Jakarta, the world’s most populous city, is sinking into the Java Sea

Jakarta is a city at breaking point, overflowing; it seems about to burst at the seams. When it became the capital of Indonesia after independence in 1945, it had fewer than one million inhabitants. Today it is the most populous megalopolis on the planet, with nearly 42 million residents, according to the UN, which includes the peripheral areas of Greater Jakarta in its calculations. In reality, it does not feel like a single city but a succession of metropolises, towns, hamlets, villages and slums laid out one after another with no apparent plan, as if some capricious god had scattered them at random along the northwest coast of Java and, over the years, a vast, brownish urban crust had formed, often capped by a haze of pollution.

Those 42 million people wake up here every morning, go to work, to school, to university, hustle with any street job they can find, and return each evening to their homes while the call to prayer rises in a chaotic-yet-ordered chorus, reminiscent of busy ant colonies. It is as if half of Germany lived crowded into a single city.

The city grew explosively as migrants arrived from rural areas in search of work. It contains futuristic corners with skyscrapers and luxury shopping malls built on fortunes amassed from nickel, copper, oil and palm oil extraction; across the street, however, shantytowns cluster along fetid streams where rats run free beside newborns and the elderly sit around with little to do. “There is no work,” they say.

Inequality is a daily, painful sight, yet even the humblest citizen — the one who rummages through mountains of trash for a few rupiah — smiles with dignity as they bury their hands in filth. Good humor, generally, seems an antidote to overcrowding, to streets choked with traffic and, above all, to the great subsidence.

Because Jakarta is sinking.

Decades of rapid urbanization and uncontrolled groundwater extraction through wells to supply a population without formal piped water have made Jakarta the fastest-sinking city in the world. Land subsides by as much as 25 centimeters a year in some areas. Nearly 40% of the metropolis already sits below sea level. The northern coastal zones face recurring floods, and sea-level rise driven by global warming has worsened the problem. It is perhaps Jakarta’s greatest challenge, and the city has for years tried to defend itself with a system of coastal walls and dikes to which new layers of concrete are repeatedly added, constant dredging when waves overrun the land, and the continual raising of roads in flood-prone areas.

There are places where the race against the tides has become a daily struggle. “At first the floods were small, then they increased gradually,” says Siti Paramita, a 35-year-old woman who lives with her husband and children in Muara Angke in north Jakarta, in a humble fishing settlement on the front line that endures the ocean’s onslaughts. “Sometimes the water reaches the calves, and last year, sometimes up to the stomach.”

Until 2024 she lived in a hut at ground level that flooded constantly. But she benefited from a program launched by the current president, Prabowo Subianto, when he was defense minister in the administration of his predecessor, the popular Joko Widodo. They built stilts to raise families above the water and elevated the area’s roads. “Those whose homes flooded, thank God, now have higher houses,” she says, sitting in the shade beneath her stilt house, a space where she keeps a washing machine, lines of drying clothes, and where her husband shelters the two motorized tricycles he uses to haul kilos of green mussels to market.

Everyone here lives off green mussels. The whole settlement smells of green mussels. The ground crunches underfoot because the streets are carpeted with green mussel shells. The village looks like an island made of mussel shells. They catch them out at sea, cook them on the shore in halved barrels, dump the contents on the ground, and the women sit by the piles of mollusks to shuck them. Siti Paramita can open up to three barrels a day — about 30 to 40 kilos, she estimates by eye — which yields her around 105,000 rupiah (around $5.75).

Dedy Heriyanto, her 37-year-old husband, adds that mussels are also the local secret to fighting the floods. Residents lay down layer upon layer of shells to raise the ground and prevent it from being submerged so they can keep using the paths. “If we simply waited for the water to keep rising, eventually everything would sink,” he says. But he knows it is an uneven battle. “We are up against nature; we will never win. The only thing initiatives like this achieve is to stop the flooding from getting worse.”

The tides that inundate them are not tied to the month or any specific trigger. They occur frequently. In recent days, which have not been especially violent, high waves come each night and where there were once paths, a sea full of floating trash covers them to knee height. It is a filthy liquid that stings bare legs and turns the settlement into a spectral place. Yet residents walk through the water as if it were normal, radios keep playing music, kiosks stay open, motorcycles move with wheels submerged and children splash happily while fat, dark rats with long tails live side by side with people who chat after dinner. “Don’t worry, they don’t bite,” a neighbor smiles. “They’re just looking for food. And when there’s flooding they climb to higher ground.” The highest ground is where the largest number of mussel shells have been dumped.

