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.
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.
> ...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.
>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.
maybe this doesn't qualify as "south east asian", but Korean is very easy to learn how to read too. It's not latin alphabet, but you only need to learn 20 symbols, and then everything is phonetic! you can have a lot of fun "reading" all the signs after you study a bit on the plane. Not as many loan words though
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).
>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.
> 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.
- 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
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.
> 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.
I guess people perceive this very differently. One sees it as an adventure while another one sees it as a hustle. Jakarta is a hustle. Some people like it and make them feel alive. If you don't enjoy it, it'll make you miserable.
> Also, Indonesian food IMHO is at the bottom of SEA food culture.
I agree. I hate the food but Malay food is similar. What Malaysia has is two other major races (Chinese and Indians) and a strong expat community (ie: Thai, Viet and Japanese) that bring lots of food diversity.
Jakarta doesn’t need to turn itself into a sex tourism city like Bangkok. It shouldn’t. Thailand sold its people out to make some business and government people rich in my opinion.
I spent a lot of time in Jakarta. It has some serious issues like pollution, worst traffic in SEA, unwalkable city, actually far more expensive for what you get than other SEA areas. It isn’t surprising to me that people don’t want to travel there for holiday. There are far better places for tourism.
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
BLACKWATER
Angwi fled his mountain home, the soldiers, as they burnt his village down, near the border line.
He’s left the card games by the valley fire, the stories that his uncle told, the stories old, the spirits past.
He’s seen the land taken away and given to the Java men; they’ve flown them in from distant lands.
Angwi fears for his people’s songs, the nights they danced the valley strong; the hunding grounds, steep mountain side.
slash and burn
Is there any place you can go now that isn't doing a genocide? USA is out, Europe is out, Russia is out, China is out. Obviously the middle east is out. Most of Africa. Australia? They're strongly aligned with the USA though. And they did one in the past. Tiny Pacific islands but they're basically USA colonies?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> it's hot, congested, polluted and largely poor, but so is Bangkok.
That's a wild comparison, makes me wonder how much time you spent in Bangkok. Bangkok has a much higher standard of living compared to Jakarta, and I've yet to meet anyone who spent more than a month in both places and prefers Jakarta. Living costs are cheaper in Jakarta for sure, but that's about it.
I'll just chime in that Chinatown in Glodok might have been that place a couple decades ago, but seemed quite deserted now :/ There's still some shops around though.
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.
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.
Because they're both hot, polluted, congested and mostly poor, but Bangkok is literally the world's most popular tourist destination city while Jakarta is not.
What? Jakarta's biggest problem is the rising sea level and the sinking ground.
Jakarta is one of the fastest sinking cities globally. Venice or Miami are nothing compared to this. 40% will be gone soon.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].
I dunno, I would think AT LEAST Jackie Chan is a household name due to the Rush Hour movies, and for anyone who grew up watching Hong Kong action flicks, they'd probably also know Jet Li at least, and Donnie Yen, Michelle Yeoh, and maybe Bolo Yeung and Sammo Hung too.
Big Fish & Begonia was a good film that got a wide release in the west. Flavors of Youth is on netflix. Ne Zha was too I think. In animation at least they do better than a lot of countries. Mojin: The Lost Legend is the only live action movie I can remember seeing off the top of my head though.
The only ones I can name are from Hong Kong before the handover, off the top of my head: Wong Kar-wei, Jackie Chan, John Woo, Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung.
Authoritarian cultures aren’t known for freedom of expression so it makes sense there’s little cultural export. The same thing applies to Islamic countries, the iconoclastic bent kinda puts a damper on visual art.
Same with India. I heard its absolutely terrible there for small groups of women and impossible for solo travelling women. The advice I've heard that can help (a little) is wearing fake wedding ring and telling people that you're married.
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.
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.
