I used to spend a lot of time in Jakarta for work, and it's an underrated city. Yes, it's hot, congested, polluted and largely poor, but so is Bangkok.
Public transport remains not great, but it's improved a lot with the airport link, the metro, LRT, Transjakarta BRT. SE Asia's only legit high speed train now connects to Bandung in minutes. Grab/Gojek (Uber equivalents) make getting around cheap and bypass the language barrier. Hotels are incredible value, you can get top tier branded five stars for $100. Shopping for locally produced clothes etc is stupidly cheap. Indonesian food is amazing, there's so much more to it than nasi goreng, and you can find great Japanese, Italian, etc too; these are comparatively expensive but lunch at the Italian place in the Ritz-Carlton was under $10. The nightlife scene is wild, although you need to make local friends to really get into it. And it's reasonably safe, violent crime is basically unknown and I never had problems with pickpockets (although they do exist) or scammers.
I think Jakarta's biggest problems are lack of marketing and top tier obvious attractions. Bangkok has royal palaces and temples galore plus a wild reputation for go-go bars etc, Jakarta does not, so nobody even considers it as a vacation destination.
duffyjp 11 hours ago [-]
I was there ~20 years ago. I had made friends with some Indonesia students in college and joined them on a trip home. We were mostly in Surabaya, but did spend some time in Jakarta as well. We had a great time.
The language is a hidden gem, you can learn enough to get around on the flight over which I can't say about any other SEA language. Phonetic spellings, Latin alphabet, no tonal sounds, dead easy grammar and a million loan words you already know.
Jakarta is definitely for the adventurous though, and you had better have an iron stomach.
asmosoinio 9 hours ago [-]
> ...which I can't say about any other SEA language. Phonetic spellings, Latin alphabet, no tonal sounds, dead easy grammar and a million loan words you already know.
Nitpick: Sounds a lot like Tagalog (Filipino), another SEA language.
duffyjp 8 hours ago [-]
I've never studied it, but my understanding is that like Japanese, Tagalog has the pitched/stressed thing going on. My wife is Japanese and holy cow I can't tell the difference. Bridge or Chopstick? No idea, they sound exactly the same to my ears...
I'm pretty fluent, but my pronunciation was as good as it's gonna get like 10 years ago which is a frustration.
throwaway2037 7 hours ago [-]
In Japan/ese, the pitch/stress thing is overrated, and so are regional language differences. When natives point it out to me, it strikes me a little more than cultural gatekeeping. Linguistic context matters much more. How often are you listening to your own native language and you are confused by two words that sounds similar (like 'hashi' in Japanese for bridge/chopsticks)? Almost never. Advice: Ignore it when natives that criticise your pronunciation. Ask them how is their German or Thai is... and they will freeze with shame.
Where I come from, to criticise a non-native speakers accent or small grammatical errors (that do not impact the meaning) is a not-so-subtle form of discrimination. As a result, I never do it. (To criticise myself, it tooks many, many years to see this about my home culture and stop doing it myself.) Still, many people ask me: "Hey, can you correct my <language X> when I speak it?" "Sure!" (but I never do.)
Muromec 5 hours ago [-]
>How often are you listening to your own native language and you are confused by two words that sounds similar
It confuses the hell out of me when non-natives misplace stress in Ukrainian and use wrong cases. It's that I want to gatekeep, but above certain rate of mistakes it's just difficult to follow what is being said.
BlaDeKke 2 hours ago [-]
Since the war, we have a lot of Ukrainians at our Flemish school. We just make it work, no time for gatekeeping.
throwaway2037 1 hours ago [-]
> We just make it work, no time for gatekeeping.
This is nice to hear. A real win.
Real question (because it took me, sadly, too long to learn it as an adult): Why don't they gatekeep? Do you think there is compassion for those who fled war in Ukraine, so people are more forgiving about linguistic and cultural differences?
bugglebeetle 2 hours ago [-]
Japanese actually has a much smaller set of phonemes (~half as many as English), resulting in extensive homophones. When combined with its greater tendency toward ambiguity, correct use of pitch can actually have a larger impact on intelligibility, as compared to many other languages.
throwaway2037 1 hours ago [-]
I swear there must an LLM that posts these types of replies. No matter what anyone says about Japan language or culture, someone will pop into the conversation with "acckkkshually...".
I can tell you from (thousands of) first hand experiences watching non-naive speakers of Japanese for many years: It doesn't matter nearly as much as locals want you to think it matters. Sure, the homophone thing is real, but Japanese people adapt their style of speaking depending upon the audience. (Japanese language and culture is highly context sensitive.) I hear it often when people pick and choose their words carefully in an attempt to reduce confusion around homophones. As a non-native speaker, when I am trying to use a relatively rare term that the speaker doesn't expect me to know, I slow down, use my hands a bit, and toss out some synonyms or brief explanation of the term I am trying to say. On the whole, Japanese people are excellent listeners, so it works pretty well.
What matters more: Japan has very little linguistic diversity for the size of its nation. Plus, it is an island. My theory (empirically observed): This makes them less able to adapt to non-native speakers. When you try to speak a type of Chinese (there are so many) to a native speaker from mainland China... their brain is automatically wired to heavy accents and different word choices, because their country is so linguistically diverse. As a result, when learning a Chinese language, it is pretty easy to speak with locals. In Japan: It is way harder. Mainland Chinese people really make an effort to understand you. It's no different than a tourist from a different region speaking to locals with a heavy accent ... or a different type of Chinese.
bugglebeetle 46 minutes ago [-]
I speak Japanese and am fully aware of the dynamic you describe, having experienced it many times, first hand. I’ve also been truly misunderstood as a result of the wrong use of accent, difference in dialect, etc.
This all being said, after this interaction, I imagine you would have trouble in any country, with any language, because you seem quite insufferable and boorish.
wahnfrieden 2 hours ago [-]
Says it’s overrated and non semantic… on authority of what? Being foreign to it and not knowing the language, naturally
spacechild1 7 hours ago [-]
Japanese pitch accent actually varies across regions. Some have no pitch accent at all! I think this shows that it's not very important unless you want to sound like a native speaker. I never bothered to learn the "standard" pitch accents but I tend to imitate the Kansai pitch accent of my wife :)
wahnfrieden 2 hours ago [-]
Kagoshima where there is no pitch accent is like a different language entirely though, and nearly unintelligible
numpad0 40 minutes ago [-]
Native Kyushu conversations are literally unintelligible to me as a Japanese speaker. There are actually numerous Japanese dialects and accents that aren't so mutually intelligible, though of course post-TV generations understand TV Japanese.
That's kind of a secret to how CJK languages are each supposedly being a unique linguistic isolates: the rest of the families are hiding in the "dialects".
Squealer2642 8 hours ago [-]
Both are Austronesian languages
Loughla 5 hours ago [-]
>Jakarta is definitely for the adventurous though, and you had better have an iron stomach.
I love, love, loved backpacking across quite a bit of southeast Asia. I did not like the massive gastrointestinal problems nearly the entire time though.
I spent big money on four things for that trip: the flight, shoes, backpack, and toilet paper. I would've killed and eaten someone to get my hands in alcohol free wet wipes.
mmooss 9 hours ago [-]
How did the language end up with a Latin alphabet?
itake 9 hours ago [-]
Same as Vietnam: No dominate written language at the time of European Colonialization.
rafram 9 hours ago [-]
Sort of. Indonesian had Jawi, based on the Arabic script. People in today's Vietnam mostly wrote in Chinese AFAIK. Those methods of writing were dominant among the people who could write. But the populations were mostly illiterate, so it was easy for colonial administrators to supplant the existing writing systems with Latin as they introduced European-style schooling.
eaksa 5 hours ago [-]
Despite its name, Jawi wasn’t used all that much in Java – it had always been more popular in the Malay peninsula. Java, as with many parts of Indonesia, used Brahmic abugidas descended from the Pallava script of Southern India (just like the Thai and Khmer scripts). Latin was chosen to write the Indonesian language for the same reason Malay was chosen as the language’s base: it was a politically neutral choice to unite a diverse archipelago.
faizmokh 26 minutes ago [-]
Jawi is also not popular nowadays among the malaysian malays.
Every now and then it will pop up in the news due to politicians using it as a tool to cause racial divide.
mc32 3 hours ago [-]
Vietnam adopted the Latin alphabet from a missionary of some sort a couple of centuries before they were colonized by France --at the time Vietnam was decolonizing from China. The French made some modifications to how the alphabet was used to represent their phonemes.
8 hours ago [-]
LAC-Tech 8 hours ago [-]
How well do Chinese characters mesh with Vietnamese?
I mean I note that there are some Chinese languages, with millions of speakers, where the largest written text they have is a bible written in a Roman script. If those are a challenge surely Vietnamese must be as well.
wisty 4 hours ago [-]
Like Korean and Japanese it has a different grammar and vocabulary. Japanese added a bunch other characters and Korean just made up a new (phonetic) script.
> No dominate written language at the time of European Colonialization
Vietnamese used to be written using Chinese orthography just like Japanese.
The French forcibly cracked down on this form of orthography, and following independence, later modernists attempting to copy Ataturk along with latent Sinophobia due to the Chinese colonial era meant this for of orthography has largely been relegated to ceremonial usage.
A similar thing happened with Bahasa Indonesia, as Indonesia's founding leadership was more secular and socialist in mindset compared to neighboring Malaysia where Jawi remained prominent because of the Islamist movement's role in Malaysian independence.
xvedejas 7 hours ago [-]
Another factor is that literacy rates were very low before colonization, in Vietnam to read or write using Chinese characters was never a broadly known skill (outside of the elite). This is a pretty big contrast to Japan, which had double-digit rates of literacy during the same era.
throwaway2037 7 hours ago [-]
One word: Colonization
celloductor 6 hours ago [-]
most SEA languages are similar btw
itake 10 hours ago [-]
I spent a month in Jakarta earlier this year and wasn't impressed.
