How neglecting walking increases socio-economic inequalities:Impeding urban sustainable mobility: Insights from Jakarta, Indonesia

Walking in Jakarta, Indonesia, is often regarded as inconvenient, unsafe, and associated with limited mobility and accessibility. These attributes are the manifestation of Jakarta’s socio-spatial structures over time (path dependence) of spatial development events in the past, which considered walking as less important in comparison to vehicular movement. In this paper, we explore Jakarta’s trajectory by analysing and interpreting the results of mathematical street network models using space syntax at a metropolitan scale for three discrete time steps (1940, 1959, 2018). We juxtapose the computational analysis with Jakarta’s history of urban development and selected transport data. Our findings indicate that vehicular dominance (i.e. car-oriented development) has been inadvertently imposed in Jakarta’s socio-spatial structure over time. This structure highly penalises those without access to private motorised vehicles, thus entrenching the existing socio-economic inequalities; especially for the potentially marginalised groups (e.g. urban poor, immigrants, those with disability, elderly, children). For them, this structure influences the accessibility to key functions such as schools and health care services. In light of sustainable urban mobility and the United Nation’s sustainable development goals (SDGs), our findings highlight the influence that socio-spatial structures have on transport mobility practice. Moreover, our results provide insights for understanding and addressing mobility inequality. We further link our results to current planning policies in Jakarta. This application of space syntax contributes to urban strategic and transport planning by emphasising the need to change the conventional urban planning practices, which heavily prioritises road infrastructures while neglecting the socio-spatial structure and intertwined land use of the city