THE slums of Jakarta have become less obvious. Anyone driving along
the toll roads, with their landscaped embankments and bougainvillea climbing
up the lump-posts of the central reservation, is shielded from a view of
the city's poorer districts. And the tall buildings of the commercial boulevards
hide the shanty towns that have neither running water nor electricity.
The slums are also shrinking as the country fights poverty. According to the World Bank, the proportion of Indonesia's population of 185m that lives in absolute poverty fell from almost 60% in 1970 to 15% in 1990.
Perhaps for this reason, better-off Indonesians arc becoming more exhibitionist. If you've got money, enjoy it. In Jakarta, already a sprawling city of more than 10m people, new suburbs are springing up for the affluent. Along the Tangerang road towards West Jakarta you pass huge boardings advertising: „Modernland: A Home in One“. On offer is a family house with a golf course adjoining. A plot fronting the golf course costs about 1.7 billion rupiah ($835,000). Add the cost of a house to that. At present it takes a four-wheel drive through paddy-fields to see many of the plots, but more than 17.5 have been sold.
It will take 15 years to build the planned 15,000-house estate. Its backers evidently believe Modernland will be a model for Indonesia's future: private power supply, closed drains, Jakarta's first sewage-treatment plant and floodlit, night-time golf. ln January Modernland went public, raising $ 50m in a flotation that valued the company at over $ 150m.
Playing golf, a game invented in Scotland, is now a sign in Indonesia that you are doing well, as it is elsewhere in Asia. At the end of 1992, greater Jakarta had ten golf clubs, four of which were public courses. By the end of 1993, another six golf clubs will have opened, some alongside housing estates. The 1,200-hectare (3,000-acre) Pantai Indah Kapuk estate, in West Jakarta, has sold half the housing lots surrounding its golf course, while the nearby Bumi Sarpong Damai estate of 6,000 hectares also has its own course.
Yet the poor remain, many of them.The average income in Tangerang district is only 1,45m rupiah a year, enough to buy three square metres of Modernland's cheapest plot. Modernland's first residents have built high walls around their houses, topped with broken glass.
The Economist, 6.2.1993
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