Traffic was terrible. I almost missed my flight due to taking a bike over a car, but then it started pouring rain and I had to huddle under a bridge while I waited for a car.
Jakarta has a noise problem. The temples blasting the prayers is disruptive to sleep and inner peace. The traffic does not make anything either.
Also, Indonesian food IMHO is at the bottom of SEA food culture. MY has wayyy better food (both in quality and diversity).
darkwater 10 hours ago [-]
> Also, Indonesian food IMHO is at the bottom of SEA food culture. MY has wayyy better food (both in quality and diversity).
Agreed! Malaysia is really underrated, or at least it was by me. Now it's one of my favorite spots in the world, food is great (not as Thai's but comes close), wonderful sea, wonderful jungle, Kuala Lumpur is becoming a really nice city and CoL is value for money.
itake 9 hours ago [-]
The teh tarik tea (served in a glass mug! paper cups don't count) is my favorite drink right now.
Also Malaysian Indian food is one of my favorite foods (especially the sweet roti).
cholantesh 5 hours ago [-]
>Also, Indonesian food IMHO is at the bottom of SEA food culture. MY has wayyy better food (both in quality and diversity).
I won't speak for the quality but this seems like an extremely dubious statement. Malay cuisine is certainly diverse, owing to settled migrant populations from other parts of Asia, but they don't have the dizzying array of indigenous cuisines on offer in Indonesia, many of which aren't readily available in Java.
phainopepla2 9 hours ago [-]
> Indonesian food IMHO is at the bottom of SEA food culture
I take it you haven't been to Burma / Myanmar
CitrusFruits 9 hours ago [-]
Having been to both Indonesia and Myanmar, I can say confidently Burmese food is much better. The one exception is the dessert Martabak you can get in Java is to die for.
8 hours ago [-]
petesergeant 6 hours ago [-]
Lived in SE Asia for well over 15 years, and Burmese food is great.
seattle_spring 9 hours ago [-]
???
Burmese food is absolutely delicious. Burma Love in SF, Rangoon Bistro or Burma Joy in Portland. They're some of my favorite restaurants.
phainopepla2 9 hours ago [-]
Burmese food in the US is very different from the food you encounter in the country itself.
izolate 8 hours ago [-]
Not only is Burmese food in Myanmar far better, but even the small, modest restaurants bring out a whole spread of complimentary small dishes (pickles, salads, crunchy snacks, all kinds of delicious little sides) before the main meal. It's just built into the dining culture there, and it's incredibly generous compared to what you see abroad.
fuzzythinker 34 minutes ago [-]
Not sure if it's still there, but Burma Super Star is the one I go to and it's good.
9 hours ago [-]
itake 9 hours ago [-]
haha, I have not.
EB-Barrington 9 hours ago [-]
Nice. I'm an ex-tour guide, and had many jovial discussions with a colleague who toured Myanmar and LOVED the food - he knew I thought it was pretty average, at best.
Of course, that crazy guy didn't really like Thai food...
Affric 7 hours ago [-]
Putting Indonesian below Filipino food is quite something.
itake 6 hours ago [-]
True. I forgot about Filipino food. Filipino bbq pig was good tho
kabes 39 minutes ago [-]
Made me remember again how disappointed I was (food-wise) that time I went backpacking in the Philippines after backpacking in Thailand. Most days we had to choose between dry rice with tasteless fried chicken, or tasteless fried chicken with dry rice.
CuriouslyC 6 hours ago [-]
I'll see anything you get in Indonesia, and raise you Balut... Or Betamax... or Helmet. Their national dish was designed to hide the aroma of rotten meat, FFS.
saagarjha 3 hours ago [-]
To be fair, this describes any sort of preserved or "reuse" food: toast, pickle, …
Affric 5 hours ago [-]
lol... try being in poultry. Every time you go to the Phillipines it's: all Balut, all the time.
throwaway2037 7 hours ago [-]
> Jakarta has a noise problem.
I offer a practical template: <Large city in developing country X> has a noise problem.
When you say "temples", do you mean masjid (mosque)? It is pretty normal anywhere in the Islamic-majority world to sing prayers over a loud speaker a few times a day.
itake 6 hours ago [-]
U.S. cities have noise laws.
I don’t think Tokyo is considered loud.
Yes, temples blasting prayers.
rester324 3 hours ago [-]
I can tell you that Tokyo is very loud. Constant road traffic noise everywhere, drunk people singing on the streets, pointless warnings from the local municipal office on the public alert system, noisy street advertisements, constant announcements in train stations, bousouzoku gangs constantly revving their bikes in silent neighborhoods every night, flight traffic noise, railroad noise of the trains passing, level crossing barriers constantly ding-donging, etc
mc3301 1 hours ago [-]
noisy street advertisements.. and jingles... shops of all shapes and sizes blaring music...
throwaway2037 1 hours ago [-]
Neither the US, nor Japan are considered developing countries. I'm confused by your comment.
3 hours ago [-]
satvikpendem 6 hours ago [-]
This is an appeal to normality fallacy, just because something is normal doesn't mean it's good, or in this case that it doesn't disrupt sleep.
rd07 3 hours ago [-]
A little tip for your next visit to Jakarta :
- Indonesia is a tropical country, and Jakarta is in the vicinity of the sea, so depending on the month of year, it can rain anytime on the day. So, if you are not comfortable with rain, always use a taxi/grab/gocar to go around.
- If you are pressed for time, I suggest you use airport train to go to the airport. At least you won't get stuck on traffic.
- About the noise problem, I think it won't be a problem if you sleep in a tall building. The last time I go there, I sleep in a relatively good hotel and deliberately choose the higher floor. And the noise doesn't become a problem for me.
Hope this help and you can get a nicer experience on your next visit
nrhrjrjrjtntbt 9 hours ago [-]
Rain, noise, traffic... welcome to SEA
askvictor 1 hours ago [-]
Bangkok doesn't have nearly the noise issues of Jakarta; the traffic proceeds without every vehicle beeping most of the time in Bangkok. Also no prayer calls.
paxys 5 hours ago [-]
Man if you think Seattle has too much noise and traffic you should stay away from basically every other mid-large sized city anywhere in the world.
Nition 4 hours ago [-]
I presume they mean South East Asia.
CamperBob2 8 hours ago [-]
The regional abbreviation, or the airport code?
.... what? Either works?
mandolingual 7 hours ago [-]
Seattle's not really known for noise. The opposite, if anything. Rain (caveat it's not the rain it's the dark and it's mostly mizzle blah blah blah) and traffic though, sure.
jasonthorsness 11 hours ago [-]
What is the air quality like to actually breathe in your experience? I have noticed Jakarta on lists of poor AQI and it doesn't look great [1] but I think the AQI number is kind of an abstraction.
I found it probably the worst of anywhere I've ever been, you can taste it and just being outside slightly burns the back of your throat. I still really like visiting though.
itake 9 hours ago [-]
Air quality is terrible. AQI does not lie. It's even worse when you're sitting on the back of a motorbike 6ft away from 10 other gas powered bikes.
There is slow adoption of electric vehicles, but still very low adoption rate (like less than 10% of motorbikes).
thaumasiotes 7 hours ago [-]
> Air quality is terrible. AQI does not lie.
Heh. To get a sense of what the page's numbers might mean, I checked on Kaohsiung, where you can taste gasoline in the air as you walk down the street.
And hey, reported air quality in Kaohsiung is abysmal, so that checks out. Jakarta even looks good by comparison.
AQI appears to have Jakarta pegged at an average "66", which looks pretty respectable for the region. They seem to have much more carbon monoxide than Kaohsiung or Shanghai, but much less fine particulate.
mcmoor 5 hours ago [-]
Hmm it's a bit surprising. Usually when I checked, it'll never be under 100. Maybe the current rainy season helps?
rockskon 10 hours ago [-]
Shame their water is poison.
itake 9 hours ago [-]
and air
vladgur 7 hours ago [-]
This could be a general issue with SE Asia, but one thing that was a breath of fresh air for me as I departed Jakarta from my Bali trip last year was a thought that I no longer need to worry about quality of water being used to wash salad veggies or clean my toothbrush with.
Clean safe water from the sink was definitely not something I experienced in Bali in 2024 and I had the similar impression in Jakart
lofties 6 hours ago [-]
I traveled often between Jakarta and Japan in 2018, 2019 and 2020. The real breath of fresh air for me was literally the fresh air back in Japan. After running around for a week through Jakarta, I would inevitably develop a deep cough and a clogged nose. That said, the people, the food, and as someone else pointed out the nightlife is amazing.
esperent 5 hours ago [-]
Clean safe water from the sink is not something you'll find in most of the world, in fact. It's not just SEA.
So basically it's only safe to drink tap water in western countries + Japan, Singapore, Chile, South Korea, and a few of the rich Arab countries.
I would argue that even the blue areas here would be speckled with lots of non-drinkable areas if you zoomed in, due to old lead piping and so on.
vladgur 5 hours ago [-]
Any idea why that is?
Why is safety of tap water high(I hope) priority in some parts of the world and not the others?