Demographics and geography approaches this through the notion of "metropolitan statistical area" (MSA) in the US, or equivalent concepts elsewhere. An MSA is defined as a "geographical region with a relatively high population density at its core and close economic ties throughout the region".
Other rough equivalents are metropolitan areas (UK), census metropolitan areas (Canada), functional urban areas (FUA) (EU), urban agglomerations (India). All of these use functional and behavioural characteristics to get around simple boundary-demarkation. Urbanisations may even span national borders, as with the greater Basel region, Lake Constance, or Strasbourg-Ortenau.
Being a large city should no longer be seen as a positive attribute. It just looks like a bigger wound in the middle of a forest and natural terrain. Packing millions of people into a vast paved area does no good. It socks all life from country due to concentration of work and services.
Early human settlements had an objective of collective strength against the predators, invaders and shared help for all problem. Cities no longer have these goals or characteristics. They exist only due to a vicious cycle of jobs and worker availability which propel each other because of each other.
There's probably a point where that stops scaling. Is there any proof a city of 40 million uses less resources per capita than a city of 1 million?
40 cities of 1 million seems preferable because then you can actually get outside the city once in a while without it being 2+ hours of travel.
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.
Also, my own take is that the high rent in NYC is sort of proof that the quality of life is high. Or at least, NYC is desirable. People are willing to pay a premium to live there, which is a strong signal of their preference.
I think it's a situation akin to HOAs where there are absolutely people who prefer being in an HOA but it has this feedback loop which results in significantly more people being in an HOA than would prefer to be just because there are limited options and undoing an HOA is higher friction than new construction including one.
On one hand this is still preference. They pick to be in a city over the other options available. On the other hand the other options aren't available because enough people are already interested in centralizing life choice options into a city and so it just drives that feedback loop over and over as more people choose where the option of the day is rather than what they'd like. The only thing holding this loop back from runaway is large cities eventually seem to have population growth fall behind cost of living growth and that stops the runaway for the particular city.
Perhaps more simply: the immediate and big picture preference often don't align and this misalignment further drives a larger gap in those two preferences over time until the cost to scale the city finally becomes too high.
> 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.
What's the benefit to the corporation to do that? They move to a more affordable area, which corresponds to less concentrated, which corresponds to fewer workforce available, especially if the goal is to spend 10 minutes commuting, as you state.
Nobody's forcing anyone to live in a city, they want to because the jobs and culture and opportunities are there. And companies want to be there because that's where the workers are. It's a feedback loop, I guess cost is the main moderator. There is an argument for decentralizing a little but surely it's the governments job to incentivize that.
There are well known netowrk effects, that happen when economists study cities. You can just have each individual bank pick some random small town and set up an office there.
That said, I do agree that some amount of distribution of infrastructure spending makes a lot of sense. But even if you did that, New York itself could raise enough taxes to make its own infrastructure without having to tax the rest of the nation.
But I would say the US has done this reasonably well, NY is nowhere as dominatie any many other places. You have Boston with universities and medical, Valley, LA areospace/media, DC government and so on and so on.
But economics is pretty clear, hubs are good, getting a place with lots of experts togheter improves efficency for everybody. And getting enough people together that proper infrastructure pays for itself is also good.
Density has some obvious advantages. It also has a bunch of disadvantages. The millions of people living there seem to think it's worth the tradeoff, at least to the point of having enough inertia not to move elsewhere.
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.
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
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"
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.
I think the title should more accurately state "most populous" because Greater Tokyo is still significantly larger in the built up land area around the Tokyo Metropolis (Almost 2x Jakarta)
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
> ...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.
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>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.
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> which I can't say about any other SEA language
maybe this doesn't qualify as "south east asian", but Korean is very easy to learn how to read too. It's not latin alphabet, but you only need to learn 20 symbols, and then everything is phonetic! you can have a lot of fun "reading" all the signs after you study a bit on the plane. Not as many loan words though
How did the language end up with a Latin alphabet?
