Are ‘sea cities’ a solution to the alarming problem of rising sea levels?
Coastal areas have experienced fast population growth due to their marine-based attractiveness as places to live, work, and visit. Today, approximately 53 percent of the global population lives in coastal areas in over 4,285 coastal cities and agglomerations across the world. This trend will continue as the recent World Urbanization Prospect (UN-DESA, 2019) projects that by 2050, approximately 70 percent of populations will live in cities. The scale and speed of the urbanization process on the coast generate changes in land use that have never been seen before, which in most cases, cause serious damage to dynamic but fragile coastal-marine ecosystems and also lead to social conflicts.
In addition to these sustainability issues, sea-level rise (SLR) has become the most alarming aspect of anthropogenic climate change. This has been exacerbated by urban development along the coast and has significantly affected the livelihoods of billions of people living in coastal regions, particularly within the Asian megacities
This article introduces the concept of ‘Sea Cities’ to emphasize a range of tactics to acknowledge the relationship between the sea and cities. This concept is critical for the possibility of integrating future aquatic-based urbanism to address climate change, and in particular, the issue of rising sea levels, which is currently faced by the majority of coastal cities.
This study employs a case study approach, for which Jakarta has been selected for several reasons. First, the city has been experiencing continual pressures from various issues associated with metropolitan coastal cities. These include high population growth and massive land conversion to urban use, leading to detrimental effects on Jakarta’s coast. Secondly, the city is subject to the impacts of climate change, particularly floods and SLR. At the same time, the land is sinking due to excessive underground water exploitation. Third, the government of Jakarta has undertaken several programmes and projects to address the issue of urban floods and SLR, which have been reported in scholarly literature.
This study aims to understand the underlying factors for each tactic in the case of Jakarta, rather than aiming to select the most suitable tactic. As part of the assessment at the strategic level using a sea cities perspective, this study uses the qualitative analysis of various data sources. To understand the prospects and pitfalls of each tactic for Jakarta, data and information were obtained from secondary sources, peer-reviewed scholarly literature around the issue in Jakarta, official government reports and documents as well as policy briefs assessment to further discuss three basic questions: (a) which tactics can be released by governments at the national level. Towards the end, the paper elaborates this to enable Jakarta to develop sustainable strategies to reduce the impacts of flooding and future SLR? (b) Which tactics open more opportunities for Jakarta? (c) What transitions are needed for Jakarta to take up these tactics? The Sea City concept helps to develop a more comprehensive and long-term oriented way of thinking.
This study concludes that approaches oriented towards massive hard structural solutions are not only insufficient but also ineffective for solving Jakarta’s problems in the face of climate change challenges, especially the rising sea level. A more integrative and interdisciplinary approach is needed, in which the sea is viewed as a potential space for the extension of urban development in Jakarta. The Sea Cities concept is very useful for diagnosing this problem. This analysis shows that the combination of accommodating and floating tactics has never been considered a possible solution to SLR in Jakarta. The combination of these two tactics needs to be considered for the future development trajectory of Jakarta. Sea cities can become a new framework for the development of coastal cities. The concept of sea cities operates on the premise that the sea is an integral part of our future.
Article details:
Extending Urban Development on Water: Jakarta Case Study
Rukuh Setiadi, Joerg Baumeister, Paul Burton, Johanna Nalau
First Published August 23, 2020 Research Article
DOI: 10.1177/0975425320938539
From Environment and Urbanization ASIA