Three Sustainability Advantages of Urban Densification in a Concentric Urban Form: Evidence from Bandung City, Indonesia

Abstract

Urban densification, in most cases, is associated with compact city because of similar goal of these two overlapping entities in optimizing limited land resources. Thus, this study borrows an understanding that urban densification leads to compact city as the ultimate goal of the process. The increase of urban land demand in the city has led to persistent pressure to the sustainability of city. In a city with loose development control like in the study area, this pressure is translated into the appearance of sprawling city. One approach to reduce the impact of increasing demand of lands is to minimize the spatial extent of urban areas by developing more compact city forms (Tratalos et al., 2007). However, heated debate on compact city has been undergoing since long time ago before the issue of sustainable development was launched by the Brundtland's Report on Our Common Future in 1987. While the compact city and sustainable development issues are presently being a hot topic in international environmental agenda, pros and cons are underway on whether or not compact city leads to sustainable city, the way that city should be developed in the future amid continuous depletion and degradation of natural resources and environment. Inarguably, cities contribute to environmental degradation according to the extent of their ecological footprint as asserted by Rees (1992) and Wackernagel & Rees (1996). The continuous enlargement of ecological footprint of cities as they are growing has confirmed the parasitic attribute of cities, as plainly depicted by Douglas (1983) who argues that great cities are biologically parasites in their use of vital resources such as air, water and food in urban system. With the emerging sustainability issue, this attribute confronts diametrically the sustainable urban development concept which requires equilibrium state among three important aspects of economic growth, social development and ecology (UN, 2001). This challenge has long been pondered by prominent urban planners, Dantzig and Saaty (1973) for instance, proposes a compact city concept with the main objective is to enhance the quality of urban life by creating more exciting city for personal interactions in today's fast moving world. The proposal of compact city implicitly disputes the organically grown sprawling cities which ubiquitously exist in developing countries, though in some instances, the quality of compact and sprawling cities is co-exist in a city. While Hong Kong and Singapore characterize Asian compact cities and have undergone extensive urban densification as disputably argued by Lau and Chiu (2004), Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila undeniably exhibit the characters of Asian sprawling cities, as urban agglomeration exists in these three major cities. The different characters of compact and sprawling cities inscribe in these five Asian cities, would likely display dissimilar performance in many respects. It would also constantly invite debate between their respective proponents and opponents. Although the debate on compact city may continually go on, it can be