I used to spend a lot of time in Jakarta for work, and it's an underrated city. Yes, it's hot, congested, polluted and largely poor, but so is Bangkok.
Public transport remains not great, but it's improved a lot with the airport link, the metro, LRT, Transjakarta BRT. SE Asia's only legit high speed train now connects to Bandung in minutes. Grab/Gojek (Uber equivalents) make getting around cheap and bypass the language barrier. Hotels are incredible value, you can get top tier branded five stars for $100. Shopping for locally produced clothes etc is stupidly cheap. Indonesian food is amazing, there's so much more to it than nasi goreng, and you can find great Japanese, Italian, etc too; these are comparatively expensive but lunch at the Italian place in the Ritz-Carlton was under $10. The nightlife scene is wild, although you need to make local friends to really get into it. And it's reasonably safe, violent crime is basically unknown and I never had problems with pickpockets (although they do exist) or scammers.
I think Jakarta's biggest problems are lack of marketing and top tier obvious attractions. Bangkok has royal palaces and temples galore plus a wild reputation for go-go bars etc, Jakarta does not, so nobody even considers it as a vacation destination.
I was there ~20 years ago. I had made friends with some Indonesia students in college and joined them on a trip home. We were mostly in Surabaya, but did spend some time in Jakarta as well. We had a great time.
The language is a hidden gem, you can learn enough to get around on the flight over which I can't say about any other SEA language. Phonetic spellings, Latin alphabet, no tonal sounds, dead easy grammar and a million loan words you already know.
Jakarta is definitely for the adventurous though, and you had better have an iron stomach.
> ...which I can't say about any other SEA language. Phonetic spellings, Latin alphabet, no tonal sounds, dead easy grammar and a million loan words you already know.
Nitpick: Sounds a lot like Tagalog (Filipino), another SEA language.
I've never studied it, but my understanding is that like Japanese, Tagalog has the pitched/stressed thing going on. My wife is Japanese and holy cow I can't tell the difference. Bridge or Chopstick? No idea, they sound exactly the same to my ears...
I'm pretty fluent, but my pronunciation was as good as it's gonna get like 10 years ago which is a frustration.
In Japan/ese, the pitch/stress thing is overrated, and so are regional language differences. When natives point it out to me, it strikes me a little more than cultural gatekeeping. Linguistic context matters much more. How often are you listening to your own native language and you are confused by two words that sounds similar (like 'hashi' in Japanese for bridge/chopsticks)? Almost never. Advice: Ignore it when natives that criticise your pronunciation. Ask them how is their German or Thai is... and they will freeze with shame.
Where I come from, to criticise a non-native speakers accent or small grammatical errors (that do not impact the meaning) is a not-so-subtle form of discrimination. As a result, I never do it. (To criticise myself, it tooks many, many years to see this about my home culture and stop doing it myself.) Still, many people ask me: "Hey, can you correct my <language X> when I speak it?" "Sure!" (but I never do.)
Well imagine somebody was talking about "bass" the fish, in a context of "bass" the instrument. If they pronounced it like the fish, certainly for a moment your language processing would stop, figure it out, fill in the gap, and continue.
Every time the wrong pitch accent is used, a similar process takes place. Especially in highly complex conversations, where a lot of processing power is going towards the semantics itself, and hopefully the person shouldn't have to worry about figuring out which word the other person is saying.
It's unclear if you yourself have native-level (or close to) pitch accent yourself. But if you don't, how can you know whether it's actually important or not?
>How often are you listening to your own native language and you are confused by two words that sounds similar
It confuses the hell out of me when non-natives misplace stress in Ukrainian and use wrong cases. It's that I want to gatekeep, but above certain rate of mistakes it's just difficult to follow what is being said.
Real question (because it took me, sadly, too long to learn it as an adult): Why don't they gatekeep? Do you think there is compassion for those who fled war in Ukraine, so people are more forgiving about linguistic and cultural differences?
I assumed this meant high school or earlier (18 and under). Most kids I grew up with (including myself) wouldn't be mature enough to do this without explicit instruction (and some policing!). That is why I want to understand more. Example: Did they have a big school meeting where they explained to local kids: "There are bunch of war refugees coming. Here are some things we can do to make them feel more welcome. First: Don't criticize their accent when they are speaking Flemish/Dutch." It is also interesting from the lens of Belgian linguistic culture, as the country is broadly divided north is Flemish, south is French and a tiny part is German.
So "not being a dick" really does need an explanatory framework in your world (and an elaborate one, with mostly irrelevant detail). That's.......a shame.
The problem here is just that upthread Muromec said “it’s that I want to gatekeep” when surely they meant “don’t,” and now there’s a whole chain of misunderstanding.
You're comparing apples to oranges. Kids learn foreign languages much faster than adults, plus get a lot more support and less judgement on mistakes from adults since school kids don't operate in a highly competitive environment.
But good luck reaching proficient fluency in a foreign language in your 30s where you'll face a lot more gatekeeping especially on the jobs market. Many western nations still gate-keep careers and opportunities based on regional accents alone, let alone not being a native speaker.
And before I get assaulted in the comments with the "umm acksually I could do it just fine it never was a problem for me exceptions, YES I know it's possible, it's just much much harder, especially when you've got a full time job and adult responsibilities, compared to doing it when you're 5-15 on the school playground, playing videogames with mates or watching cartoons.
You're conflating 2 issues here: judgement of adult attempts at a new language and the time required to learn it. The first is just a cultural thing, although it is sometimes valid for understanding a speaker (cases in Slavic languages, pronunciation in a homonym-heavy language like French, tones in Asian languages). Problem is that it's oftentimes more "cultural" than "valid" critique, which helps no one.
