Jakarta, the world's most populous city, is sinking into the Java Sea
With 42 million inhabitants, the Indonesian capital is the most exposed to rising ocean levels, it is polluted and its citizens live crammed. A journey to the great Asian metropolis of the 21st century
Jakarta is a city on the limit, overflowing; it seems to be on the verge of bursting its seams. When it became the capital of Indonesia, after independence in 1945, it did not reach a million inhabitants. Today it is the most populous megalopolis on the planet, with almost 42 million residents, according to the UN, which includes the peripheral areas of Greater Jakarta in its calculations.
In reality, it does not seem like a city, but a succession of metropolises, towns, villages, and underdeveloped housing areas arranged one after the other without any criteria, as if some capricious god had thrown them randomly onto the northwest coast of the island of Java and over the years had sedimented a gigantic, brownish urban crust, often covered by a layer of pollution.
Translated by urgent.news. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
