Cosmo Park is a three acre development with paved streets, 78 two story homes, tennis courts, safe play ares for kids, and open space.
It also has a high metal fence around it, not to keep people out, but to keep people from falling out. Why? Because Cosmo Park is on the roof of
the 10 story Thamrin City Mall in Jakarta, Indonesia.
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With a population of over 10 million and three times that within the greater Jakarta area, the city may soon need to build more neighborhoods on top of existing buildings. Life on the ground has become unbearable for many due to chronic flooding that occurs every rainy season. This is exacerbated by the fact that Jakarta is sinking as more and more groundwater from underground aquifer is pumped out for drinking, washing and construction purposes. On top of that, the sea level in Jakarta Bay is rising every year.
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Jakarta is among the world’s densest cities, on par with Tokyo, with about 14,000 residents per square kilometer. But Tokyo and other megacities in Asia are growing vertically. In contrast, Jakarta’s density is sprawling horizontally with low-rise single-family houses. Such development leads to shortage of land leaving little space for affordable housing and parks. The city is depressingly low in green spaces—less than 10 percent of the city’s land area is allocated to open parks and gardens.
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Wendy Haryanto, Executive director of Jakarta Property Institute, believes that the only way to make Jakarta livable is to build upwards. Government-owned enterprises, she points out, own vast amount of land in strategic areas but these land has low floor area utilization, because they are often used for a single and limited purpose, such as to serve a market or a bus terminal. Wendy proposes that they take these under-used buildings and build multistory low-income apartments on top of them, the same way the Thamrin City Mall and the Mall of Indonesia have done.
“This could be a win-win solution,” she writes. “Public enterprises earn extra income from unused air rights for developers to build low-income apartments that they are obligated to construct anyway; markets get more business; low-income households live in the city.”
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Seems like an awful waste of buildable surface area and materials to build apartments for perfectly good Soylent Green.
Oh well it’s like a chicken coop I guess.
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