The second problem is more practical and it's not the only difference between child and adult speakers; the vocabulary required in most day-to-day settings for a child is considerably easier to master than the adult equivalent, regardless of language (describing symptoms to your doctor or getting through a bank or tax appointment will be much more difficult than describing the weather or what you want for lunch). Adults in general are just as good as children at learning new languages, it's just that life has different requirements from that age group.
Edit: that said, I actually am agreeing with your general sentiment
Sure some few adults can learn languages as fast as kids, but you completely missed my main points around gatekeeping that language skills always has on adults and less so on kids.
Because statements like the original I was replying to of "no time for gatekeeping" are simply not true, but more like the poster doesn't notice it because he (or his kids) are not affected by that gatekeeping.
> Sure some few adults can learn languages as fast as kids, but you completely missed my main points around gatekeeping that language skills always has on adults and less so on kids.
Adults in general are actually way faster at learning languages than kids if you control for time actually spent learning the language, but generally adults are required to fit language learning in around a full time job (and are also full of shame/embarrassment)
Can't concur. As a kid I learned foreign languages effortlessly, compared to now as an expat. And every other expat here my age shares the same experiences, where their 8 year old already speak the host country's language better than they do.
As another expat, I'd concur with him, with an asterisk. The thing is - your kids are surrounded by the language nonstop. Depending on your situation it may be spoken at school, certainly spoken by some of their friends, teachers, and so on endlessly. But "you" (speaking in generalities of expats and not necessarily literally you)? Unless you happen to have a local wife, then you probably speak it extremely rarely, there's a reasonable chance you can't even read it if it's non-latin, and there's no real need to move beyond that.
Living in one country for a rather long time, my fluency was basically non-existent beyond simple greetings, shopping/eating, and other basic necessities. By contrast somewhat recently I've taken a major interest in another language, one that's generally considered extremely difficult, and I've reached at least basic fluency in about 3 years. The difference? I immersed myself in the other language, my music playlist is overwhelmingly in that language, I've watched endless series and movies in that language, I've made efforts to read books in the other language, and any time I find another speaker I make sure to use the opportunity to talk with him in that language, and so on. If I was in a country where it was the native language, then I'd probably be near fluent by now.
We have the same in dutch, but, surprise twist: it is often the dutch that get it wrong. And indeed, it is confusing, but then again, it is just a bit of noise injected into the bitstream and easily worked around once you attune to that particular speaker.
Note that for people not attuned to a language some differences that are clear as day to the natives are absolutely inaudible.
The difference between 'kas' and 'kaas' in dutch is obvious to me and if your language uses stressed vowels it probably is obvious to you too but if your language skills do not yet include that difference you will not even hear these as two different words.
Why is this downvoted? This is a nice addition to the conversation. I see the same with Cantonese speakers. If you ask native speakers from Hongkong, Macao, and Guangdong, all of them will say "the other sounds weird"... but they work it out. And all three groups are happy to listen to a foreigner speak Canto (yes, there are a few). All will probably say: "Weird accent, but I understand what they are saying." Plus, Canto language communities probably exist in over 50 countries in the world. All of them will have slight tonal differences.
As a Japanese, I will mention that I've seen Japanese people correct each other on this, both in private and in public. Its because we might get the meaning by context, but if you pronounce it wrong, it sounds very strange in that context where its clearly wrong... To default to an assumption that this is due to racism / cultural gatekeeping says a whole lot about your world view and perception about Japanese people and culture than it does my people.
For example, examine your own words when you say that where you come from its a subtle form of discrimination. Well, you are saying it yourself that an action is deemed discriminatory according to the standards of your own culture, not to the standards of the other culture. You realize that could be cultural misunderstanding? There is a word for evaluating another culture by the standards of one's own culture: ethnocentrism.
If you are actually living in Japan, you should self-reflect a bit about what problems you face that you attribute subconsciously in your head to malicious intent, rather than cultural misunderstanding.
Anyways, I'm often disappointed by the comment section on this website when its anything about Japanese people. This is just another reminder for me to avoid the comments.
As a foreigner living in Japan, I'd like to take the opportunity to let you know that it's not ethnocentrism, but that Japan is for the most part quite xenophobic, and racist. It's common to hear Japanese folks make fun of other people's accents in what should be obviously extremely inappropriate settings, like at work, for example. The fact that you consider this ethnocentrism furthers the point that xenophobia and racism is commonplace, and that you feel that it's on foreigners to accept it.
If you're nitpicking a foreigner's accent pitch, think about how it would make you feel if they nitpicked your english pronunciation. My wife points out when I make mistakes in Japanese, but I ask her to do so. If a coworker or stranger were to do so, it would be embarrassing, and that's the difference that matters.
Yes, I also find it hilarious (in any culture) when someone is critical of a foreign speaker. Then when that person speaks a foreign language, usually their accent and style is so predictably awful that people are hiding under their desks. That is why I made the joke about asking natives: "So, how is your Thai... or German?" Those two languages are pretty rare to hear in Japan, especially for non-native speakers. It acts as the perfect monkeywrench in their gears.
> My wife points out when I make mistakes in Japanese, but I ask her to do so. If a coworker or stranger were to do so, it would be embarrassing, and that's the difference that matters.
Another great point. In my experience, the very best language lessons are from casual interactions when a stranger makes a correction to my foreign language when replying me, but not in a derogatory manner. Most of the time, you can tell they are trying to be subtle and give you a helpful hint.
I mean there are widely spoken regional dialects that make no pitch distinction between the pronounciation of 橋 and 箸. You may get looked down on for not speaking the Queen's English (I mean standard Tokyo Japanese) but you are still speaking fully correct Japanese.
