Urban Population Growth and Their Implication to Agricultural Land in the Process of Metropolitanization: The case of Kabupaten Sukoharjo, in Metropolitan Surakarta

Abstract

Extended urban spatial formation has been a major phenomena in many cities’ development, in Indonesia, including big, medium and smaller size of cities. Using the case which occurred in the Kabupaten Sukoharjo, an adjacent kabupaten of the City of Surakarta, this paper discusses the process of population growth, land expansion and their impact on the agricultural land outside the city’s perimeter, in the metropolitanization process of Surakarta as a secondary metropolitan growth in Java based on a medium city size as the core of the metropolitan. The analysis applies time-serial statistical data gathered from the kabupaten’s monographs. It also applies comparative analysis among the kecamatan (districts) in the kabupaten that are classified into two types of kecamatan: the adjacent and the non-adjacent. The analysis indicates a dramatic changing of urban land, which confirmed the impact of uncontrolled urbanization into agricultural land in the peripheries in terms of losing of fertile agricultural land. It also indicates that the process leads to the needs to develop other agricultural land to substitute the loss of fertile agricultural land. Therefore, the analysis indicates the double impacts of metropolitanization process into agricultural land, such as: the loss of fertile agricultural land in its peri-urban and the implication of efforts in producing fertile land in other areas.