“Climate change, land subsidence, a desire to urbanize, and a sinking city — all these disparate influences coalescing about Jakarta, Indonesia, have resulted in a giant infrastructure project that melds the private and the public in a grand attempt to change the country as a whole.”
My final paper for World Regions and Contemporary Culture with Jared Diamond at UCLA was about a proposed seawall in Indonesia called the Great Garuda. I carried this topic over to other international development classes and cited existing UCLA scholarship from geographers Helga Leitner, Eric Sheppard, and Emma Colven.
This paper breaks down the specific stakeholders. I tracked the funding — who stands to gain or lose? Are there less costly or dramatic alternatives to ease land subsidence? The Great Garuda project also has a postcolonial dimension because a prominent Dutch engineering corporation designed and promoted it, though the scale and hardness of the proposed megaproject would be unlike any in existence domestically.