Is it simply the economics of water purification and delivery or something else?
wiradikusuma 2 hours ago [-]
Bottled (mineral) water is a big business in Indonesia. Not sure if "people" are incentivized to change that anytime soon.
esperent 28 minutes ago [-]
I don't think there's any conspiracy like this. It's just economic + (lack of) beauracracy. Installing and maintaining a functioning potable water supply across an entire country is expensive, but even harder is setting and maintaining standards.
stickfigure 4 hours ago [-]
> lunch at the Italian place in the Ritz-Carlton was under $10
I'm curious, what does a beer or a glass of wine cost?
rossriley 1 hours ago [-]
A local beer in a bar will normally be around 60k IDR so $3-4, wine is more expensive generally in SEA you'll normally pay around 90-100k IDR per glass.
wiradikusuma 2 hours ago [-]
Alcohol is more expensive than other countries, in general.
bogota69 10 hours ago [-]
Bangkok is not what you described. Bangkok is a great city, not too polluted, there are not a lot of poor people. Bangkok is like Manila.
I spent a lot of time working is South East Asia. Jakarta is the worst city, yes it is big but very filthy like New Delhi or India in general. Second filthiest is Malaysia.
The cleanest city is without a doubt Singapore.
wraptile 5 minutes ago [-]
I'd take Bangkok over Singapore any time of the day/month/year. There's still a bit of chaos in Bangkok in 2025 but once you spend a few days there and learn how to avoid peak traffic hours and areas it's incredibly charming and charistmatic city with loads of activities and opportunities for all classes of people. Singapore while clean is incredibly dull and characterless unless you're a billionaire.
itake 9 hours ago [-]
> not too polluted
Are we talking about the same Bangkok? I'm talking about the Bangkok in Thailand where they literally shut down the schools due to air pollution being so bad [0].
What Bangkok are you referring to?
Malaysia is wayyy cleaner than Indonesia, both in air quality and trash on the ground.
Bangkok has seasonal haze incidents that can get bad enough to close schools etc. Those are a scourge across all of SEA and are generally caused by slash-and-burn agriculture practices. It's much different from having bad AQI year-round.
I'd hardly say Bangkok is a clean air capital, but it's next to the ocean with no significant mountains nearby so usually pollution gets blown out to sea.
decimalenough 4 hours ago [-]
> it's next to the ocean with no significant mountains nearby so usually pollution gets blown out to sea.
So is Jakarta, and it's still pretty polluted.
decimalenough 4 hours ago [-]
For me Manila is the uncontested worst city in SEA. All of Jakarta's downsides, plus an absolutely horrific airport, worse traffic, extremely limited public transport network (which doesn't extend at all to the places where most business travellers go, namely Makati/BGC), higher crime and more violent crime too (lots of guns around), and worse food.
About the only upside is that most people speak some English, which is manifestly not the case in Jakarta.
darrenf 9 hours ago [-]
> I spent a lot of time working is South East Asia. Jakarta is the worst city, yes it is big but very filthy like New Delhi or India in general. Second filthiest is Malaysia.
Malaysia's a pretty decent size country, not a city. Can't say as I'd have referred to KL as filthy on any of my visits (admittedly only 3 times over the past 12 years). Kuching wasn't filthy either.
thedrexster 7 hours ago [-]
This is such an odd position to create a burner account to argue...
darkwater 9 hours ago [-]
N=1 but my experience with Philippines and Malaysia is exactly the opposite.
moneywoes 10 hours ago [-]
what is the cheapest for a nomad
itake 9 hours ago [-]
Vietnam.
source: I've been to almost every country in SEA at least 3x. (Brunei was once, never went to Timor-Leste).
Check the forex changes and rent prices if you don't believe me.
Harder to factor in is visa costs. Vietnam, you need to leave every 90 days. So you need to buy a $25usd visa + flights/buses + hotels for 3-5 days while you get your next visa. Thailand, you only need to leave every 6mo on the DTV.
Think you mean Delhi NCR? New Delhi is pretty small, and mostly houses political and social elite.
bandrami 6 hours ago [-]
I love that they put all the diplomats in Chanakyapur which would be like Italy putting them on Machiavelli Lane
mandeepj 8 hours ago [-]
> you need to make local friends to really get into it
Well, that might sound like an impossible task!! So, just sign up for Experiences from any of the leading travel portals. They’d get you into any of the local party scenes.
paxys 5 hours ago [-]
So - hot, congested, polluted, no public transit, cheap taxis, cheap luxury hotels, amazing food, fun night activities (but you'll need to know locals). Other than the no crime claim (which I find dubious) you've just described every big city in every developing country on the planet.
markus_zhang 10 hours ago [-]
Thanks for sharing. I’m wondering whether they have a large retro computing market?
10 hours ago [-]
andyjohnson0 9 hours ago [-]
Thanks for posting this. Really interesting perspectives
Whats the food like for vegetarians/ vegans?
decimalenough 4 hours ago [-]
If you're strict or allergic, very difficult. Fish sauces and pastes like terasi and patis are culinary staples on the level of soy sauce and make it into otherwise seemingly vegetarian dishes.
If you're willing to flex a bit and just avoid obvious meat/fish, you'll survive, there's plenty of tofu, tempeh, veg etc. Gado-gado is always veg, nasi/mee goreng, etc.
zppln 8 hours ago [-]
Tempeh is an Indonesian staple and from what I understand pretty popular with vegans.
kgwxd 7 hours ago [-]
Is being an attractive vacation destination necessarily a good thing for a city? They're the biggest city, didn't they "win"?
peyton 4 hours ago [-]
The nightlife is wildest in SEA but definitely for the bold and brave.
markdown 5 hours ago [-]
Sounds wonderful if you're OK with Indonesia's ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing of West Papua.
> Widespread atrocities committed by Indonesian forces have led human rights groups to describe the situation as a genocide against the indigenous Papuan population. Reports of mass killings, forced displacement, and sexual violence are extensive and credible. According to a 2007 estimate by scholar De R. G. Crocombe, between 100,000 and 300,000 Papuans have been killed since Indonesia's occupation began.[19][23] A 2004 report by Yale Law School argued that the scale and intent of Indonesia’s actions fall within the legal definition of genocide.[24] State violence has targeted women in particular. A 2013 and 2017 study by AJAR and the Papuan Women's Working Group found that 4 in 10 Papuan women reported suffering state abuse,[25] while a 2019 follow-up found similar results.[26][27][Note 1][Note 2]
> In 2022, the UN condemned what it described as "shocking abuses" committed by the Indonesian state, including the killing of children, disappearances, torture, and large-scale forced displacement. It called for "urgent and unrestricted humanitarian aid to the region."[28] Human Rights Watch (HRW) has noted that the Papuan region functions as a de facto police state, where peaceful political expression and independence advocacy are met with imprisonment and violence.[29] While some analysts argue that the conflict is aggravated by a lack of state presence in remote areas,[30] the overwhelming trend points to systemic state violence and neglect.
> Indonesia continues to block foreign access to the Papuan region, citing so-called "safety and security concerns", though critics argue this is to suppress international scrutiny of its genocidal practices
Key Facts:
Number of megacities, urban areas with 10 million or more inhabitants has quadrupled from 8 in 1975 to 33 in 2025.
Jakarta is now the world’s most populous city, with nearly 42 million residents. The current population of Indonesia is 286 million.
In 2019, Indonesia said it will be moving its capital to Nusantara, a new city which is under construction.
awongh 11 hours ago [-]
To add some more detail regarding the new capital, Jakarta has some structural governance problems in the sense that it's very hard to improve infrastructure improve / stop the sinking of the city (mostly caused from over reliance on ground water pumping and permitting corruption / bad river management). Those problems might never be solved.
And separate of it's economic power it remains a center of power where the city mayor/governor always becomes a major national political figure.
Indonesia is actually a plurality of distinct island cultures, but with Jakarta, Java and Javanese culture sits at the top of the national political hierarchy. (Not to mention a sort of internal Javanese colonialism similar to the USSR).
The new capital could be part of dismantling some of the legacy internal Javanese power structures.
(To add a further detail re. Java vs. Indonesia, because of the mercator projection it's hard to see how big Indonesia is. It would stretch from Maine, past California almost to Anchorage).
vkou 11 hours ago [-]
New capitals also help prevent revolutions and uprisings. It's a lot easier to have a government that's insulated from the unrest of the masses, when everyone in its capital is loyal to it.
B1FF_PSUVM 5 hours ago [-]
Some say the straight Paris boulevards were intended for cannon grapeshot ...
ghaff 12 hours ago [-]
I also imagine a lot of people who are admiring these megacities have never been to one. Jakarta has oceans of scooters and, when I was there to visit some customers with our country manager, she had a driver. With some exceptions like Singapore, SE Asian cities are horrible to get around.
ecshafer 11 hours ago [-]
Other than Singapore. I am not sure why SE Asian cities aren't going as all in on mass transit like China. Jakarta has a single subway line for 42 million people. They have some light rail line and buses. If you compare this with Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing its really night and day.
lurk2 10 hours ago [-]
The usual patterns that crop up are:
1) Lack of institutional knowledge. No one even knows how to get started and bringing in foreign expertise may be prohibitively expensive.
2) Economics don’t pencil out even in higher income countries compared to BRT systems, especially because high density and heavy traffic means the lines usually have to be grade-separated which adds additional costs compared to an at-grade system.
3) Corruption makes development impossible. No well-established processes for expropriation exist, or the country is given over to clientelism such that landlords won’t give up what they own and hamper the development process via political connections.
