Urbanization Phenomena of Small Inland City: Case of Parakan, Central Java

Abstract

Urban development in Indonesia has been notably figured out with the development of coastal area as the place to provide regional-international trade having the control of labour. Hence, coastal cities and the surrounding areas are rapidly growing to urbanized area. However, rapid development with limited carrying capacity and climate related issues of coastal area has become the challenges of their development. Meanwhile, the growth of inland city also started to gain some attentions. In Central Java, for instance, the emerging of inland city centre has become a new phenomenon in urbanization. Parakan, one of the inland cities in Central Java selected as the study area due to the growing of rural-urban characteristic. This new inland city centre is a part of Temanggung Region, Central Java strategically located in the national road of Semarang to Purwokerto. The intention of this paper is to elaborate the growth of inland city in Central Java, especially in Parakan. The GIS is utilized to analyse the spatial changes in Parakan meanwhile the economic aspects are analysed to find out the indication of shifting economic activities within the city. From the analysis, it is found that changes in population appear in urban area as one of indicators of urbanization in Parakan inland city. As a consequence, the economic activities and the GDP also experience changes due to the growing of urbanized area. The growing of Parakan has been proven that the urbanization phenomenon in Central Java occurs in the inland city inferring that the urbanization pattern in Indonesia, specifically in Central Java, is not only limited to the growth of the coastal cities.