Celebrating its 483rd anniversary on Tuesday, Jakarta may be battered — by pollution, a history of strife, strained infrastructure — but it remains the nation’s beating heart. Looking for opportunity, education, employment and a better life, masses of people head for Jakarta. The city is a magnet for the hopeful and the place where the well-connected build and maintain their empires.
It must always have been so. Originally a trading por t on the Ciliwung River, it was home to the last Hindu kingdom of West Java in the early 1500s. The founding date, June 22, 1527, marks the victory of the Muslim leader Sunan Gunungjati, fighting as Fatahillah, over the kingdom of Sunda Kelapa and its Portuguese allies. He renamed the city Jayakarta, “victorious city.” Later fought over by the British and the Dutch, it became Batavia when the Dutch colonizers sought to create an Amsterdam in the tropics.
And Jakarta was, of course, the crown jewel of a new nation after independence. Always home to a multicultural mix of peoples, Jakarta is Betawi and Javanese and every other culture of these islands. It is Chinese and Indian and even European. It is the symbol of Indonesia’s long struggle for a tolerant and open society.
Fireworks have already marked the beginning of a month-long Jakarta Great Sale taking place to mark the birthday in the city’s shopping malls. There are street fairs, athletic events and cultural activities planned.
Some residents are also pausing to consider the city’s sometimes cruel past. The Wisata Masup Jakarta group has organized a walking tour of old Jakarta to remember the massacre and banishment of Chinese residents there by the colonial government in the 1740s.
Despite anti-Chinese violence in 1998, in today’s Jakarta, ethnic tensions seem largely a relic of a distant past. The city is at peace and facing a great many issues with relative unity.
“My hope lies in Jakarta’s residents,” Jakarta Governor Fauzi Bowo told the Jakarta Globe. “Don’t just grumble… Try to think of positive contributions you can make for Jakarta.”
Taking the occasion of the anniversary to imagine a better future for our dynamic but environmentally fragile city, we try to articulate that vision with a special section titled Green Jakarta.
Our reporters found everyday citizens who are responding to Fauzi’s message. Whether through local recycling efforts or the kind of life-saving work that Irwansyah, a neighborhood head in the riverside slum of North Petojo, has undertaken to bring basic sanitation to his community, there is no doubt that Jakartans are pitching in to build a better city.
The struggle for the city over its next many birthdays will be to harness the resources, creativity and talent that have made Jakarta one of Asia’s great cities to also make it livable and sustainable.
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