BRT is usually the most effective solution in places where grade-separated rail is not yet viable as it allows a right-of-way network to be established that can later be upgraded to rail. This doesn’t solve problem 3, which requires a comparatively authoritarian approach to overcome the incentive problems at play; this is why the Chinese have generally excelled in the space over the last 20 years.
ghaff 10 hours ago [-]
Even in the US, a lot of right-of-ways were taken by the government for rail and, later, highways (which intersected with earlier railroads in many cases) before it would have been as difficult a process as it would be today. Not a political comment so much as an observation that it's harder to just take private land today.
snicky 10 hours ago [-]
For anyone interested in the issues with Indonesian economy, politics and development may I suggest a great book: Indonesia, Etc. by Elizabeth Pisani.
exidy 37 minutes ago [-]
It's a case of better late than never. KL has a reasonable mix of subway, monorail, elevated and suburban rail. Bangkok's above-ground BTS has been very popular and they have been building subways as well. Hanoi has a master plan and has opened its first subway line in 2021 and second in 2024. Manila is also digging subways right now and has wisely called in the Japanese to do it, given that city is simultaneously subject to typhoons, floods and earthquakes.
seanmcdirmid 9 hours ago [-]
The water table surely has something to do with it, but they could put much of it above ground like Bangkok does (erm, Bangkok should be listed as doing ok, even if they aren't doing as well as Singapore).
China built A LOT in the last 15 years. Beijing before 2008 had line 1, 2, a couple of suburban lines (13 and another one out east), and that was it. I don't think any other country has ever built infrastructure so quickly, so it isn't really fair to compare them to China.
ecshafer 3 hours ago [-]
That is a fair argument. China's level of infrastructure development is pretty absurd.
eaksa 4 hours ago [-]
Jakarta doesn’t have one metro line. It has 9 lines which it variously calls light rail, commuter trains, etc. but are metro lines in all but name, in terms of frequency, infrastructure, and service patterns. It’s not quite Beijing or Tokyo, but it’s also not as wealthy as either city.
nerdralph 10 hours ago [-]
KL has subways. Even better is the KL city bus network which is free, air conditioned, and has free wifi. Despite Malaysia being a nominally muslim state, I found it multicultural and tolerant. If it wasn't for the heat and humidity, I'd consider it a great place to retire.
YorickPeterse 5 hours ago [-]
If you leave KL city and go to the surrounding areas, such as Petaling Jaya or Subang Jaya, it becomes more manageable (entering KL from there feels like a 5-10C temperature increase). It gets better the further you go of course, but for tourists that may be a bit tricky as it won't be as easy to get around (at least not without a car).
gorbachev 9 hours ago [-]
KL?
speedyapoc 9 hours ago [-]
Kuala Lumpur
filloooo 11 hours ago [-]
Democratic governments are weak on deficit spending, especially poor ones, the debt from their tiny stretch of high speed rail almost became a scandal.
ghaff 11 hours ago [-]
Probably a combination of overall wealth and government policies/stability/priorities. I'd probably add Hong Kong to the list of cities with pretty good public transit but, overall, it's pretty bad in that area of the world relative to cities that you'd generally consider to be "good."
projectazorian 8 hours ago [-]
Bangkok has built a lot of transit in the past decade, 6 lines on top of an already-substantial existing network. Still plenty of projects under construction as well. This alone puts it way ahead of Jakarta in terms of quality of life IMO.
wdb 6 hours ago [-]
Or electric bikes and cars
alephnerd 8 hours ago [-]
> I am not sure why SE Asian cities aren't going as all in on mass transit like China
Eminent domain and mass demolitions were very common in 1990s-2010s China, and to a degree that I have not seen in other authoritarian and nominally communist states like Vietnam or even Laos, let alone other less authoritarian states.
Entire neighborhoods, villages, and towns were razed to build the urban areas that make up China today.
Beijing [0][1], Shanghai [2][3], and other cities across China [4] all saw massive urban demolitions until the Central Government banned them in 2021 during the Evergrande crisis [5] due to limited utility and rising urban discontent.
Back in the day, it was somewhat common to see news about some random Jie commiting a terrorist act in retaliation for being evicted from their homes [6][7] due to this urban demolition program, and partially helped Xi consolidate power as most officials affiliated with these programs were deeply corrupt, and were often felled during the anti-corruption purges (ironically, Xi oversaw similar initiatives in Zhejiang in the 2000s).
Most other governments don't see the utility of implementing a similar style of program.
In Beijing alone, some activists said more than 1 million people were forced from their homes to make way for new sports venues for last year's Olympics.
Wow...
bwv848 1 hours ago [-]
And don't forget Beijing's forced eviction of tens of thousands of so called 'low end population' in the middle of winter.
And, while you can pick and choose data, Beijing's Olympic stadium is not really very widely used as far as I can tell. Of course you can also debate whether a lot of urban revitalization projects--even if leading to popular settings/venues--were worth the cost to neighborhoods that were basically flattened.
LAC-Tech 8 hours ago [-]
Even in democratic Taiwan they have this mindset to an extent - private land must not stand in the way of infrastructure.
Taiwan's mass urban demolition spree happened towards the tail end of authoritarian rule, and did in fact play a role in garnering mass support for the democracy movement.
After democracy, Taiwan shifted towards trying to preserve traditional neighborhoods or working to normalize unofficial neighborhoods and slums - basically adopting a bottom up instead of top down approach [0]
Everytime I see the ocean of scooters, I wonder how horrible it'd be if scooters weren't invented but instead everyone use cars like in America. Either it'll make the most legendary traffic jam ever or GDP will be cut in half since no one can move anywhere. With our already overcrowded public transport, it's practically the only alternative.
I actually wonder how much better American traffic would be if scooters are more popular.
BurningFrog 1 hours ago [-]
Americans use cars because we can afford them. The Indonesians would too if they could.
geodel 10 hours ago [-]
Hehe. Great point. I have lived and worked in 2 Delhi and Mumbai in India. With such terrible living condition, traffic, pollution and so on it sucked the soul out of me. At least I found it so bad in Mumbai that many a times while leaving from work to hostel, I would literally cry on train platform with massive crowd pushing and shoving from all directions while trying to get into bursting at seams trains.
And this all is 20 years back. During this time thing have gone worse many times over.
Sharlin 11 hours ago [-]
> In 2019, Indonesia said it will be moving its capital to Nusantara, a new city which is under construction.
Because Jakarta is literally sinking into the ocean. It also has a terrible flood problem which is only going to get worse. Doesn’t bode well for the population.
kopirgan 20 minutes ago [-]
Been going there since mid 90s, not that often recently. Seen it change and yet stay the same.. Not cheap anymore but ofc not comparing to Singapore.
Issue is getting around.. For a city of that size + national capital, public transport options very limited. More like HCM or PP than Bangkok or KL.
Comparisons to Thailand inappropriate cos almost no pub culture and "entertainment". Even top end hotel bar like Raffles had near zero choice for wine etc. And lots more expensive.
Wish them well though.. Nicest people, nice memories.
superconduct123 12 hours ago [-]
I'm always surprised how big the population of Indonesia is yet it seems culturally underrepresented in the world compared to a lot of smaller countries
Almost 300 million people but it rarely comes up in the news or pop media
lurk2 10 hours ago [-]
They don’t have a huge culture industry yet (or at least, not one that appeals to English-speaking audiences), but they’ve become a lot more prominent on the internet in the last 5 years due to better infrastructure and integration into various English speaking social networks (via both social media and people travelling in and out of Indonesia).
It’s a Muslim majority country and very conservative, so a lot of the themes you’d find in American film, music, and literature wouldn’t make much sense there, and the media that has commercial potential outside of Indonesia is generally coming from wealthy households that don’t have much to do with how the average Indonesian really lives (Nicole Zefanya being the example that comes to mind).
Indonesians (at least the ones who speak English) are quite similar to Latinos in that they have a desire to be accepted into the English-speaking world not only personally but culturally. This can manifest in attempts to whitewash oneself to fit in, adopting whatever seems to be popular on English-speaking social media, leading to comparatively old trends propagating in these countries.
You saw the same thing with the Chinese and the Koreans back in the 2000s and both developed their own internationally-competitive culture industries, but those were both secular countries already well-integrated into the international system. I wouldn’t expect to see anything quite like that in Indonesia until at least 2030, when more of the digital natives come of age.
stickfigure 4 hours ago [-]
> both developed their own internationally-competitive culture industries
Korea definitely, but China? Seems like most of China's modern cultural export came from Hong Kong, and even that has stopped. Conventional wisdom is that the Three Body Problem couldn't be published today.
I'm curious what (homegrown) Chinese cultural products are internationally competitive today. China seems to be punching far below their weight, considering their population and their economic position.
lurk2 2 hours ago [-]
> Seems like most of China's modern cultural export came from Hong Kong, and even that has stopped.
You’re probably right. I’m just saying that 20 years ago the label of being “Made in China” meant something was cheap and bad. The business culture still isn’t great from what I hear but people are more comfortable than ever buying Chinese products and I’ve been hearing that more exchange students have been going to China to study.
The impression I had of China’s cultural exports was mostly from having seen more Chinese expatriates and immigrants openly engaging with e.g. Chinese music and fashion influencers. This wasn’t particularly common 20 years ago; I started noticing it around 2019.
The other thing I should note is that when I said internationally competitive I primarily meant outside of the Anglosphere. K-dramas are an interesting one because you can find women (it’s almost always women) of all ages from all over the world who watch them. Korean media is not unheard of in the Anglosphere but it is not nearly as popular as it is outside of the Anglosphere.
It’s possible China doesn’t have anything like this yet, and maybe it never will due to being comparatively censorious, but my perception is that sentiment towards China has improved quite a bit outside of the Anglosphere. I haven’t done reading on that; it’s just a hunch.
Apocryphon 9 hours ago [-]
Feels like in the West the only Indonesian movie that got popular is The Raid, which had a Welsh director anyway. And, uh, The Act of Killing which was also made by a Brit.
awongh 9 hours ago [-]
I always thought it was interesting that, I guess due to Arab racism, it's also not very represented in the community of Islam.
Like, Indonesia (and together with Malaysia) makes up a really significant portion of all muslims. As an outsider it still seems like there isn't much cultural overlap- which seems like, even if Indonesian culture wouldn't reach Europe or the USA, at least it would reach to the middle east / north africa because of the the religious link.