The government is well aware of the problem and is considering an “integrated” response, says Agus Harimurti Yudhoyono, coordinating minister for Infrastructure and Regional Development, in response to EL PAÍS during a July appearance in Jakarta. He says the capital is the Indonesian city most exposed to sea-level rise and land subsidence. He speaks of the need to “improve the flow” of rivers, to keep them “clean” so water reaches downstream supply networks, the city, its people, and its industries, and to ensure there is no improper land use that jeopardizes river capacity; he acknowledges the “danger” that “constantly hangs over coastal communities.” “Therefore, it is necessary to build dikes, coastal defenses, and retaining walls, even using nature-based approaches such as mangrove protection.”

“It’s very depressing,” says Nabilla Asmaahany, a 24-year-old hairstylist, when talking about these issues on a terrace in Block M, a highly gentrified entertainment area that has gone viral among affluent middle-class youth. She chats with a friend while they enjoy a latte and a matcha latte that together cost what the mussel shuckers earn in a day. She says the city, full of people who only care about money, can feel “superficial.” The upper classes often live oblivious to the problems of the poorest: “They don’t worry because it doesn’t affect them.” Her friend, Thahira Kairunnisa, a 23-year-old ocean engineering student, adds: “The lower class doesn’t have the privilege of worrying about it.”

But people are not silent. Generation Z is known for protesting against the government; last summer those demonstrations left at least 10 dead nationwide and official buildings burned in the capital. Beside Block M, in front of the Prosecutor General’s Office, a protest on August 2 was organized against the alleged corruption of Febrie Adriansyah, the recently resigned deputy attorney general. Police caught him with 74 kilos of gold bars and several million in foreign currency. “I don’t trust the government, not the prosecutor’s office, not the judges,” proclaims Muhamar Fakhri, a 22-year-old student leader. He also speaks of rampant inequality: “I feel it from the moment I wake up.”

Indonesia, the largest economy in Southeast Asia, home to 287 million people, is also a country where differences are raw. Here the richest 1% owns as much as the poorest 55 million, according to a Celios report. This gap is visible in the capital and is at the same time one of the engines of overpopulation — the magnet that draws outsiders.

Greater Jakarta generates around 25% of the country’s GDP, says Ahmad Gamal, professor of urban and regional planning and vice rector at the University of Indonesia: “This clearly demonstrates that opportunities are not lacking; on the contrary: most opportunities are created in Jakarta.”

How those opportunities are structured is another matter.

For decades waves of migrants have settled in low-income neighborhoods called kampungs, which literally means “village.” Some studies claim that 60% of the population lives in these settlements, though official statistics reduce the share of marginal neighborhood units to 7.7%.

Kampungs function as a kind of village within the metropolis. Some have, over generations, evolved to resemble respectable neighborhoods. Others remain mired in filth — no more than boards and corrugated roofs crowded beside fetid, dense bluish-gray canals where residents accept their situation with startling nonchalance: “I’d move elsewhere, but I need the money,” says 37-year-old Yanti Eti. She speaks at the door of her home, where 12 people live overlooking the polluted stream. She was born here, as was her mother.

The conversation ends when her husband growls inside. He has been awakened while resting before his night shift as a mototaxi driver. It is one of the most common jobs among those with almost nothing. In traffic-choked Jakarta, motorcycles have become the queens of the road. And legions of gig-economy workers have begun serving apps like Gojek and Grab, barely scraping a few cents per trip.

Despite various initiatives, Jakarta remains the ninth-most congested city in the world, according to traffic consultancy Inrix. Its residents lose 83 hours a year in traffic jams, and public transport is insufficient to handle the enormous volume of trips — a mismatch, academic Gamal explains, that also causes other problems such as air pollution: “People live where they don’t work, or work where they don’t live.”

Jakarta’s dire situation, beset by multiple problems, led former president Joko Widodo to seek drastic solutions. He proposed starting anew by building a new capital called Nusantara on the island of Borneo. Construction began in 2022, and although the plan is ongoing, ministries have not yet relocated. Meanwhile, the current administration under Prabowo has cut budgets, and some doubt whether the project still has the same support. Time will tell.

“If the buildings and transport are in good condition, I think I would be willing to move there,” says 42-year-old Kiki Puspita Amalia, who could be affected as a worker at the Ministry of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries.

Married and a mother of two, Kiki lives in Bogor, one of the peripheral cities that make up the Greater Jakarta urban mass. Although it is far from her workplace, she finds it worthwhile to live where she does — in a more spacious, affordable area: “Jakarta is too saturated to raise children,” she says. But it forces her to wake at 4 a.m. to do everything on time. She prepares breakfasts, gets ready, adjusts her headscarf and leaves her house for the train station at the hour when the sky lightens with first light. From the commuter train window she watches one neighborhood after another pass while she reads verses of the Quran on her phone in a packed carriage. When she reaches her central station, she still needs to take a mototaxi for the final stretch. It takes her roughly an hour and a half door to door. By car it could take up to three hours, she says. “The traffic is madness.”

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