SIEMENS

The little boy is standing in a wastewater ditch. He holds a duckling in his arm that he carefully presses to his small chest. His feet are submerged in a mixture of mud and old plastic bags, and behind him extends a squalid cemetery. Garbage has piled up between the graves where chickens poke around in the muck. Children use this place as a playground, and although they happily romp around the mud hills, their voices sound as if they’re packed in cotton in the oppressive midday heat. A putrid breeze blows in from a nearby river and the stench mixes with the clove scent of the Kretek cigarettes several men are smoking as they stand around their makeshift huts.

There’s a bizarre idyllic atmosphere at the moment in the Cawang slum, which is located in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta — a city of ten million. The rainy season will soon begin, however, and monsoons will descend upon the megacity with all their might. The small river will then be transformed into a raging current that will plunge the slum into misery. Hundreds of people will lose their makeshift dwellings — and if things get really bad, as they did during the great flood of 2007, dozens will also lose their lives. But regardless of whether or not the cemetery gets some new residents, the people in Cawang are likely to take it all in stride.

“We’re used to facing existential challenges every day,” says Oyo, the district chief. “We’ve also learned to adapt to any situation.” Oyo is a 55-year-old man with haggard features. He represents the interests of the people in the slum by acting both as a point of contact and as the inhabitants’ spokesperson.

Oyo has lived in the slum his whole life and is very familiar with the problems the people face there. Water has always been the biggest threat, Oyo explains, but he doesn’t just mean the annual floods, which he says the people here are more than capable of dealing with. When things get really rough, they climb up on the roofs of their huts and wait until the threat has passed. Clean drinking water, on the other hand, is a major issue throughout the year. “Families get their water from the river or else dig makeshift wells,” Oyo says. “However, even the groundwater is yellow and stinks.”

Even boiling water couldn’t help after the last disaster, which flooded more than 60 percent of Jakarta and dramatically raised the water levels in Cawang to six meters above normal. “Many of us got very sick,” Oyo recalls.

Since then, however, the situation in the Cawang slum has improved. A small water treatment unit donated by the Susila Dharma Indonesia aid organization and the SkyJuice Foundation after the huge flood is now making a fundamental difference. Known as a “SkyHydrant,” the unit was developed by Rhett Butler, a Siemens engineer from Australia. It uses ultra-fine membrane filters to remove virtually every trace of sediments and pathogens from water (see "Mobile solutions for a Thirsty World"). The low-maintenance unit can turn 10,000 liters of contaminated water per day into a highly pure liquid — and it doesn’t require any chemicals to achieve this feat.

Oyo points to a concrete platform embedded in the ground between the huts and wild banana trees. The 1.5-meter cylindrical SkyHydrant has been placed on the platform. Next to it stands a large plastic tank with a faucet. A hose connects the tank to the filter, and a clothesline hangs between the two.

“There are 180 families who get water here for free,” says Oyo. But the water isn’t just used for drinking. Just a few meters away there’s a second faucet; an old woman sits on the garbage covered ground and washes her dishes with the water it provides. There’s also another line that leads to a wooden shed. “That’s our shower,” Oyo says proudly.

The water comes from below the ground. An electric pump brings it up from a depth of12 meters to the SkyHydrant. It’s Oyo’s job to ensure that the small freshwater factory, which can also be operated with rainwater, always functions properly. He cleans it once a month by back-flushing the filters with clear water. The unit has been operating without any problems since it was installed in 2007.The SkyHydrant, which costs approximately $3,500, is more than just a “drop in the bucket” as far as the residents of the slum are concerned.The few liters of clean water it provides each day have significantly improved the lives of the people in Cawang. “For us,” says Oyo, as he lights up a clove cigarette, “quality of life means health more than anything else.”

Seven Million Vehicles. Just a few kilometers from Oyo’s hut, Cawang gives way to a completely different Jakarta. Here, skyscrapers shimmer in the sunlight reflecting seemingly endless lines of cars. This is the “Big Durian,” a nickname given to Jakarta in reference to the exotic but harsh-smelling fruit of the same name. And the moniker fits. There are nearly seven million vehicles in Jakarta, and every day another 1,100 cars and motorcycles are added to the mix. Indeed, according to a recent study by Frost & Sullivan, the city ranked last in a global survey of commuter satisfaction that covered 23 major cities.

The city long ago lost its ability to deal with this motorized onslaught, and the constant congestion is also costly. According to a study conducted by environmental expert Dr. Firdaus Ali from the University of Indonesia, the economic damage caused by traffic congestion costs the city about $3 billion per year — all due to lost hours of productive work and the rising health care costs associated with poor air quality. There are no subways in Jakarta. Traffic is only reduced somewhat by a bus system that entered service in 2004. Walking is no easy matter either, as sidewalks and pedestrian traffic lights are a rarity.