I could have drawn some parallels between Catholics and South America, but there's already two Popes that have Latin American roots.
mcmoor 4 hours ago [-]
At least in the two holy cities itself, Indonesia has quite significant pull. Because our pilgrims heavily outnumber lots of other nations. To the point where sellers around the city usually knows a least a word or two of Indonesian.
elgenie 9 hours ago [-]
They're #4 by population, and the world's most populous Muslim country, but are also only a quarter century removed from a corrupt authoritarian regime.
They have very little in the way of exported cultural products ("The Raid" films?), are much worse in sports than would be expected based on population, spend relatively little on their military and don't do much in the way of regional power projection, and are growing economically but not remarkably, so there just aren't that many avenues for them to make international news.
veeti 6 hours ago [-]
The only time I see Indonesia in the news is when some unfortunate soul gets swallowed by a giant snake:
I think it's just because there aren't large immigrant communities in Western countries besides Australia and the Netherlands.
numpad0 9 hours ago [-]
Yeah and... articles like these are reminders that cultural representation as a concept in general is kind of broken. There's no website which topic distribution follows actual distribution of population of the world[1].
Like how many of you can name a Chinese movie or pop star or TV show?
Froztnova 11 hours ago [-]
I also did a double take when I learned that they were Muslim-majority too. It flies in the face of a lot of assumptions.
cdmckay 10 hours ago [-]
Which assumptions are those?
Froztnova 10 hours ago [-]
Mostly just that it's easy for an American (or at least, myself circa several years ago) to assume that the overwhelmingly vast majority of Muslims live in middle eastern countries, and when I first learned that Indonesia was the world's largest Muslim majority country it proved that mental heuristic to be entirely inaccurate.
I suppose it shouldn't be too surprising though, I mean Christianity sure as hell got around too.
flopsamjetsam 10 hours ago [-]
> Mostly just that it's easy for an American (or at least, myself circa several years ago) to assume that the overwhelmingly vast majority of Muslims live in middle eastern countries, and when I first learned that Indonesia was the world's largest Muslim majority country it proved that mental heuristic to be entirely inaccurate.
I live in Australia, and when I was growing up I thought the same, even though Indonesia are a very close neighbour of ours. Indonesia is featured quite a bit in our local news these days, and that together with lots of Aussie tourists in Indonesia, plus lots of Indonesian students studying here, has made us a little more knowledgeable about our neighbours.
bouncycastle 8 hours ago [-]
Also, the Indonesia that most Australians only ever visit is Bali, which is mostly Hindu.
elgenie 9 hours ago [-]
The top five countries in the world by Muslim population are not in the Middle East/North Africa region: Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria.
deepspace 8 hours ago [-]
That's so weird. What do they teach in American schools? Apparently not even basic geography? The fact that Indonesia was Muslim is something I learned very early on - certainly before high school.
lurk2 3 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
Froztnova 7 hours ago [-]
TBH, without going into overmuch detail, I wouldn't generalize from my educational experience to the American educational system as a whole. I think it was better in a lot of ways, and worse in a few ways, than what most people would have received, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were some particular holes in my knowledge due to taking part in multiple curricula from different institutions.
lurk2 2 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
faizmokh 46 minutes ago [-]
Now figure out how Christianity got around in SEA region.
mmooss 9 hours ago [-]
India (also not Middle Eastern) has the largest population of Muslim people, but it is not 'majority Muslim'.
rafram 9 hours ago [-]
Only 20% of the Muslims in the world live in the Middle East.
aruggirello 9 hours ago [-]
It seems things are improving for Christians in Indonesia in 2025 - or is the data missing?
Yeah if i only went by TV news i'd come to the same general conclusion.
And if i narrowed it down to just Fox i'd probably think it was the UK.
lordnacho 10 hours ago [-]
Ask someone in the West what the largest muslim country is.
yieldcrv 3 hours ago [-]
Check out the predominant races there, you’ve probably never heard of them!
aprilthird2021 10 hours ago [-]
You must not have known about Malaysia then either?
Froztnova 10 hours ago [-]
Correct, it was around the time I learned how big Islam was in certain parts of Southeast Asia in general. It's just massively under-represented in news and popular culture and my historical/geographic education never really went into much detail on Asia.
throwaway290 10 hours ago [-]
Why? It's a big religion in the world and I heard it grows at 30% per year
rar00 10 hours ago [-]
typo? Rounding it up to 2 billion, 30% means 600 million per year
_DeadFred_ 9 hours ago [-]
How much of that is just because people aren't allowed to leave the religion though? My whole family would be considered Catholic if we still had those sorts of old thinking rules that Islam still has. Instead we have lots of people becoming Catholic and lots leaving balancing out.
andreygrehov 2 hours ago [-]
I don’t understand the point of concentrating everything in a megacity. Take New York as an example: the cost of living is through the roof, while the quality of life is often the opposite. Corporations should stop renting offices in the most expensive areas of the country and instead prioritize locations where housing is affordable and people don’t have to spend more than 10 minutes commuting to work. The state should de-prioritize NYC and encourage companies to invest in smaller cities. This would bring jobs to those areas, reduce pressure on NYC, and support broader infrastructure development. Apply that approach across the country, and suddenly the entire nation can function more efficiently instead of relying on a few overloaded hubs.
I always find discussion of the world biggest city a bit of a pointless exercise considering it’s entirely dependent on how administrative lines are drawn.
Highly fragmented metro areas are regarded as smaller than consolidated metro areas, whereas they might be the same size overall.
paxys 5 hours ago [-]
These rankings always consider city to be a contiguous metro area, regardless of how internal lines are drawn. Otherwise most of them wouldn't show up on the list at all. "Los Angeles" for example has close to 200 indiviudal cities.
refurb 4 hours ago [-]
That is true for this report, based on the methodology
However, instead of an arbitrary administrative definition, they used an arbitrary cutoff for population density.
Thus it still comes down to a subjective drawing of lines around the city.
yieldcrv 3 hours ago [-]
and Los Angeles City would still be on the list
paxys 3 hours ago [-]
Los Angeles city has 3.8 million people so no, it is nowhere close to a megacity.
pat_erichsen 11 hours ago [-]
If anyone is looking for a good movie to get a sense of what Jakarta is like, highly recommend "The Year of Living Dangerously" with Mel Gibson/Sigourney Weaver
Maybe 50 years ago, and with Manila standing in for Jakarta.
ghaff 11 hours ago [-]
Can't speak for the accuracy at the time but great film!
metalman 19 hours ago [-]
Canada has less people, even with a 10% increase in the last 4 years through imigration, some of which is from Indonesea presumably including a significant number from Jakarta, where the civil infrastructure must be epic
skx001 19 hours ago [-]
The West just refuses to build anything. Whereas in Asia its not uncommon to build entire cites from scratch.
parpfish 10 hours ago [-]
I don't even know what it would it even look like to "build a city" from scratch in the US. who does the building and puts together the central plan?
does the government build a bunch of public housing and a publicly owned commercial district? i guess they kind of have experience doing this with military bases, but at some point you need to encourage a bunch of private development and ownership, right?
or would the government just incentivize private developers to start building in the middle of nowhere and hope that a city arises as an emergent phenomenon? that approach seems like it would be rife with abuse and waste.
seems like this would be a lot easier to do with an authoritarian regime that could just decree "we're building a city here. the following industries will move their headquarters"
abdullahkhalids 10 hours ago [-]
It's not particularly difficult to start a new city.
The government simply asks large companies to open offices/factories in the new city in exchange for tax breaks/subsidies. Or give funding to a university to open a satellite campus. All you need is a promise for like 20k people to initially move. Then the government builds roads and utility networks. Private developers will also build housing if given the right financial incentive.
The 20k people will automatically lead to the same number moving in due to cheap housing, or for creating every day businesses, hospitals, schools etc. Within a couple of years you can setup up a feedback loop where the population is growing at 5-10% every year. There is no need to force anyone to do anything. Financial incentives are enough.
renewiltord 1 minutes ago [-]
City of Irvine corp and California Forever corp are two examples. But billionaires in the US are constrained by everyone else. The power of democracy is strength in numbers and we have them now though we didn’t fifty years ago.
toenail 10 hours ago [-]
Starting a city is easy, growing it into a real city is the hard part. If you look at the fastest growing cities of the last decades, they had economic freedom or booming industries, nothing that requires authoritarianism.
mikepurvis 10 hours ago [-]
The western approach would almost certainly be a public-private partnership; we do that with all meaningful infra projects, where multiple industry consortia put together proposals and then one is selected to move forward. For example, for the ION Light Rail in Waterloo Region (~$1B), the winning consortium was composed of engineering and construction firms/consultants, a operations company that would run the system, plus a financier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GrandLinq
That said, for a project the scale of building a city, I can imagine it might actually be faster and more efficient for the government to just plan and build everything itself and then sell it off to private entities later.
steego 10 hours ago [-]
Honestly, if you build transit, developers will build.
I wouldn't call it "building a city", but if you look at Northern Virginia today, you'll find that vertical districts are popping up along the Silver Line metro that now extends past Dulles airport.
At the end of the metro, there is literally a "town center" residential area on one side with buildings around 5 stories tall. On the other side of the tracks is literally fields, but the roads have been laid out like Sim City with empty plots and developers are now beginning to construct buildings starting from the outside perimeter first, working their way toward the metro station.
Throughout the DC suburbs, you will find densely populated areas with relatively tall vertical buildings (15-20 stories) that simply were not there 20 years ago. Reston is a good example. I've watched 4-6 buildings (over 10 stories) get built in Reston alone. They mostly started when the the metro line was finished.
botanrice 7 hours ago [-]
tysons is a good example as well. I always think the development of the DC metro is some of the most impressive in the sense of 'cities' popping up along the train lines.
