenefit of regional cities.There are many pros and cons in the development of strong regionalcapitals, and ideological positions play an important role. In recent years,the central government has strongly favored more regional autonomy andeconomic equality, so numerous smaller cities are growing. The number ofcomplicated governmental regulations that encourage, or even require, in-dustries to locate at or near Jakarta in order to interact with decision makershas been reduced. Financing procedures have been deregulated and liber-alized, and banking has become nearly ubiquitous because foreign banks arenow free to open branches in cities other than Jakarta. As a result, manyregional centers are now expanding more rapidly than is the capital. Medan,for example, is one of the fastest growing major cities in the world, andmany of the smaller, resource-rich cities on Kalimantan and Sulawesi arebooming as well.Relatively little is known about the form and structure of Indonesiancities. In view of the increasing importance of urban Indonesia, I propose amorphological model that can shed light on the processes shaping them.Models have a way of developing a life of their own as they are reproducedthrough the years. T. G.McGee
(1967)
used the phrase "generalized diagramof main land use areas" rather than the term model to describe SoutheastAsian urban form. Although I am fully aware of the shortcomings as wellas the heuristic value of such models, I propose one specifically for Indonesiancities to generalize about the components of urban morphology and theprocesses affecting their spatial arrangement and to initiate theoretical dis-course. Morphological models are meant not to be finished products orempirically accurate representations but rather to serve as frameworks forasking questions.
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reply03 / 09 / 2010
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