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most SEA languages are similar btw
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).
>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.
> 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.
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Putting Indonesian below Filipino food is quite something.
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> Indonesian food IMHO is at the bottom of SEA food culture
I take it you haven't been to Burma / Myanmar
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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
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.
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> 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.
I guess people perceive this very differently. One sees it as an adventure while another one sees it as a hustle. Jakarta is a hustle. Some people like it and make them feel alive. If you don't enjoy it, it'll make you miserable.
> Also, Indonesian food IMHO is at the bottom of SEA food culture.
I agree. I hate the food but Malay food is similar. What Malaysia has is two other major races (Chinese and Indians) and a strong expat community (ie: Thai, Viet and Japanese) that bring lots of food diversity.
Rain, noise, traffic... welcome to SEA
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Jakarta doesn’t need to turn itself into a sex tourism city like Bangkok. It shouldn’t. Thailand sold its people out to make some business and government people rich in my opinion.
I spent a lot of time in Jakarta. It has some serious issues like pollution, worst traffic in SEA, unwalkable city, actually far more expensive for what you get than other SEA areas. It isn’t surprising to me that people don’t want to travel there for holiday. There are far better places for tourism.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papua_conflict
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrciT3lXtwE
Tabaran: Recorded Pacific Gold Studios, Rabaul, PNG, July to August ‘88
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XX5p1sjvW6s
They also have not prosecuted the earlier genocides they made: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_19...
I have personally flagged them as a country non-grata.
Is there any place you can go now that isn't doing a genocide? USA is out, Europe is out, Russia is out, China is out. Obviously the middle east is out. Most of Africa. Australia? They're strongly aligned with the USA though. And they did one in the past. Tiny Pacific islands but they're basically USA colonies?
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
Clean safe water from the sink is not something you'll find in most of the world, in fact. It's not just SEA.
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.
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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.
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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.
> 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.
[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/24/bangkok-pollut...
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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.
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> 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.
This is such an odd position to create a burner account to argue...
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N=1 but my experience with Philippines and Malaysia is exactly the opposite.
what is the cheapest for a nomad
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> very filthy like New Delhi
Think you mean Delhi NCR? New Delhi is pretty small, and mostly houses political and social elite.
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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.
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> 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.
Shame their water is poison.
and air
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.
[1] https://www.aqi.in/us/dashboard/indonesia/jakarta/jakarta/hi...
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.
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).
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> it's hot, congested, polluted and largely poor, but so is Bangkok.
That's a wild comparison, makes me wonder how much time you spent in Bangkok. Bangkok has a much higher standard of living compared to Jakarta, and I've yet to meet anyone who spent more than a month in both places and prefers Jakarta. Living costs are cheaper in Jakarta for sure, but that's about it.
Is being an attractive vacation destination necessarily a good thing for a city? They're the biggest city, didn't they "win"?
Thanks for sharing. I’m wondering whether they have a large retro computing market?
I'll just chime in that Chinatown in Glodok might have been that place a couple decades ago, but seemed quite deserted now :/ There's still some shops around though.
The nightlife is wildest in SEA but definitely for the bold and brave.
> 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?
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.
Alcohol is more expensive than other countries, in general.
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Thanks for posting this. Really interesting perspectives
Whats the food like for vegetarians/ vegans?
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.
Tempeh is an Indonesian staple and from what I understand pretty popular with vegans.
Why compare Jakarta to Bangkok?
Because they're both hot, polluted, congested and mostly poor, but Bangkok is literally the world's most popular tourist destination city while Jakarta is not.
What? Jakarta's biggest problem is the rising sea level and the sinking ground. Jakarta is one of the fastest sinking cities globally. Venice or Miami are nothing compared to this. 40% will be gone soon.
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/7a9fa31104334f3db4c01d0...
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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.
Alternative Link: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/jakarta-world-s-most-p...
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.
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).
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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> 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.
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
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.