I haven't travelled the entire country but I've never seen anything quite like Silver Spring, Bethesda, or as you say, Reston. Super interesting.
Sohcahtoa82 11 hours ago [-]
Why spend billions building when you can just keep raising rents on existing infrastructure?
bryanlarsen 12 hours ago [-]
Canada has been building housing at a much higher rate than the US in the last 2 decades. Not enough, but more.
daedrdev 11 hours ago [-]
They have been underbuilding compared to their population trends as we see their prices continue to skyrocket
bryanlarsen 11 hours ago [-]
Down substantially from the peak in 2022. And that's nominal prices. Adjusting for inflation will show that real prices are lower now than they were in 2017.
Hrmm. What data source can I see to demonstrate this? I looked at a chart I have referenced before that shows nationwide USA housing starts over the last 20 years ranging from 2 to 8 per 1000 people. Then I searched for one for Canada and found one suggesting 1-2 per 1000 since 2005. And, evidently, the situation in Canada as developed/deteriorated to the extent there's a whole subreddit for the canadian housing crisis?
Yes so it looks like the Reddit people are committing major chart-crimes, showing quarterly data as such, rather than annualized rates, and not mentioning it. It looks like this is a source of truth: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=341001...
mh- 11 hours ago [-]
I have watched reddit become useless for any kind of nuanced debate over the last 5 years. It's rather sad to me, because once upon a time I learned a lot about others views - especially ones I disagree with.
Even HN is much less welcoming of the "I think I agree with you, but walk me through your thinking" replies than it used to be.
I presume this is reflective of a few broader societal trends, and it's.. not good.
bbarnett 18 hours ago [-]
Yes, it's easy to build entire cities from scratch in a centrally managed society, such as a dictatorship or communist nations.
It's also easy to have cities grow fast, if you're primarily a rural/agrarian nation, and suddenly have a transition to become urban. This was (for example) Canada in the 1900s. Mostly rural, yet now it's mostly urban.
Canada saw fast growth of cities back then.
It's maintaining large cities once the fast growth is over, that is a different story. How will, for example, China look in 50+ years? 100+ years? When all its newly built mega-city projects are crumbling.
gucci-on-fleek 18 hours ago [-]
> Canada saw fast growth of cities back then.
It still does—Vancouver and Calgary have both almost doubled in population over the past 30 years [0] [1].
> Yes, it's easy to build entire cities from scratch in a centrally managed society, such as a dictatorship or communist nations.
I would like to pushback on this assumption. I made that point because you mentioned Canada and its rapid immigration rise in the last 5 years. Western countries, namely Canada can do a lot to build more to ease the pressures on its housing demand.
Vast amounts of land is available to build amazing cities. There are specialist architect firms that can plan the most beautiful, walkable, livable, affordable cities very close to major hubs and metros currently.
In the 50s/60s/70s these very Western countries, spent a lot and built all kinds of infrastructure which led to meaningful increases in quality of life and perhaps created the most prosperous generation in these countries.
Even now when any government in the West wants to really do something, they don't really care about anything and it gets done, the money magically appears, the votes are found no matter how unpopular it may be. But for some reason building infrastructure, housing, mass transit has been completely forgotten.
The real bottlenecks are governance, bureaucracy, and NIMBYism. Like a few comments above pointed out, its keeping boomers happy with their high property values at the expense of the young.
Some things just don't make sense to me as an outsider. A few examples I read recently.
[1] It will take three decades to turn an 18-mile stretch of the A66 road in northern England into a dual carriageway.
[2] It will take 20+ years just to add another runway at Heathrow London and cost $64 Billion Dollars! [3] While Dubai is building a brand new whole airport for $35 Billion, I think the worlds largest when its finished.
Nearly all of the political problems in Canada, UK, Australia and much of the US (NYC,SF, etc.) will completely go away if they had the "Build, Baby Build" attitude. Just build housing like there is no tomorrow.
There is no such thing as an "oversupply" of a basic human need, livable shelter.
I can assure you, knowing how Asian countries like China approach governance, Chinese cities will have no major issues in 50+ years. Any outstanding issues will will resolved well before they start to become a problem with various 5-10 year plans. The same for Malaysia, Singapore etc.
> Yes, it's easy to build entire cities from scratch in a centrally managed society, such as a dictatorship or communist nations.
This is generally true, but Indonesia is neither
Squealer2642 8 hours ago [-]
The civil infrastructure in Jakarta is horrible, especially compared to other Asian cities.
umanwizard 9 hours ago [-]
How is "city" defined, for the purposes of this metric? Is it the administrative boundaries of Jakarta according to Indonesian law? The catchment area where a large fraction of people commute to the city center? Something else?
asmosoinio 8 hours ago [-]
I was wondering the same. I guess it comes from this "UN figure":
> The UN figures include a mixture of city proper, metropolitan area, and urban area.
I haven't looked into the details of that definition.
But there is a somewhat standard definition to "metropolitan area" derived from something like "area where there is at least X per square km"
So it's not related a somewhat random definition of a "city" and its borders.
asmosoinio 8 hours ago [-]
If you find a better link for the methodology please let me know.
But simplified it's maybe exactly this from the UN reports glossary:
> Cities: According to the Degree of Urbanization methodology, contiguous geographic areas with a high population density (at least 1,500 people per km2) and a total population of at least 50,000 inhabitants.
Public transport remains not great, but it's improved a lot with the airport link, the metro, LRT, Transjakarta BRT. SE Asia's only legit high speed train now connects to Bandung in minutes. Grab/Gojek (Uber equivalents) make getting around cheap and bypass the language barrier. Hotels are incredible value, you can get top tier branded five stars for $100. Shopping for locally produced clothes etc is stupidly cheap. Indonesian food is amazing, there's so much more to it than nasi goreng, and you can find great Japanese, Italian, etc too; these are comparatively expensive but lunch at the Italian place in the Ritz-Carlton was under $10. The nightlife scene is wild, although you need to make local friends to really get into it. And it's reasonably safe, violent crime is basically unknown and I never had problems with pickpockets (although they do exist) or scammers.
I think Jakarta's biggest problems are lack of marketing and top tier obvious attractions. Bangkok has royal palaces and temples galore plus a wild reputation for go-go bars etc, Jakarta does not, so nobody even considers it as a vacation destination.
The language is a hidden gem, you can learn enough to get around on the flight over which I can't say about any other SEA language. Phonetic spellings, Latin alphabet, no tonal sounds, dead easy grammar and a million loan words you already know.
Jakarta is definitely for the adventurous though, and you had better have an iron stomach.
Nitpick: Sounds a lot like Tagalog (Filipino), another SEA language.
I'm pretty fluent, but my pronunciation was as good as it's gonna get like 10 years ago which is a frustration.
Where I come from, to criticise a non-native speakers accent or small grammatical errors (that do not impact the meaning) is a not-so-subtle form of discrimination. As a result, I never do it. (To criticise myself, it tooks many, many years to see this about my home culture and stop doing it myself.) Still, many people ask me: "Hey, can you correct my <language X> when I speak it?" "Sure!" (but I never do.)
It confuses the hell out of me when non-natives misplace stress in Ukrainian and use wrong cases. It's that I want to gatekeep, but above certain rate of mistakes it's just difficult to follow what is being said.
Real question (because it took me, sadly, too long to learn it as an adult): Why don't they gatekeep? Do you think there is compassion for those who fled war in Ukraine, so people are more forgiving about linguistic and cultural differences?
I can tell you from (thousands of) first hand experiences watching non-naive speakers of Japanese for many years: It doesn't matter nearly as much as locals want you to think it matters. Sure, the homophone thing is real, but Japanese people adapt their style of speaking depending upon the audience. (Japanese language and culture is highly context sensitive.) I hear it often when people pick and choose their words carefully in an attempt to reduce confusion around homophones. As a non-native speaker, when I am trying to use a relatively rare term that the speaker doesn't expect me to know, I slow down, use my hands a bit, and toss out some synonyms or brief explanation of the term I am trying to say. On the whole, Japanese people are excellent listeners, so it works pretty well.
What matters more: Japan has very little linguistic diversity for the size of its nation. Plus, it is an island. My theory (empirically observed): This makes them less able to adapt to non-native speakers. When you try to speak a type of Chinese (there are so many) to a native speaker from mainland China... their brain is automatically wired to heavy accents and different word choices, because their country is so linguistically diverse. As a result, when learning a Chinese language, it is pretty easy to speak with locals. In Japan: It is way harder. Mainland Chinese people really make an effort to understand you. It's no different than a tourist from a different region speaking to locals with a heavy accent ... or a different type of Chinese.
This all being said, after this interaction, I imagine you would have trouble in any country, with any language, because you seem quite insufferable and boorish.
That's kind of a secret to how CJK languages are each supposedly being a unique linguistic isolates: the rest of the families are hiding in the "dialects".
I love, love, loved backpacking across quite a bit of southeast Asia. I did not like the massive gastrointestinal problems nearly the entire time though.
I spent big money on four things for that trip: the flight, shoes, backpack, and toilet paper. I would've killed and eaten someone to get my hands in alcohol free wet wipes.
Every now and then it will pop up in the news due to politicians using it as a tool to cause racial divide.
I mean I note that there are some Chinese languages, with millions of speakers, where the largest written text they have is a bible written in a Roman script. If those are a challenge surely Vietnamese must be as well.
Vietnamese used to be written using Chinese orthography just like Japanese.
The French forcibly cracked down on this form of orthography, and following independence, later modernists attempting to copy Ataturk along with latent Sinophobia due to the Chinese colonial era meant this for of orthography has largely been relegated to ceremonial usage.