This is exactly why I say it is nothing but cultural/linguistic gatekeeping. Even natives between regions disagree on the "correct" way to pronouce these terms. This further proves to me how little Japanese varies throughout the country. It is freakishly regular for the size of Japan.
Consider a place like UK with four constituent countries: England, Wales, Scotland, and North Ireland (not to mention the channel islands and other oddities). They range of accents (without huge mountain ranges!) is wildly different. And the change in vocabulary for vernacular speech is far larger than the United States, which Google AI tells me is 40x larger(!).
Japanese actually has a much smaller set of phonemes (~half as many as English), resulting in extensive homophones. When combined with its greater tendency toward ambiguity, correct use of pitch can actually have a larger impact on intelligibility, as compared to many other languages.
Nice theory, but my experience is exactly the other way around.
Even after several years of learning Chinese I still had trouble communicating with Chinese people, especially those who had no experience talking to foreigners. When I arrived in China and asked the way to the university I was going to (which was close by and very famous) they just didn't get what I was saying. In the end I had to show them the written word.
I don't speak Japanese, but when I arrived and said the name of the city and they immediately understood where I wanted to go. After my experience with Chinese I was flabbergasted that that went so smooth.
I blame the tones in Chinese (which I admit I'm not very good at)
You might have been trying too hard with tones and the stilted speech didn’t help with understanding. My first trip to China before I spoke Chinese well enough…the Beijing taxi drivers, you needed to speak more naturally for them to get you, not more correctly. You were better off talking like a farmer than trying to talk like a broadcaster.
I think that you are right that your problem must have been caused more by the Chinese tones than by any other characteristic of Chinese, and perhaps also from some of their consonants that do not have a straightforward English equivalent.
On the other hand, the Japanese pronunciation is one of the easiest in the world to learn, even taking into account the subtleties of pitch.
Japanese pitch accent actually varies across regions. Some have no pitch accent at all! I think this shows that it's not very important unless you want to sound like a native speaker. I never bothered to learn the "standard" pitch accents but I tend to imitate the Kansai pitch accent of my wife :)
Native Kyushu conversations are literally unintelligible to me as a Japanese speaker. There are actually numerous Japanese dialects and accents that aren't so mutually intelligible, though of course post-TV generations understand TV Japanese.
That's kind of a secret to how CJK languages are each supposedly being a unique linguistic isolates: the rest of the families are hiding in the "dialects".
Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia and the Philippines share a lot (language, food, genetics and customs). Look up Austronesian people. They do exist as minorities in Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. After a while (4 years so far in SEA), you get to notice them in these countries among the masses.
They are both Austronesian languages (also related to the Polynesian languages), so the similarity is not due to coincidence. In SEA there are also other completely unrelated language families besides Austronesian, e.g. the Thai language and the Khmer language belong to different language families with no relationships to Austronesian languages, like Malaysian (besides recent linguistic borrowings between neighbors).
All Austronesian languages are simple phonetically. Also the phonetic simplicity of Japanese is likely to have been caused by an Austronesian substrate related to that of the aborigine Taiwanese people.
> Also the phonetic simplicity of Japanese is likely to have been caused by an Austronesian substrate related to that of the aborigine Taiwanese people.
That's being asserted with too much confidence, I think. While I was aware some kind of Austronesian connection has been suggested, as far as I know there's zero actual consensus among linguists on any kind of relationship between Japanese and any other language family. Like, there's theories relating Japanese to everything from Korean to Turkish to Greek floating around - but nothing to my knowledge that we should really be describing as "likely" at the point, even a connection with the grammatically extremely similar Korean.
Now that said, I don't know a lot about the Austronesian languages or this particular hypothesis. I did find an article about a possible Austronesian substratum ("Does Japanese have an Austronesian stratum?" by Ann Kumar), but it seemed mostly preoccupied with drawing that connection through similarities in vocabulary rather than phonology. Do you have pointers to scholarly sources on the subject?
Japanese is likely to have been a hybrid language, somewhat similar with many European languages that had both a substrate and a superstrate, e.g. a Romance language like French had a Celtic substrate and a Germanic superstrate.
However, in the case of such European languages the 3 combined languages were not radically different, but they belonged to the same great language family, only to different branches. For Japanese, its sources have come from completely unrelated language families, which is the probable cause of the difficulties in determining the affinities of Japanese.
The grammar of Japanese is very similar to its Western neighbor, i.e. Korean, while its phonology is very similar to its Southern neighbor, i.e. the Austronesian languages of Ancient Taiwan and Philippines.
On the other hand, for the vocabulary of native Japanese, before it incorporated the huge amount of borrowings from Chinese, it has been more difficult to find relationships with other languages. Besides the Southern and Western influences, Japanese was also affected by a Northern influence, from people related to Ainu. As there are no old enough recorded sources about languages related to Ainu, it is possible that many of the words that do not appear to have a Southern or Western source may have come from a Northern contribution to the Japanese language.
I did not find any linguistic publication that does an adequate analysis of the relationships of Japanese with other languages. To be fair, such an analysis would require a huge amount of work, because unlike for Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic languages, where a large amount of texts have been preserved from several millennia ago, when the evolution of the languages had not changed most words so much as to make their correspondences in related languages unrecognizable, for Japanese many of the languages related to those which have contributed to the formation of Japanese have probably disappeared before leaving any written records. A credible analysis of the possible relationships of Japanese would require the compilation of a great amount of information about poorly documented languages, in order to try to reconstruct their earlier stages, where similarities with Old Japanese could be identified.
