Urbanization Pattern in Indonesia’s Secondary Cities: Greater Surabaya and Its Path toward a Megacity

Abstract

In the past few decades, many countries had single primate city dominating the national economy and functioning as the country’s social and political center. This was also the case of Indonesia in that Jakarta occurred as the first city with its economic dominance and a population of over one million inhabitants reached within 30 years (between 1950s-1980s). Together with the surrounding area Jakarta become megacity since 1980s (commonly referred to as the Jakarta metropolitan area or JMA). The liberalization measures of the late 1980s and the decentralization policy since the early 2000s have provided opportunities for other cities and urban regions in Indonesia to grow. In this paper, we focus on Greater Surabaya, the fast-growing secondary city of Indonesia that has greatly benefited from the changing global and national politico-economic landscapes. Our aims is to explore its urbanization pattern in the last three decades. This study exhibits that urbanization pattern in Greater Surabaya is characterized by a relatively higher growth of annual population and economic development in the surrounding area compare to the core city. This rapid sub-urbanization seems to follow the JMA’s experience. This paper therefore, has important implications for urban scholarship and planning practice: how this rapis sub-urbandevelopment process does not lead to the same unsustainable problems experience by the JMA.