A similar thing happened with Bahasa Indonesia, as Indonesia's founding leadership was more secular and socialist in mindset compared to neighboring Malaysia where Jawi remained prominent because of the Islamist movement's role in Malaysian independence.
Traffic was terrible. I almost missed my flight due to taking a bike over a car, but then it started pouring rain and I had to huddle under a bridge while I waited for a car.
Jakarta has a noise problem. The temples blasting the prayers is disruptive to sleep and inner peace. The traffic does not make anything either.
Also, Indonesian food IMHO is at the bottom of SEA food culture. MY has wayyy better food (both in quality and diversity).
Agreed! Malaysia is really underrated, or at least it was by me. Now it's one of my favorite spots in the world, food is great (not as Thai's but comes close), wonderful sea, wonderful jungle, Kuala Lumpur is becoming a really nice city and CoL is value for money.
Also Malaysian Indian food is one of my favorite foods (especially the sweet roti).
I won't speak for the quality but this seems like an extremely dubious statement. Malay cuisine is certainly diverse, owing to settled migrant populations from other parts of Asia, but they don't have the dizzying array of indigenous cuisines on offer in Indonesia, many of which aren't readily available in Java.
I take it you haven't been to Burma / Myanmar
Burmese food is absolutely delicious. Burma Love in SF, Rangoon Bistro or Burma Joy in Portland. They're some of my favorite restaurants.
Of course, that crazy guy didn't really like Thai food...
When you say "temples", do you mean masjid (mosque)? It is pretty normal anywhere in the Islamic-majority world to sing prayers over a loud speaker a few times a day.
I don’t think Tokyo is considered loud.
Yes, temples blasting prayers.
- Indonesia is a tropical country, and Jakarta is in the vicinity of the sea, so depending on the month of year, it can rain anytime on the day. So, if you are not comfortable with rain, always use a taxi/grab/gocar to go around.
- If you are pressed for time, I suggest you use airport train to go to the airport. At least you won't get stuck on traffic.
- About the noise problem, I think it won't be a problem if you sleep in a tall building. The last time I go there, I sleep in a relatively good hotel and deliberately choose the higher floor. And the noise doesn't become a problem for me.
Hope this help and you can get a nicer experience on your next visit
.... what? Either works?
[1] https://www.aqi.in/us/dashboard/indonesia/jakarta/jakarta/hi...
There is slow adoption of electric vehicles, but still very low adoption rate (like less than 10% of motorbikes).
Heh. To get a sense of what the page's numbers might mean, I checked on Kaohsiung, where you can taste gasoline in the air as you walk down the street.
And hey, reported air quality in Kaohsiung is abysmal, so that checks out. Jakarta even looks good by comparison.
https://www.aqi.in/us/dashboard/taiwan/kaohsiung/kaohsiung
https://www.aqi.in/us/dashboard/indonesia/jakarta/jakarta
AQI appears to have Jakarta pegged at an average "66", which looks pretty respectable for the region. They seem to have much more carbon monoxide than Kaohsiung or Shanghai, but much less fine particulate.
Clean safe water from the sink was definitely not something I experienced in Bali in 2024 and I had the similar impression in Jakart
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Safe_drink_tap_water_map....
So basically it's only safe to drink tap water in western countries + Japan, Singapore, Chile, South Korea, and a few of the rich Arab countries.
I would argue that even the blue areas here would be speckled with lots of non-drinkable areas if you zoomed in, due to old lead piping and so on.
Is it simply the economics of water purification and delivery or something else?
I'm curious, what does a beer or a glass of wine cost?
I spent a lot of time working is South East Asia. Jakarta is the worst city, yes it is big but very filthy like New Delhi or India in general. Second filthiest is Malaysia.
The cleanest city is without a doubt Singapore.
Are we talking about the same Bangkok? I'm talking about the Bangkok in Thailand where they literally shut down the schools due to air pollution being so bad [0].
What Bangkok are you referring to?
Malaysia is wayyy cleaner than Indonesia, both in air quality and trash on the ground.
[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/24/bangkok-pollut...
I'd hardly say Bangkok is a clean air capital, but it's next to the ocean with no significant mountains nearby so usually pollution gets blown out to sea.
So is Jakarta, and it's still pretty polluted.
About the only upside is that most people speak some English, which is manifestly not the case in Jakarta.
Malaysia's a pretty decent size country, not a city. Can't say as I'd have referred to KL as filthy on any of my visits (admittedly only 3 times over the past 12 years). Kuching wasn't filthy either.
source: I've been to almost every country in SEA at least 3x. (Brunei was once, never went to Timor-Leste).
Check the forex changes and rent prices if you don't believe me.
Harder to factor in is visa costs. Vietnam, you need to leave every 90 days. So you need to buy a $25usd visa + flights/buses + hotels for 3-5 days while you get your next visa. Thailand, you only need to leave every 6mo on the DTV.
Think you mean Delhi NCR? New Delhi is pretty small, and mostly houses political and social elite.
Well, that might sound like an impossible task!! So, just sign up for Experiences from any of the leading travel portals. They’d get you into any of the local party scenes.
Whats the food like for vegetarians/ vegans?
If you're willing to flex a bit and just avoid obvious meat/fish, you'll survive, there's plenty of tofu, tempeh, veg etc. Gado-gado is always veg, nasi/mee goreng, etc.
> Widespread atrocities committed by Indonesian forces have led human rights groups to describe the situation as a genocide against the indigenous Papuan population. Reports of mass killings, forced displacement, and sexual violence are extensive and credible. According to a 2007 estimate by scholar De R. G. Crocombe, between 100,000 and 300,000 Papuans have been killed since Indonesia's occupation began.[19][23] A 2004 report by Yale Law School argued that the scale and intent of Indonesia’s actions fall within the legal definition of genocide.[24] State violence has targeted women in particular. A 2013 and 2017 study by AJAR and the Papuan Women's Working Group found that 4 in 10 Papuan women reported suffering state abuse,[25] while a 2019 follow-up found similar results.[26][27][Note 1][Note 2]
> In 2022, the UN condemned what it described as "shocking abuses" committed by the Indonesian state, including the killing of children, disappearances, torture, and large-scale forced displacement. It called for "urgent and unrestricted humanitarian aid to the region."[28] Human Rights Watch (HRW) has noted that the Papuan region functions as a de facto police state, where peaceful political expression and independence advocacy are met with imprisonment and violence.[29] While some analysts argue that the conflict is aggravated by a lack of state presence in remote areas,[30] the overwhelming trend points to systemic state violence and neglect.
> Indonesia continues to block foreign access to the Papuan region, citing so-called "safety and security concerns", though critics argue this is to suppress international scrutiny of its genocidal practices
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papua_conflict
Key Facts: Number of megacities, urban areas with 10 million or more inhabitants has quadrupled from 8 in 1975 to 33 in 2025.
Jakarta is now the world’s most populous city, with nearly 42 million residents. The current population of Indonesia is 286 million.
In 2019, Indonesia said it will be moving its capital to Nusantara, a new city which is under construction.
And separate of it's economic power it remains a center of power where the city mayor/governor always becomes a major national political figure.
Indonesia is actually a plurality of distinct island cultures, but with Jakarta, Java and Javanese culture sits at the top of the national political hierarchy. (Not to mention a sort of internal Javanese colonialism similar to the USSR).
The new capital could be part of dismantling some of the legacy internal Javanese power structures.
(To add a further detail re. Java vs. Indonesia, because of the mercator projection it's hard to see how big Indonesia is. It would stretch from Maine, past California almost to Anchorage).
1) Lack of institutional knowledge. No one even knows how to get started and bringing in foreign expertise may be prohibitively expensive.
2) Economics don’t pencil out even in higher income countries compared to BRT systems, especially because high density and heavy traffic means the lines usually have to be grade-separated which adds additional costs compared to an at-grade system.
3) Corruption makes development impossible. No well-established processes for expropriation exist, or the country is given over to clientelism such that landlords won’t give up what they own and hamper the development process via political connections.
BRT is usually the most effective solution in places where grade-separated rail is not yet viable as it allows a right-of-way network to be established that can later be upgraded to rail. This doesn’t solve problem 3, which requires a comparatively authoritarian approach to overcome the incentive problems at play; this is why the Chinese have generally excelled in the space over the last 20 years.
China built A LOT in the last 15 years. Beijing before 2008 had line 1, 2, a couple of suburban lines (13 and another one out east), and that was it. I don't think any other country has ever built infrastructure so quickly, so it isn't really fair to compare them to China.
Eminent domain and mass demolitions were very common in 1990s-2010s China, and to a degree that I have not seen in other authoritarian and nominally communist states like Vietnam or even Laos, let alone other less authoritarian states.
Entire neighborhoods, villages, and towns were razed to build the urban areas that make up China today.
Beijing [0][1], Shanghai [2][3], and other cities across China [4] all saw massive urban demolitions until the Central Government banned them in 2021 during the Evergrande crisis [5] due to limited utility and rising urban discontent.
Back in the day, it was somewhat common to see news about some random Jie commiting a terrorist act in retaliation for being evicted from their homes [6][7] due to this urban demolition program, and partially helped Xi consolidate power as most officials affiliated with these programs were deeply corrupt, and were often felled during the anti-corruption purges (ironically, Xi oversaw similar initiatives in Zhejiang in the 2000s).
Most other governments don't see the utility of implementing a similar style of program.
[0] - https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollecti...
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/jun/06/sport.china
[2] - https://web.archive.org/web/20130324195541/http://www.unhabi...
[3] - https://archive.nytimes.com/sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/201...
[4] - https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1002775
[5] - https://english.www.gov.cn/statecouncil/ministries/202108/31...
