Jakarta is the capital city of Indonesia. Jakarta isn’t as famous as Bali Island which has been misunderstood as a country or capital city of Indonesia for many years. Indonesia is a country which well known for its unique islands as you can see on the world map. We have a K shape island. It is the island of Sulawesi, that’s what we called it in Indonesian language.
Jakarta has rapidly change from undeveloped city to a metropolitan city. Our government worked very hard try to build Jakarta as an icon of modernity. Those developments encompass the development of tall buildings allocated for office spaces and malls.
Today, Jakarta is a city with the highest number of malls in the world. We have reached nearly 200 malls and counting. When you open google maps and simply type “mall” then enter, you can get at least 8-10 malls near your location in 8 km.
The average building area of malls in Jakarta more or less is about 200.000 - 300.000 square meters. So I did simple calculation here, imagine if we could put 4 people standing on 1 square meter space. Take an example of a 300.000 square meters mall, it means that we can put around 12 million people standing there, while the newest population data released stated that Jakarta has “only” 10,5 million residents. Wow… We can fit all Jakarta residents standing just in one mall!
Malls have been playing an important role in our lives. Our first mall opened is Sarinah Mall, located at Menteng, Central Jakarta. Build by our First President, Ir. Soekarno in 1962. The name Sarinah was actually taken from his childminder when he was a kid. His love and respect to “Mbok Sarinah” were manifested as a tribute to her. From Mbok Sarinah I learned to love low society people. She maybe uneducated but she has great souls and love, he said. Also, in Sarinah Mall, Jakarta has its first ever escalator.
Below is the picture of Sarinah Mall nowadays:
Sarinah’s Logo:
With so many selections of mall here, we don’t have many choices when going out because we could find literally everything in mall. Just named it, supermarket checked, bookstore checked, cafe checked, fashion boutique checked, fitness center checked and the most odd things are, preschool and church checked. It has been common in our society during weekend thinking, which mall I should go today? Is there a new mall open recently?
The fact is, the stores inside are mostly same in every mall. Same fast food restaurant, same department store, same groceries store, same fitness center and so on. We also treat mall as our meeting points because of the various cafe inside.
Since the enormous number of malls in Jakarta, Jakarta residents like myself is longing for more open space to do outdoor activity. We are trapped within buildings in this metropolitan city. No public space or park means we have less trees and plants, so lead to less oxygen. More building means more Air Conditioner used, more carbon dioxide produced and temperature of Jakarta is getting hot day by day.
So my fellow Local Guides mates, thank you for reading my short article (actually its my first article in Local Guide Connect) and I would love to hear what activities you do in your city during your free time.
Ps: “Mbok” is a polite nickname for a childminder and domestic workers in Indonesia, adopted from Javanese languange. So we usually say: Mbok Ayu, Mbok Ina, Mbok Tika etc.