> 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.
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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.
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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.
The only time I see Indonesia in the news is when some unfortunate soul gets swallowed by a giant snake:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/python-kills-woman-swallowed-in...
Many such cases.
The island of Bali has outsized impact from all the tourism.
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.
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.
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.
Which assumptions are those?
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You must not have known about Malaysia then either?
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Check out the predominant races there, you’ve probably never heard of them!
Why? It's a big religion in the world and I heard it grows at 30% per year
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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].
1: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_per...
I think it's just because there aren't large immigrant communities in Western countries besides Australia and the Netherlands.
I feel the same way about China tbh
Like how many of you can name a Chinese movie or pop star or TV show?
I dunno, I would think AT LEAST Jackie Chan is a household name due to the Rush Hour movies, and for anyone who grew up watching Hong Kong action flicks, they'd probably also know Jet Li at least, and Donnie Yen, Michelle Yeoh, and maybe Bolo Yeung and Sammo Hung too.
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Big Fish & Begonia was a good film that got a wide release in the west. Flavors of Youth is on netflix. Ne Zha was too I think. In animation at least they do better than a lot of countries. Mojin: The Lost Legend is the only live action movie I can remember seeing off the top of my head though.
The only ones I can name are from Hong Kong before the handover, off the top of my head: Wong Kar-wei, Jackie Chan, John Woo, Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung.
Authoritarian cultures aren’t known for freedom of expression so it makes sense there’s little cultural export. The same thing applies to Islamic countries, the iconoclastic bent kinda puts a damper on visual art.
The west deliberately blocks Chinese media.
In asia, China's culture is far more prevalent and gaining quickly.
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Opression makes it much harder to export culture. See also China.
For Europeans wanting a megacity experience within weekend jaunt range, Cairo can be kind of a mad experience, with things like the Garbage City https://www.adventuresnsunsets.com/cairo-garbage-city/ and cave church https://www.egypttoursportal.com/en-gb/blog/egypt-attraction... plus the usual pyramids etc. Very cheap Ubers like $8/hr.
Try not to be a woman
Same with India. I heard its absolutely terrible there for small groups of women and impossible for solo travelling women. The advice I've heard that can help (a little) is wearing fake wedding ring and telling people that you're married.
Family went together. Mum, dad, and us two boys. ‘07 or so. Very friendly people. But armed soldiers everywhere. Perhaps have changed since then.
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What's the problem?
We were in a group with women but solo might be hard work.
Or gay
Perhaps Istanbul would be more accessible (and safe) for Europeans in terms of megacity experience?
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.
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.
Demographics and geography approaches this through the notion of "metropolitan statistical area" (MSA) in the US, or equivalent concepts elsewhere. An MSA is defined as a "geographical region with a relatively high population density at its core and close economic ties throughout the region".
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area>
Other rough equivalents are metropolitan areas (UK), census metropolitan areas (Canada), functional urban areas (FUA) (EU), urban agglomerations (India). All of these use functional and behavioural characteristics to get around simple boundary-demarkation. Urbanisations may even span national borders, as with the greater Basel region, Lake Constance, or Strasbourg-Ortenau.
That is true for this report, based on the methodology
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.
and Los Angeles City would still be on the list
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Being a large city should no longer be seen as a positive attribute. It just looks like a bigger wound in the middle of a forest and natural terrain. Packing millions of people into a vast paved area does no good. It socks all life from country due to concentration of work and services.
Early human settlements had an objective of collective strength against the predators, invaders and shared help for all problem. Cities no longer have these goals or characteristics. They exist only due to a vicious cycle of jobs and worker availability which propel each other because of each other.
Dense cities use up a lot less resources and land than the same number of people spread out in smaller cities or suburbs.
There's probably a point where that stops scaling. Is there any proof a city of 40 million uses less resources per capita than a city of 1 million? 40 cities of 1 million seems preferable because then you can actually get outside the city once in a while without it being 2+ hours of travel.