Korean has old written records, but only about as old as Japanese itself, so those are not very helpful to reconstruct the stage from many centuries before, which could have provided a component of Japanese. A language related to Korean appears to have contributed to Japanese, but only as a late superstrate that has applied a new grammar on the vocabulary inherited from the previous inhabitants of the islands. The language providing this superstrate was probably the language of the Yayoi people, who immigrated in Japan more than two thousand years ago.
For the Southern and Northern languages that could have contributed to the vocabulary and phonology of the language of Japan before the Yayoi immigration, there are extremely low chances of becoming able to reconstruct them as they were a few millennia ago, so it is unlikely that the origin of Japanese will ever be known with certainty.
Still, the fact that the languages that share features with Japanese are exactly its former neighbors in the 3 directions besides the Ocean (from before Taiwan became Chinese), is not surprising at all, but it is exactly what would be expected. What are not known are the details of what exactly each source has contributed and when did this happen.
>Jakarta is definitely for the adventurous though, and you had better have an iron stomach.
I love, love, loved backpacking across quite a bit of southeast Asia. I did not like the massive gastrointestinal problems nearly the entire time though.
I spent big money on four things for that trip: the flight, shoes, backpack, and toilet paper. I would've killed and eaten someone to get my hands in alcohol free wet wipes.
maybe this doesn't qualify as "south east asian", but Korean is very easy to learn how to read too. It's not latin alphabet, but you only need to learn 20 symbols, and then everything is phonetic! you can have a lot of fun "reading" all the signs after you study a bit on the plane. Not as many loan words though
Sort of. Indonesian had Jawi, based on the Arabic script. People in today's Vietnam mostly wrote in Chinese AFAIK. Those methods of writing were dominant among the people who could write. But the populations were mostly illiterate, so it was easy for colonial administrators to supplant the existing writing systems with Latin as they introduced European-style schooling.
Despite its name, Jawi wasn’t used all that much in Java – it had always been more popular in the Malay peninsula. Java, as with many parts of Indonesia, used Brahmic abugidas descended from the Pallava script of Southern India (just like the Thai and Khmer scripts). Latin was chosen to write the Indonesian language for the same reason Malay was chosen as the language’s base: it was a politically neutral choice to unite a diverse archipelago.
Vietnam adopted the Latin alphabet from a missionary of some sort a couple of centuries before they were colonized by France --at the time Vietnam was decolonizing from China. The French made some modifications to how the alphabet was used to represent their phonemes.
Btw, after a couple of days being super-confused in Thailand I reverse-engineered this history from signs in English I kept seeing that in no way matched the Thai pronunciation. Finally the penny dropped that whoever had come up with the "English" phonetic spelling of Thai words, was not an English speaker.
How well do Chinese characters mesh with Vietnamese?
I mean I note that there are some Chinese languages, with millions of speakers, where the largest written text they have is a bible written in a Roman script. If those are a challenge surely Vietnamese must be as well.
> How well do Chinese characters mesh with Vietnamese?
Not very well. The old vietnamese script with Chinese characters had a lot of custom additions not in Chinese to make it work. It clearly was ducktaped.
That was kind of like that with vietnamese, a mix of phonetic-only characters, fully custom characters and standard ones all blend together, it's quite a mess. I doubt any Chinese speaker can understand that.
The colonial administration didn't have to push too hard to make people switch, the customized chinese script wasn't very popular.
Chinese speakers won't understand Zhuang, Yi, or Bai as well. Latinization would probably be more effective, but China would lose some face. They even re-popularized an old form of Uighur script for Mongolian (while Mongolians in outer Mongolia/Russia use Cyrillic).
Like Korean and Japanese it has a different grammar and vocabulary. Japanese added a bunch other characters and Korean just made up a new (phonetic) script.
> No dominate written language at the time of European Colonialization
Vietnamese used to be written using Chinese orthography just like Japanese.
The French forcibly cracked down on this form of orthography, and following independence, later modernists attempting to copy Ataturk along with latent Sinophobia due to the Chinese colonial era meant this for of orthography has largely been relegated to ceremonial usage.
A similar thing happened with Bahasa Indonesia, as Indonesia's founding leadership was more secular and socialist in mindset compared to neighboring Malaysia where Jawi remained prominent because of the Islamist movement's role in Malaysian independence.
Another factor is that literacy rates were very low before colonization, in Vietnam to read or write using Chinese characters was never a broadly known skill (outside of the elite). This is a pretty big contrast to Japan, which had double-digit rates of literacy during the same era.
Malay culture adopted Arabic alphabet without colonization. I think colonization had less to do with it and more with the fact that the Alphabet is better and more practical. Same thing with modern numbers.
> There is evidence that Parameswara converted to Islam following his infatuation with and marriage to a girl from the Samudera Pasai Sultanate.
Doesn't that seem like the silliest thing you ever read? When the infatuation ended ( like all infatuations do ), did he convert back? The only thing royals are infatuated with is wealth and power. If anything, don't you think the guy converted to get preferable treatment from the arab traders or get special access to the arab trading network? There is more to the story for sure. But I'm not buying that fanciful story.
> Doesn't that seem like the silliest thing you ever read?
Not even close to be frankly honest.
Leaving aside the delibrate silliness of Edward Lear, Roald Dahl, et al and focusing just on origin stories relating to the spread of various beliefs ...
* Have you heard the one about the Buddist Monk, the Monkey, Pig, Fish, Dragon, and Horse spirits ?
* the tale of a great snake that carved rivers ?
* maybe that fishing boat passenger that got out and walked across the water ?
> If anything, don't you think the guy converted to get preferable treatment from the arab traders
I suspect the marriage was political .. but he wasn't marrying into a family of arab traders, Sultan Malikussaleh (the progenitor of the Samudera Pasai Sultanate) was an Acehnese man from part of what is now called Sumatra, a part of Indonesia.
