Land Value in a Disaster-Prone Urbanized Coastal Area: A Case Study from Semarang City, Indonesia

Abstract

Coastal areas have been growing massively worldwide. The fast growth also affects the land value in either a positive or a negative way. Many scholars have studied land value and the factors that affect it in areas prone to sudden-onset disasters. In contrast, studies on urbanized coastal areas that suffer from slow-onset disasters are still lacking. Using a case study from Semarang City in Indonesia, this research aims at ameliorating this limitation. To comprehensively understand the aim, two research questions are addressed: (1) What is the distribution of land value in urbanized coastal areas? (2) How do the different distribution factors determine the land value? Based on in-depth interviews with key persons, map analyses, and desk studies, this research discovers that land value is distributed randomly among coastal areas. The dynamics of land value are determined by road access, distance, and accessibility to the city center and CBD, public facilities, transportation facilities, population composition, physical environment, and disasters. Surprisingly, the coastal areas in Semarang that experience combined disasters showed that disasters could not decrease the land value; the value in some areas is constant or even increasing. This shows the different impacts of disasters on land value for slow-onset disasters and sudden-onset disasters.