Much attention has been paid recently to land grabs in rural and urban areas of the global South, but relatively little attention has been paid to such activities in the third dimension-vertical space. Yet vertical space has also been increasingly colonized, as manifest in the transformation of mega-city skylines through the proliferating number and height of high-rises in both central cities and peri-urban developments. We investigate how floor area ratio policies, originally designed to control densification, have been reworked to facilitate densification through floor area uplift. Thus a tool originally developed to advance public welfare has been used to facilitate the profitability of real estate projects for developers and to benefit local governments. Taking DKI Jakarta as our case study, we sketch out the coevolution of this policy with urban regimes, focusing on the mid-2010s when compensation measures were formalized and made transparent. By using a particular project in Jakarta's central business district we show how the benefits of floor area uplift favor private sector developers over the local government. In a context of rapidly increasing land values, increasing demand for housing from an emergent middle class, and particularly the privatization of planning, this unevenness systematically favors the private sector.

This paper illustrates how the extraction of land value into volumetric spaces (subterranean spaces, elevated infrastructures and high-rise buildings) is rendered possible through accumulation strategies embedded in spatial planning in Jakarta. In doing so, it carefully delves into the shift in Floor-Area Uplift (FAU) compensation policy and its relationship with the expansion of mass transportation system development. We analysed urban planning and high-rise building policy documents from 1975–2017 and modelled the allowable FAU based on those policies. We illustrate, first, the transformation of FAU discourse in urban policies and how its operability is facilitated in discretionary planning regimes. This paper then demonstrates the planning gain delivery and consequences produced through FAU compensation policy. We argued how volumetric urbanism in Jakarta had been produced and sustained through entrepreneurial motives. It continues to segregate the city both in local and urban contexts despite its positivist development goals.

This article contributes to the debate of small centre urbanization and positions it amidst three emerging challenges: urban-rural transformation, economic experimentation, and disaster risk mitigation. To examine the entanglement of the three forces, we analysed the expansion of the Pangandaran urban area – a small urbanizing area in West Java. This expansion occurred as part of the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) project, in the form of a regional infrastructure plan including railway, airport, and harbour development to accommodate tourism flux. This study uses discursive and qualitative approaches to rural-urban transformation with data gathered through document analysis, mapping, and FGDs with local stakeholders. The results show that although urbanization was a complex process with promises of extensive infrastructure developments and national projects, little attention has been paid to the internal urban structure, utilities, and increasing vulnerability to natural disasters in Pangandaran. The study also addresses how urban theories and policies should deal with the complexities of small urban areas in Indonesia.

Since the 1990s, Jakarta city planning has introduced Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) as solution to dominant auto-mobility and sprawl to regional cities in Bogor, Depok, Tangerang, and Bekasi (JABODETABEK) by improving accessibility and inter-connectivity in urban mobility. Nevertheless, less has been investigated to what extent the on-going implementation in TOD projects departs from the means of TOD as planning approach in response to the urban problems. This paper aims to investigate TOD concept and implementation in Jakarta by proposing a comparative study on TOD in Japan and JABODETABEK, by using desk study in the planning documents and TOD projects. In each case, the investigation focuses on three sections; planning, implementation, and output. This paper reveals that the current TOD projects in Jakarta are based on single land development within proximity of TOD stations that maximizes private development benefits. Therefore, it concludes that the “TOD” projects in Jakarta have not yet met the TOD principles as a planning approach in response to the urban sprawls and integrated development.

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