Vini Adini experiences this every day. Adini, like Oyo, was born in Jakarta and has lived here most of her twenty-five years. But unlike slum residents, she lives in a middle class house in a district that doesn’t get hit by floods.

Adini has to deal with quality of life issues as early as 6 a.m. every day, when she heads out to work. “It takes me over two hours to get there,” she says. “If the traffic were normal, I could manage the trip in less than 30 minutes.” Because there’s no public transport to speak of, Adini and her neighbors have organized a car-sharing system. She walks the last few meters and puts on a surgical mask to protect herself against the smog. “If I were to go to sleep and wake up again in 20 years, I’d like to see some trees instead of traffic jams,” she says. “I also wish I could sit under a tree in a park and read a book.”

Sarwo Handhayani is well acquainted with the bitter reality of the “Big Durian” through her work. Handhayani, who was born in Jakarta, is the director of the city’s urban development authority — the Development Planning Board. When she looks out the window of her office in the business district, she sees something similar to what Adini sees — and she’s long since grown tired of the endless stream of cars as well. “It’s going to be difficult to solve the congestion problem without an effective public transport system,” she says. “That’s because everyone buys a motorcycle or car as soon as he or she can afford one.” The problem, says Handhayani, is that the lack of public transport often leaves a great number of people no other choice: “So that’s where we’ve got to start.”

In Search of a Financing Model. Jakarta’s first subway line is scheduled to be completed in 2016. Work will begin in 2012 on an initial section of about 15 kilometers, with additional sections to be built in piecemeal fashion. The city government also wants to expand the bus network and is considering introducing a congestion charge as well.

Handhayani admits that such infrastructure projects are rather costly given the budget restraints Jakarta faces. The city government therefore frequently enters into public-private partnerships with businesses or utilizes World Bank financing models.

Handhayani is also concerned about the flooding problem. “More than 20 percent of Jakarta is below sea level and we’ve got 13 rivers flowing through the city,” she says. “Climate change has also led to an increase in extreme weather in the rainy season, which makes things even worse.” Poverty plays a role as well. Jakarta sinks a few centimeters into the earth each year because of the unregulated extraction of groundwater. In addition, the drains and sewers in the poor districts are often clogged by plastic bags and other trash, so that water often has nowhere to go when the monsoon rains come. “We plan to build more reservoirs to retain water upstream and widen the rivers so that they can take in more water. In addition, we’re also going to build a new dam on the coast,” Handhayani says. This will help people like Oyo to live in harmony with the water in the future.

Even with the huge challenges Jakarta faces, Handhayani can still appreciate the pleasant and beautiful side of the “Big Durian.” “Jakarta is a very pluralistic city with many different ethnic groups and religions,” she says. “And everyone gets along very well despite all the differences.”

Handhayani believes the metropolis has a green future. For one thing, Jakarta plans to reduce its emissions by 30 percent between now and 2030. Indeed the city’s Development Planning Board has teamed up with the German Society for International Cooperation as well as with Siemens to study ways to make this vision of the future possible. The partner organizations compared the Indonesian capital to cities such as Paris and New York in the “Jakarta 21” study and came up with recommendations as to how Jakarta might be transformed into a “world-class megacity” by around 2050.

Good Investment. The organizations determined that achieving this goal will require approximately 1.5 percent of Indonesia’s gross domestic product to be invested in the development of Jakarta each year. The city accounts for around 16 percent of Indonesia’s total economic output. Investment in Jakarta would not only benefit the capital but would also give the entire surrounding region a boost. In other words, such a project would be money well spent, say urban planners, because the Jakarta metropolitan area with its three satellite cities is expected to merge into a giant megacity over the medium term. Some 27 million people will then be squeezed into “Jabodetabek” (Jakarta, Bogor-Depok, Tangerang, Bekasi).

A study conducted for Siemens by the Economist Intelligence Unit also came to the conclusion that the Indonesian capital needs to develop sustainability strategies. According to the Asian Green City Index, Jakarta has a lot of catching up to do in terms of water and waste management in particular. On the plus side, the city stands out as a positive example in Asia when it comes to energy conservation. Government offices, for instance, will be required to cut back sharply on use of electricity.

Despite all the plans, Oyo and his family aren’t getting too excited about the developments to come. In fact, they don’t expect to see any major changes in the immediate future. In any case, their slum in Cawang already not only has many weeds and plants but also little traffic to speak of. And of course, there are also the banana trees, even if the latter are covered with garbage most of the time. Still, Oyo is one-hundred percent certain that a future megacity named Jabodetabek would bring his community at least one thing: “A lot of new neighbors.”