> special access to the arab trading network
Was pretty low key wrt volume between the modern middle east and Indonesia back in the time we are looking at - the trade advantages by volume (ie. that which mattered) was all local to the greater archipelago.
Moreover, returning to the original point upthread, there's no evidence of colonisation by arabs in the sense of colonisation by the British of India or various parts of Africa, colonisation by the Dutch in the East Indies, colonisation by the Germans in Africa and PNG, by the French in Vietnam, etc.
No. But Arabs didn't colonize the Malay islands. They just adopted Islam from their internal politics. Not sure why this triggered you, pretty much everybody is a colonizer.
The same way the latin world ended up with a Latin Alphabet. It's more practical and they never developed their own. Malaysia, for example, has Jawi which is the Arabic alphabet of the their language. The short answer: the language never developed an "alphabet" and thus adopted one.
The dutch colonization of indonesia started in the 1600s and ended in 1949. So plenty of time for the locals, especially the elites, to learn dutch and the alphabet.
I spent a month in Jakarta earlier this year and wasn't impressed.
Traffic was terrible. I almost missed my flight due to taking a bike over a car, but then it started pouring rain and I had to huddle under a bridge while I waited for a car.
Jakarta has a noise problem. The temples blasting the prayers is disruptive to sleep and inner peace. The traffic does not make anything either.
Also, Indonesian food IMHO is at the bottom of SEA food culture. MY has wayyy better food (both in quality and diversity).
>Also, Indonesian food IMHO is at the bottom of SEA food culture. MY has wayyy better food (both in quality and diversity).
I won't speak for the quality but this seems like an extremely dubious statement. Malay cuisine is certainly diverse, owing to settled migrant populations from other parts of Asia, but they don't have the dizzying array of indigenous cuisines on offer in Indonesia, many of which aren't readily available in Java.
> Also, Indonesian food IMHO is at the bottom of SEA food culture. MY has wayyy better food (both in quality and diversity).
Agreed! Malaysia is really underrated, or at least it was by me. Now it's one of my favorite spots in the world, food is great (not as Thai's but comes close), wonderful sea, wonderful jungle, Kuala Lumpur is becoming a really nice city and CoL is value for money.
Made me remember again how disappointed I was (food-wise) that time I went backpacking in the Philippines after backpacking in Thailand. Most days we had to choose between dry rice with tasteless fried chicken, or tasteless fried chicken with dry rice.
I'll see anything you get in Indonesia, and raise you Balut... Or Betamax... or Helmet. Their national dish was designed to hide the aroma of rotten meat, FFS.
Having been to both Indonesia and Myanmar, I can say confidently Burmese food is much better. The one exception is the dessert Martabak you can get in Java is to die for.
Not only is Burmese food in Myanmar far better, but even the small, modest restaurants bring out a whole spread of complimentary small dishes (pickles, salads, crunchy snacks, all kinds of delicious little sides) before the main meal. It's just built into the dining culture there, and it's incredibly generous compared to what you see abroad.
Nice. I'm an ex-tour guide, and had many jovial discussions with a colleague who toured Myanmar and LOVED the food - he knew I thought it was pretty average, at best.
Of course, that crazy guy didn't really like Thai food...
- Indonesia is a tropical country, and Jakarta is in the vicinity of the sea, so depending on the month of year, it can rain anytime on the day. So, if you are not comfortable with rain, always use a taxi/grab/gocar to go around.
- If you are pressed for time, I suggest you use airport train to go to the airport. At least you won't get stuck on traffic.
- About the noise problem, I think it won't be a problem if you sleep in a tall building. The last time I go there, I sleep in a relatively good hotel and deliberately choose the higher floor. And the noise doesn't become a problem for me.
Hope this help and you can get a nicer experience on your next visit
I offer a practical template: <Large city in developing country X> has a noise problem.
When you say "temples", do you mean masjid (mosque)? It is pretty normal anywhere in the Islamic-majority world to sing prayers over a loud speaker a few times a day.
I can tell you that Tokyo is very loud. Constant road traffic noise everywhere, drunk people singing on the streets, pointless warnings from the local municipal office on the public alert system, noisy street advertisements, constant announcements in train stations, bousouzoku gangs constantly revving their bikes in silent neighborhoods every night, flight traffic noise, railroad noise of the trains passing, level crossing barriers constantly ding-donging, etc
I lived in Japan 2x long than you. You just said you lived near stations so there you go. Of course it’s loud next to the station. Walk 3 minutes perpendicular to the station and it’s silent
I live in Japan and this is something that I will never get used to. Yes, the people are quiet, but shops are ridiculously loud. Go to any supermarket and there are seven different jingles playing in parallel! Honestly, I don't understand how the employees don't go crazy.
I've known a few younger people who can't go into shops they used to do their part-time work (バイト) at, simply because the looped jingles did, in fact, drive them nuts.
I've heard that some places, such as train stations, did away with jingles (etc.) to bring more silence. The feedback was that those places felt "lonely."
Catholic churches ring bells twice a day. It's less then mosques that do their call 5 times a day both as non-religious person both are disappointing to me.
> Traffic was terrible. I almost missed my flight due to taking a bike over a car, but then it started pouring rain and I had to huddle under a bridge while I waited for a car.
I guess people perceive this very differently. One sees it as an adventure while another one sees it as a hustle. Jakarta is a hustle. Some people like it and make them feel alive. If you don't enjoy it, it'll make you miserable.
> Also, Indonesian food IMHO is at the bottom of SEA food culture.
