YOGYAKARTA- The growth of urban people from year to year is increasing, particularly if compared with the growth of rural people. The rural population started to get stagnant/stable between 1980-1990 and decreased between 1990-2000.
“If this tendency continues, and it has been proven, then the urban population has exceeded the rural population in 2010,” said the lecturer of Regional Development study program Dr. M. R. Djarot W., M.Sc, in his scientific speech during the 47th anniversary of the Faculty of Geography on Wednesday (1/9).
Drawing a conclusion from this fact, it can be said that the start of the third millenium is a momentum of the establishment of urban (industrial) civilization in Indonesia, leaving behind the agrarian, rural nature which is the prototype of the Indonesians since the early to the middle of the 20th century.
Djarot explained that the urban development process in Indonesia is an extraordinary process, though the urbanisation level in the past 80 years has not ranked Indonesia the highest in Southeast Asia (still below Malaysia and the Philippines).
“In less than one century, the number of urban population in Indonesia has grown immensely, around 30 times or less than 3 million in 1920 to almost 90 million in 2000,” he added.
Indonesian urban population in 2000 is almost the same with the total population of Malaysia and Western Thailand, or excedding the people of the Philippines, or almost silimar to the population in three Western European countries, France Belgium dan Dutch.
Seen from the aspect of financial distribution, the Indonesian urbanisation process is concentrated urbanisation as over 85% of urban population is centered in Java and Sumatera.
“The process of concentrated urbanisation was obviously not detached from political and economic policy made by the New Order government and the entrance of political and economic influence and technology development at that time,” Djarot said.
Djarot added that the open economic policy of the New Order has effected the easy entrance of global influences to Indonesia; while centered political-economic policy resulted in Jakarta and othe major cities as centres of (economic) development.
On the other hand, according to Djarot, the formation of huge urban areas such as Greater Jakarta, Surabaya and its satellite cities, Bandung and its satellite cities; the high population growth; the emergence of new cities whether as autonomous cities or regency capitals, the development of rural urbanisation process in major corridor of the highly populated Java due to the betterment of transport and communication means. “This process of urbanisation very intensively takes place in areas experiencing mega urbanisation process and rural urbanisation,” he described.