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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.
There's a whole subfield of economics that studies clustering in cities ("agglomeration"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration There are lots of benefits.
Also, my own take is that the high rent in NYC is sort of proof that the quality of life is high. Or at least, NYC is desirable. People are willing to pay a premium to live there, which is a strong signal of their preference.
I think it's a situation akin to HOAs where there are absolutely people who prefer being in an HOA but it has this feedback loop which results in significantly more people being in an HOA than would prefer to be just because there are limited options and undoing an HOA is higher friction than new construction including one.
On one hand this is still preference. They pick to be in a city over the other options available. On the other hand the other options aren't available because enough people are already interested in centralizing life choice options into a city and so it just drives that feedback loop over and over as more people choose where the option of the day is rather than what they'd like. The only thing holding this loop back from runaway is large cities eventually seem to have population growth fall behind cost of living growth and that stops the runaway for the particular city.
Perhaps more simply: the immediate and big picture preference often don't align and this misalignment further drives a larger gap in those two preferences over time until the cost to scale the city finally becomes too high.
> 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.
What's the benefit to the corporation to do that? They move to a more affordable area, which corresponds to less concentrated, which corresponds to fewer workforce available, especially if the goal is to spend 10 minutes commuting, as you state.
Nobody's forcing anyone to live in a city, they want to because the jobs and culture and opportunities are there. And companies want to be there because that's where the workers are. It's a feedback loop, I guess cost is the main moderator. There is an argument for decentralizing a little but surely it's the governments job to incentivize that.
There are well known netowrk effects, that happen when economists study cities. You can just have each individual bank pick some random small town and set up an office there.
That said, I do agree that some amount of distribution of infrastructure spending makes a lot of sense. But even if you did that, New York itself could raise enough taxes to make its own infrastructure without having to tax the rest of the nation.
But I would say the US has done this reasonably well, NY is nowhere as dominatie any many other places. You have Boston with universities and medical, Valley, LA areospace/media, DC government and so on and so on.
But economics is pretty clear, hubs are good, getting a place with lots of experts togheter improves efficency for everybody. And getting enough people together that proper infrastructure pays for itself is also good.
Density has some obvious advantages. It also has a bunch of disadvantages. The millions of people living there seem to think it's worth the tradeoff, at least to the point of having enough inertia not to move elsewhere.
Article is a paywalled summary of the UN press release: https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2025/11/press...
And the full report as PDF: https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.deve...
> The U.N.'s report highlighted what areas are expected to be the next megacities and surpass the 10 million mark, including:
> [...]
> - Hajipur, India.
Estimated population of Hajipur in 2025 is 213k people. Not sure why it's on the list. Throws the rest of the article into question for me.
I have sent an email to the contacts listed in the press release regarding this. Let's see what they say.
I believe you are correct. They have made a mistake in the report. Hajipur is a small town near Patna, Bihar which is much bigger than it is.
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.
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
The West just refuses to build anything. Whereas in Asia its not uncommon to build entire cites from scratch.
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"
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Why spend billions building when you can just keep raising rents on existing infrastructure?
Canada has been building housing at a much higher rate than the US in the last 2 decades. Not enough, but more.
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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.
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The civil infrastructure in Jakarta is horrible, especially compared to other Asian cities.
Here's a better link, though maybe it's too late:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46042447
Were they going to "move" Jakarta to a new location, because of climate change?
I think the title should more accurately state "most populous" because Greater Tokyo is still significantly larger in the built up land area around the Tokyo Metropolis (Almost 2x Jakarta)
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?
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.
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.
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.
https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.deve...
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
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086617/
Maybe 50 years ago, and with Manila standing in for Jakarta.
Can't speak for the accuracy at the time but great film!
Behind a paywall.
https://archive.ph/qoimk
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Previous submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46038863
Who submitted that?
I did
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