Bekasi

Everyone calls Bekasi a bedroom community — a place where Jakarta's workers sleep before commuting back to the capital. The label persists despite the fact that the adjacent Bekasi Regency hosts ten industrial parks spanning 9,500 hectares with more than 7,600 companies, making it one of Southeast Asia's largest manufacturing concentrations. The Cikarang industrial corridor directs roughly 70 per cent of its output to export markets, while the Marubeni-backed MM2100 Industrial Town generates roughly ten billion dollars in annual output from a single estate.

This is niche construction on an industrial scale. In the early 1990s, MM2100 and Jababeka were built from scratch on agricultural land east of Jakarta. They created an entirely new economic ecosystem — power grids, worker housing, logistics corridors — that attracted the next wave of manufacturers, which attracted the next wave of suppliers. Jababeka now hosts nearly 2,000 companies from thirty countries. The preferential attachment is visible in Samsung's supply chain: 25 of its 28 Indonesian supplier companies are located within Bekasi. When 89 per cent of your suppliers share a single floodplain, a natural disaster becomes a supply chain event.

Beavers reshape entire watersheds by building dams — structures that create productive wetland ecosystems while simultaneously flooding the surrounding landscape. Bekasi's industrial parks have done the same thing: they built an enormously productive manufacturing ecosystem that is steadily destroying the water catchment it depends on.

The life-history trade-off is now impossible to ignore. Residential areas in the Bekasi watershed grew from 30 per cent to nearly 50 per cent of total land use between 2000 and 2024, paving over the floodplains that once absorbed monsoon rainfall. The city spends roughly a third of its regional budget on flood management, and severe flooding regularly paralyses eight or more of its twelve sub-districts. Every hectare of water catchment converted to factory floor or housing estate increases the metabolic cost of Bekasi's own survival.

The irony runs deep. The Tugu Inscription, carved in the fifth century CE, records that the Tarumanagara king ordered the Chandrabhaga River — now the Bekasi River — to be widened and straightened to prevent flooding. The same river today overwhelms a city built too fast to remember why the excavation was needed.