I agree. I hate the food but Malay food is similar. What Malaysia has is two other major races (Chinese and Indians) and a strong expat community (ie: Thai, Viet and Japanese) that bring lots of food diversity.
Bangkok doesn't have nearly the noise issues of Jakarta; the traffic proceeds without every vehicle beeping most of the time in Bangkok. Also no prayer calls.
Seattle's not really known for noise. The opposite, if anything. Rain (caveat it's not the rain it's the dark and it's mostly mizzle blah blah blah) and traffic though, sure.
Jakarta doesn’t need to turn itself into a sex tourism city like Bangkok. It shouldn’t. Thailand sold its people out to make some business and government people rich in my opinion.
I spent a lot of time in Jakarta. It has some serious issues like pollution, worst traffic in SEA, unwalkable city, actually far more expensive for what you get than other SEA areas. It isn’t surprising to me that people don’t want to travel there for holiday. There are far better places for tourism.
Sounds wonderful if you're OK with Indonesia's ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing of West Papua.
> Widespread atrocities committed by Indonesian forces have led human rights groups to describe the situation as a genocide against the indigenous Papuan population. Reports of mass killings, forced displacement, and sexual violence are extensive and credible. According to a 2007 estimate by scholar De R. G. Crocombe, between 100,000 and 300,000 Papuans have been killed since Indonesia's occupation began.[19][23] A 2004 report by Yale Law School argued that the scale and intent of Indonesia’s actions fall within the legal definition of genocide.[24] State violence has targeted women in particular. A 2013 and 2017 study by AJAR and the Papuan Women's Working Group found that 4 in 10 Papuan women reported suffering state abuse,[25] while a 2019 follow-up found similar results.[26][27][Note 1][Note 2]
> In 2022, the UN condemned what it described as "shocking abuses" committed by the Indonesian state, including the killing of children, disappearances, torture, and large-scale forced displacement. It called for "urgent and unrestricted humanitarian aid to the region."[28] Human Rights Watch (HRW) has noted that the Papuan region functions as a de facto police state, where peaceful political expression and independence advocacy are met with imprisonment and violence.[29] While some analysts argue that the conflict is aggravated by a lack of state presence in remote areas,[30] the overwhelming trend points to systemic state violence and neglect.
> Indonesia continues to block foreign access to the Papuan region, citing so-called "safety and security concerns", though critics argue this is to suppress international scrutiny of its genocidal practices
BLACKWATER
Angwi fled his mountain home, the soldiers, as they burnt his village down, near the border line.
He’s left the card games by the valley fire, the stories that his uncle told, the stories old, the spirits past.
He’s seen the land taken away and given to the Java men; they’ve flown them in from distant lands.
Angwi fears for his people’s songs, the nights they danced the valley strong; the hunding grounds, steep mountain side.
slash and burn
Is there any place you can go now that isn't doing a genocide? USA is out, Europe is out, Russia is out, China is out. Obviously the middle east is out. Most of Africa. Australia? They're strongly aligned with the USA though. And they did one in the past. Tiny Pacific islands but they're basically USA colonies?
This could be a general issue with SE Asia, but one thing that was a breath of fresh air for me as I departed Jakarta from my Bali trip last year was a thought that I no longer need to worry about quality of water being used to wash salad veggies or clean my toothbrush with.
Clean safe water from the sink was definitely not something I experienced in Bali in 2024 and I had the similar impression in Jakart
The price of clean water is at least an order of magnitude less than the price of electricity, but the cost of creating a water grid is probably more expensive than the electricity grid.
You will notice that many of the countries with unsafe tap water also have electricity reliability problems. If the economics of electricity don't work, then the economics of safe water don't work at all.
I don't think there's any conspiracy like this. It's just economic + (lack of) beauracracy. Installing and maintaining a functioning potable water supply across an entire country is expensive, but even harder is setting and maintaining standards.
I traveled often between Jakarta and Japan in 2018, 2019 and 2020. The real breath of fresh air for me was literally the fresh air back in Japan. After running around for a week through Jakarta, I would inevitably develop a deep cough and a clogged nose. That said, the people, the food, and as someone else pointed out the nightlife is amazing.
Somebody I know had asthma while she lived in Jakarta. It went away when she moved to Europe. I really liked Jakarta, but the air quality is one of the reasons why I won't go back again.
Bangkok is not what you described. Bangkok is a great city, not too polluted, there are not a lot of poor people. Bangkok is like Manila.
I spent a lot of time working is South East Asia. Jakarta is the worst city, yes it is big but very filthy like New Delhi or India in general. Second filthiest is Malaysia.
Are we talking about the same Bangkok? I'm talking about the Bangkok in Thailand where they literally shut down the schools due to air pollution being so bad [0].
What Bangkok are you referring to?
Malaysia is wayyy cleaner than Indonesia, both in air quality and trash on the ground.
Bangkok has seasonal haze incidents that can get bad enough to close schools etc. Those are a scourge across all of SEA and are generally caused by slash-and-burn agriculture practices. It's much different from having bad AQI year-round.
I'd hardly say Bangkok is a clean air capital, but it's next to the ocean with no significant mountains nearby so usually pollution gets blown out to sea.
For me Manila is the uncontested worst city in SEA. All of Jakarta's downsides, plus an absolutely horrific airport, worse traffic, extremely limited public transport network (which doesn't extend at all to the places where most business travellers go, namely Makati/BGC), higher crime and more violent crime too (lots of guns around), and worse food.
About the only upside is that most people speak some English, which is manifestly not the case in Jakarta.