[6] - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-18018827.amp
[7] - https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna34450213
Wow...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/world/asia/china-beijing-...
After democracy, Taiwan shifted towards trying to preserve traditional neighborhoods or working to normalize unofficial neighborhoods and slums - basically adopting a bottom up instead of top down approach [0]
[0] - https://www.taiwan-panorama.com/en/Articles/Details?Guid=5fc...
I actually wonder how much better American traffic would be if scooters are more popular.
And this all is 20 years back. During this time thing have gone worse many times over.
Because Jakarta is literally sinking into the ocean. It also has a terrible flood problem which is only going to get worse. Doesn’t bode well for the population.
Issue is getting around.. For a city of that size + national capital, public transport options very limited. More like HCM or PP than Bangkok or KL.
Comparisons to Thailand inappropriate cos almost no pub culture and "entertainment". Even top end hotel bar like Raffles had near zero choice for wine etc. And lots more expensive.
Wish them well though.. Nicest people, nice memories.
Almost 300 million people but it rarely comes up in the news or pop media
It’s a Muslim majority country and very conservative, so a lot of the themes you’d find in American film, music, and literature wouldn’t make much sense there, and the media that has commercial potential outside of Indonesia is generally coming from wealthy households that don’t have much to do with how the average Indonesian really lives (Nicole Zefanya being the example that comes to mind).
Indonesians (at least the ones who speak English) are quite similar to Latinos in that they have a desire to be accepted into the English-speaking world not only personally but culturally. This can manifest in attempts to whitewash oneself to fit in, adopting whatever seems to be popular on English-speaking social media, leading to comparatively old trends propagating in these countries.
You saw the same thing with the Chinese and the Koreans back in the 2000s and both developed their own internationally-competitive culture industries, but those were both secular countries already well-integrated into the international system. I wouldn’t expect to see anything quite like that in Indonesia until at least 2030, when more of the digital natives come of age.
Korea definitely, but China? Seems like most of China's modern cultural export came from Hong Kong, and even that has stopped. Conventional wisdom is that the Three Body Problem couldn't be published today.
I'm curious what (homegrown) Chinese cultural products are internationally competitive today. China seems to be punching far below their weight, considering their population and their economic position.
You’re probably right. I’m just saying that 20 years ago the label of being “Made in China” meant something was cheap and bad. The business culture still isn’t great from what I hear but people are more comfortable than ever buying Chinese products and I’ve been hearing that more exchange students have been going to China to study.
The impression I had of China’s cultural exports was mostly from having seen more Chinese expatriates and immigrants openly engaging with e.g. Chinese music and fashion influencers. This wasn’t particularly common 20 years ago; I started noticing it around 2019.
The other thing I should note is that when I said internationally competitive I primarily meant outside of the Anglosphere. K-dramas are an interesting one because you can find women (it’s almost always women) of all ages from all over the world who watch them. Korean media is not unheard of in the Anglosphere but it is not nearly as popular as it is outside of the Anglosphere.
It’s possible China doesn’t have anything like this yet, and maybe it never will due to being comparatively censorious, but my perception is that sentiment towards China has improved quite a bit outside of the Anglosphere. I haven’t done reading on that; it’s just a hunch.
Like, Indonesia (and together with Malaysia) makes up a really significant portion of all muslims. As an outsider it still seems like there isn't much cultural overlap- which seems like, even if Indonesian culture wouldn't reach Europe or the USA, at least it would reach to the middle east / north africa because of the the religious link.
I could have drawn some parallels between Catholics and South America, but there's already two Popes that have Latin American roots.
They have very little in the way of exported cultural products ("The Raid" films?), are much worse in sports than would be expected based on population, spend relatively little on their military and don't do much in the way of regional power projection, and are growing economically but not remarkably, so there just aren't that many avenues for them to make international news.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/python-kills-woman-swallowed-in...
Many such cases.
1: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_per...
Like how many of you can name a Chinese movie or pop star or TV show?
I suppose it shouldn't be too surprising though, I mean Christianity sure as hell got around too.
I live in Australia, and when I was growing up I thought the same, even though Indonesia are a very close neighbour of ours. Indonesia is featured quite a bit in our local news these days, and that together with lots of Aussie tourists in Indonesia, plus lots of Indonesian students studying here, has made us a little more knowledgeable about our neighbours.
https://www.opendoors.org/en-US/persecution/countries/
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-25/jakarta-overtakes-tok...
It was posted to HN recently (not by me):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46042447
And the full report as PDF: https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.deve...
Highly fragmented metro areas are regarded as smaller than consolidated metro areas, whereas they might be the same size overall.
https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.deve...
However, instead of an arbitrary administrative definition, they used an arbitrary cutoff for population density.
Thus it still comes down to a subjective drawing of lines around the city.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086617/
does the government build a bunch of public housing and a publicly owned commercial district? i guess they kind of have experience doing this with military bases, but at some point you need to encourage a bunch of private development and ownership, right?
or would the government just incentivize private developers to start building in the middle of nowhere and hope that a city arises as an emergent phenomenon? that approach seems like it would be rife with abuse and waste.
seems like this would be a lot easier to do with an authoritarian regime that could just decree "we're building a city here. the following industries will move their headquarters"
The government simply asks large companies to open offices/factories in the new city in exchange for tax breaks/subsidies. Or give funding to a university to open a satellite campus. All you need is a promise for like 20k people to initially move. Then the government builds roads and utility networks. Private developers will also build housing if given the right financial incentive.
The 20k people will automatically lead to the same number moving in due to cheap housing, or for creating every day businesses, hospitals, schools etc. Within a couple of years you can setup up a feedback loop where the population is growing at 5-10% every year. There is no need to force anyone to do anything. Financial incentives are enough.
That said, for a project the scale of building a city, I can imagine it might actually be faster and more efficient for the government to just plan and build everything itself and then sell it off to private entities later.
I wouldn't call it "building a city", but if you look at Northern Virginia today, you'll find that vertical districts are popping up along the Silver Line metro that now extends past Dulles airport.
At the end of the metro, there is literally a "town center" residential area on one side with buildings around 5 stories tall. On the other side of the tracks is literally fields, but the roads have been laid out like Sim City with empty plots and developers are now beginning to construct buildings starting from the outside perimeter first, working their way toward the metro station.
Throughout the DC suburbs, you will find densely populated areas with relatively tall vertical buildings (15-20 stories) that simply were not there 20 years ago. Reston is a good example. I've watched 4-6 buildings (over 10 stories) get built in Reston alone. They mostly started when the the metro line was finished.
I haven't travelled the entire country but I've never seen anything quite like Silver Spring, Bethesda, or as you say, Reston. Super interesting.
https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/average-house-prices
Even HN is much less welcoming of the "I think I agree with you, but walk me through your thinking" replies than it used to be.
I presume this is reflective of a few broader societal trends, and it's.. not good.
It's also easy to have cities grow fast, if you're primarily a rural/agrarian nation, and suddenly have a transition to become urban. This was (for example) Canada in the 1900s. Mostly rural, yet now it's mostly urban.
Canada saw fast growth of cities back then.
It's maintaining large cities once the fast growth is over, that is a different story. How will, for example, China look in 50+ years? 100+ years? When all its newly built mega-city projects are crumbling.
It still does—Vancouver and Calgary have both almost doubled in population over the past 30 years [0] [1].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Vancouver#Demographics
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Calgary#Civic_...
I would like to pushback on this assumption. I made that point because you mentioned Canada and its rapid immigration rise in the last 5 years. Western countries, namely Canada can do a lot to build more to ease the pressures on its housing demand.
Vast amounts of land is available to build amazing cities. There are specialist architect firms that can plan the most beautiful, walkable, livable, affordable cities very close to major hubs and metros currently.
In the 50s/60s/70s these very Western countries, spent a lot and built all kinds of infrastructure which led to meaningful increases in quality of life and perhaps created the most prosperous generation in these countries.
Even now when any government in the West wants to really do something, they don't really care about anything and it gets done, the money magically appears, the votes are found no matter how unpopular it may be. But for some reason building infrastructure, housing, mass transit has been completely forgotten.
The real bottlenecks are governance, bureaucracy, and NIMBYism. Like a few comments above pointed out, its keeping boomers happy with their high property values at the expense of the young.
Some things just don't make sense to me as an outsider. A few examples I read recently.
[1] It will take three decades to turn an 18-mile stretch of the A66 road in northern England into a dual carriageway. [2] It will take 20+ years just to add another runway at Heathrow London and cost $64 Billion Dollars! [3] While Dubai is building a brand new whole airport for $35 Billion, I think the worlds largest when its finished.
Nearly all of the political problems in Canada, UK, Australia and much of the US (NYC,SF, etc.) will completely go away if they had the "Build, Baby Build" attitude. Just build housing like there is no tomorrow.
There is no such thing as an "oversupply" of a basic human need, livable shelter.
I can assure you, knowing how Asian countries like China approach governance, Chinese cities will have no major issues in 50+ years. Any outstanding issues will will resolved well before they start to become a problem with various 5-10 year plans. The same for Malaysia, Singapore etc.
[1] https://archive.md/PcOZV
[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-chooses-heathrow-airport...
[3] https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/4/29/dubais-ruler-ann...
This is generally true, but Indonesia is neither
> The UN figures include a mixture of city proper, metropolitan area, and urban area.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities
I haven't looked into the details of that definition.
But there is a somewhat standard definition to "metropolitan area" derived from something like "area where there is at least X per square km"
So it's not related a somewhat random definition of a "city" and its borders.
But simplified it's maybe exactly this from the UN reports glossary:
> Cities: According to the Degree of Urbanization methodology, contiguous geographic areas with a high population density (at least 1,500 people per km2) and a total population of at least 50,000 inhabitants.
https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.deve...