vervolg:
Below Sea Level
"When a third of the city is under sea level and there's nowhere else to put people, the only option is to go the Netherlands route," said Paul Rowland, a Jakarta-based political consultant. "It's just going to get worse."
The works can't come too soon. In October 2013, the sea rose to just 10 centimeters below the top of the defenses, threatening 4 million people, according to Deventer-based Witteveen+Bos. Global sea levels may increase by as much as 82 centimeters this century, according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Meanwhile, North Jakarta is sinking by between 7.5 and 17 centimeters a year because of decades of pumping out groundwater to supply homes and businesses.
Coastal cities have been building barriers against the waves since Herod the Great sank barges full of concrete to protect the harbor of Caesarea Maritima in modern Israel before the birth of Jesus Christ. With the rise of sea levels accelerating, ocean defenses have become more popular -- from London's Thames Barrier, opened in 1982, to Venice's 5.5 billion-euro ($6.9 billion) MOSE project, scheduled for completion in 2016.
New Business
For local companies such as PT Agung Podomoro Land, Indonesia's seventh-largest property developer, the Garuda project opens up a whole new area that has traditionally been blighted with run-down colonial structures and shanties, sandwiched between an airport and the nation's largest port.
Podomoro is marketing a planned 160-hectare (395-acre) man-made island called Pluit City with apartments, a shopping mall, offices, an international school and a "floating" opera house.
"The sea level keeps rising while Jakarta is sinking, so without a wall the flooding will get worse," said Wibisono, Podomoro's head of investor relations, who, like some Indonesians, uses one name. "Development is happening across Jakarta, from East, West and South, but in the North it's constrained by lack of land."
15 Years
The company is awaiting a license to begin reclaiming the land, he said. The island city would take 10 to 15 years to complete.
The sleek images of the future contrast with the patchwork of slums, docks and walled compounds today. The first piles for the new sea wall are being erected in Muara Baru, near the sprawling Dunia Fantasi amusement park. On the shore, fishermen work on their boats next to a 3-meter sluice gate with pumps that keep the land from submerging.
Nearby, antique cars are parked in the driveway of a mansion in a walled compound and an Azimut motor yacht is tethered to its private dock.
In the narrow streets of Muara Angke to the west, the evening air is filled with the smell of salted fish, laid out to dry in front of crowded concrete houses. These streets have sunk more than 4 meters -- the height of the houses -- since records began in 1975, according to a report for the Jakarta Coastal Defence Strategy study in 2012. They wind down to the sea where Warkin, a fisherman sits in his wooden boat, mending his net before heading out for the night's catch.
Fishermen's Worries
He's worried the project will disrupt fishing grounds and block the boats. "How will small people like us go out to sea if they build a wall?" said Warkin, who made almost a week's wages in a single day during a flood last year by ferrying fresh fruit and vegetables to the rich neighborhoods. "How will we be able to keep fishing?"
That's not the only potential problem. Skeptics are concerned about the amount of garbage and silt the city's rivers would spew into the proposed lagoon, the corruption such a large project would attract and the danger posed by the fact that Indonesia is one of the most earthquake-prone countries in the world.
The city's acting governor, Basuki "Ahok" Tjahaja Purnama, said the first stage -- strengthening the existing defenses -- will go ahead, while further studies need to be done before proceeding with the plan for the land reclamation and Garuda island. Purnama took over running the city in June from Indonesia's new President Joko Widodo.
Better Drainage
Darmawan, the marketing executive whose house is near a canal that joins the Ciliwung, is doubtful about the benefit.
"I'm not going to get my hopes up that it will get better, knowing how Jakarta is," she said. "I'm not that optimistic about the sea wall. I think they should improve the drainage system."
She said the government brought in dredging equipment after the January floods to remove garbage from the canals, but it hasn't made much difference.
"The difficulty in widening and improving drainage along the Ciliwung River lies in entrenched practices of pumping ground water and dumping of human and industrial waste," said Girot, who is also a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. "Building the wall of course would guard against the rising seas very well, but we should first take care of the river."
Residents caught between the rising sea and the flooding Ciliwung aren't holding their breath.
"The giant sea wall is only a project to earn more money for government officials and give more land for real-estate developers," said Charli Soegono, 38, who lost his red Honda Civic and whose prized Arowana fish swam away when water flooded his house up to the second floor last year. "It was like in that movie Titanic, where the ship is sinking and you have to rush to get all your valuables out of the water."
(A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the cost of Venice's MOSE project.)