I guess we just have different experience of Manila. In most places you would go as a visitor, either tourist or business, you're not really likely to see a lot of violence. I've been there 10 times over 10 years, and really nothing truly bad happened or even seen or heard by fellow travellers. I've been harassed by street kids, that's about it.
Do people talk that crime exists? For sure. You have to be smart, just like any other big city. But I don't see how you'd truly put yourself into a dangerous situation. There's lots of security everywhere westerners might hang out.
Airport has seen lots of improvements recently.
But yes, traffic is horrendous, public transit as well.
> I spent a lot of time working is South East Asia. Jakarta is the worst city, yes it is big but very filthy like New Delhi or India in general. Second filthiest is Malaysia.
Malaysia's a pretty decent size country, not a city. Can't say as I'd have referred to KL as filthy on any of my visits (admittedly only 3 times over the past 12 years). Kuching wasn't filthy either.
source: I've been to almost every country in SEA at least 3x. (Brunei was once, never went to Timor-Leste).
Check the forex changes and rent prices if you don't believe me.
Harder to factor in is visa costs. Vietnam, you need to leave every 90 days. So you need to buy a $25usd visa + flights/buses + hotels for 3-5 days while you get your next visa. Thailand, you only need to leave every 6mo on the DTV.
The parent mentions the DTV visa which is the opposite of the visa-run strategy. Realistically though, if you're a "nomad" from a country with a powerful-ish passport you can come to Thailand for 60 days, extend once for 30 days for a total stay of 90 days. After that you can do a bit of a loop between Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Philippines in whatever order you prefer and come back to Thailand in a year. They'll have no problem letting you in again.
It's pretty easy to spend a year in SEA without raising eyebrows at any border if you're willing to change countries somewhat often and don't mind AirAsia flights.
That is basically my life. I've visited almost every country in the region this year (+ China and Japan) on a tourist visa.
The problem for me personally is this life is stressful on relationships, health, and personal productivity. Spending a weekend every 1-2 months to deal with travel (and arrangements) is exhausting and expensive on productivity hours.
I'd take Bangkok over Singapore any time of the day/month/year. There's still a bit of chaos in Bangkok in 2025 but once you spend a few days there and learn how to avoid peak traffic hours and areas it's incredibly charming and charistmatic city with loads of activities and opportunities for all classes of people. Singapore while clean is incredibly dull and characterless unless you're a billionaire.
"Learn how to avoid peak traffic hours." Most people living in Bangkok cannot do this. Also, a very high percent of the time, the Icon Siam area is extremely congested (even on weekends). Yes, you can avoid living in or going to that area, but there are also very few nice areas in Bangkok in general.
Most don't have the luxury of the flexibility to avoid certain areas and/or certain peak travel times (which in BKK are many throughout the day)
> "Learn how to avoid peak traffic hours." Most people living in Bangkok cannot do this
you can absolutely do this. Once you learn how to live there and design your own routes with motorbike taxis, sky train etc you do save a lot of time. It's still quite bad but it's 20 minutes vs 2 hours sort of better.
Every time I tried taking a motorbike taxi, they charged me probably three times more than a local to just travel maybe 1km, not to mention Bangkok has one of the deadliest roads in the world, if not the deadliest. I have explored pretty much all of Bangkok and I don't think the MRT and BTS are as convenient as some people make it out to be. It is built as it is in any other city where it's very concentrated around the city centre but anything right outside of that is terrible.
Also, for two weeks in December you have the Red Cross festival. I challenge you to schedule your day every single day to avoid that mass of hell if you live anywhere in a 2km radius of that. Even if you call a tuktuk or a motorbike, they will absolutely NOT come to get you if they think there's too much traffic, or worse, they will tell you to get off somewhere where it's convenient for them.
Like a lot of foreigners, you seem to have built your life avoiding many things in Bangkok, which you can do in any city, but that's not the point. You are compensating for how poorly the city is built and how poorly the city is ran. A city is not appealing if you have to self-impose so many restrictions and find so many workarounds.
This comment is proof that the parent commenter has never actually lived in either city.
After a while, a city's 'character', 'charm', and 'charisma' all become annoyances. People live, work, go to school, file taxes, use transport, not just visit tourist attractions. Singapore's quality and efficiency of administration is light-years beyond any other country, perhaps bar Switzerland. 6.1 million people live in Singapore; they're not all multimillionaires.
It's hard to put into words how unsafe Singapore makes me feel.
No, literally, it's hard to put it into words. I feel that if I criticize the country, the govt might take revenge the next time I visit. (See also: Bald JD Vance)
Metrics aren't everything. Singapore might be on paper a great place to live, but it could never be a home.
I agree it's hard to explain why Singapore is so dull. I go there every year or so as that's where the closest Lithuanian embassy is and the entire country feels like a shopping mall.
It's a great example how "on paper" metrics don't match reality but it's hardly surprising given that manipulating paper is the entire function of the country.
Lots of people labouring under weak and old stereotypes here...
I wonder what people would think if I said that about London, if I only visited central London and said 'it feels like a tourist trap'. London is huge, as is Singapore (for a city, it's pretty big— it has a larger population than all of the Baltics and the Nordic except Sweden).
Oh, for goodness' sake, drop the melodrama and hyperbole. I take it you haven't lived in the country either.
Singapore is not North Korea, the PRC, or any of the Gulf countries, where people just get disappeared (or sawn into pieces and stuffed into a suitcase) for 'criticising the government' or 'criticising the country'.
I am Singaporean.
I can absolutely call the ruling People's Action Party a bunch of ivory tower-dwelling bureaucrats who have lost touch with the issues of the populace, and are mostly far cry from Lee Kuan Yew's days. I can say that Ms Josephine Teo really needs to keep her mouth shut, and that Mr Ng Chee Meng, MP for Jalan Kayu, didn't deserve to win his constituency one jot. I can say the ruling party regularly gerrymander the districts so they keep winning, even though they deny it. I can say they stifle the development of creative pursuits and the arts with their heavy-handed censorship. I can say they have their vices backwards by being extremely light on drink-driving, but simultaneously extremely harsh on cannabis, which smells horrible but isn't a big problem in terms of addiction or withdrawal.
I can say they are strongly influenced by Anglospheric right-wing Christian evangelism, and they need to root it out before it settles too deep into the country's psyche. I can say they are trying to build a cult of personality of Lee Kuan Yew, who has been dead for 10 years; it's time the country, the government, and the ruling party built on his legacy and moved forward instead of circling around him and his memory.
If you want more criticism, how about actually watching the Singapore Parliament, and deciding for yourself?
Oh, and if you ever decide to drop by, leave the hard drugs at home (including weed), if you want to leave with your head on its neck.
As for metrics: Singapore is both on paper and in reality a pretty good place to live, if you can stand the humidity and heat (frankly, that's the only truly oppressive thing about the place, how ruddy hot it gets). Why do you think people still emigrate to it, from lower-income countries, and from the West?
And finally, 'bald JD Vance', I don't understand how US politics is related to Singapore. They are countries hemispheres apart. One occupies a full third of a continent and has a population of 350 million. The other is a tiny island city-state of 6 million.
The politics of the US have also degraded to something worse than sports rivalries and the discourse is generally of extremely poor quality; it is only a reflection of the competence (or lack thereof) of its leadership and the majority of its people.
I agree with everything you say, however I would note that Singapore has a substantial resident (ordinary definition of the word) population on various types of work permits who, rightly or wrongly, don't feel so free to speak out as you do.
A substantial proportion of those would like to become PR or even citizens, but can't risk prejudicing an already-opaque process in doing so.
> you need to make local friends to really get into it
Well, that might sound like an impossible task!! So, just sign up for Experiences from any of the leading travel portals. They’d get you into any of the local party scenes.
What is the air quality like to actually breathe in your experience? I have noticed Jakarta on lists of poor AQI and it doesn't look great [1] but I think the AQI number is kind of an abstraction.
I found it probably the worst of anywhere I've ever been, you can taste it and just being outside slightly burns the back of your throat. I still really like visiting though.
Heh. To get a sense of what the page's numbers might mean, I checked on Kaohsiung, where you can taste gasoline in the air as you walk down the street.
And hey, reported air quality in Kaohsiung is abysmal, so that checks out. Jakarta even looks good by comparison.
AQI appears to have Jakarta pegged at an average "66", which looks pretty respectable for the region. They seem to have much more carbon monoxide than Kaohsiung or Shanghai, but much less fine particulate.
I don't feel that AQI in reasonably normal ranges corresponds at all to the subjective experience of how nice the air feels to breathe.
The best breathing I've done was in Mumbai. Felt like a silk blanket both in the lungs and on the skin. I'm sure it would be bad for me if I stayed there a few decades, but it didnt feel bad at all when visiting.
Are you from Mumbai? or a place with notably bad AQI? Do you smoke?
Mumbai is one of the most polluted cities on earth, many people report being unable to perform aerobic exercise or describe breathing the air as being similar to smoking.
I'm from a place with excellent AQI (semi-rural Sweden). I do not smoke. I usually don't mind when other people smoke, but I don't like how they smell just after finishing. :-)
I know that the Mumbai air is not healthy, but my subjective experience of it was very positive.
> it's hot, congested, polluted and largely poor, but so is Bangkok.
That's a wild comparison, makes me wonder how much time you spent in Bangkok. Bangkok has a much higher standard of living compared to Jakarta, and I've yet to meet anyone who spent more than a month in both places and prefers Jakarta. Living costs are cheaper in Jakarta for sure, but that's about it.
I'll just chime in that Chinatown in Glodok might have been that place a couple decades ago, but seemed quite deserted now :/ There's still some shops around though.
A local beer in a bar will normally be around 60k IDR so $3-4, wine is more expensive generally in SEA you'll normally pay around 90-100k IDR per glass.
If you're strict or allergic, very difficult. Fish sauces and pastes like terasi and patis are culinary staples on the level of soy sauce and make it into otherwise seemingly vegetarian dishes.
If you're willing to flex a bit and just avoid obvious meat/fish, you'll survive, there's plenty of tofu, tempeh, veg etc. Gado-gado is always veg, nasi/mee goreng, etc.
Because they're both hot, polluted, congested and mostly poor, but Bangkok is literally the world's most popular tourist destination city while Jakarta is not.
What? Jakarta's biggest problem is the rising sea level and the sinking ground.
Jakarta is one of the fastest sinking cities globally. Venice or Miami are nothing compared to this. 40% will be gone soon.
So - hot, congested, polluted, no public transit, cheap taxis, cheap luxury hotels, amazing food, fun night activities (but you'll need to know locals). Other than the no crime claim (which I find dubious) you've just described every big city in every developing country on the planet.
To add some more detail regarding the new capital, Jakarta has some structural governance problems in the sense that it's very hard to improve infrastructure improve / stop the sinking of the city (mostly caused from over reliance on ground water pumping and permitting corruption / bad river management). Those problems might never be solved.
And separate of it's economic power it remains a center of power where the city mayor/governor always becomes a major national political figure.
Indonesia is actually a plurality of distinct island cultures, but with Jakarta, Java and Javanese culture sits at the top of the national political hierarchy. (Not to mention a sort of internal Javanese colonialism similar to the USSR).
The new capital could be part of dismantling some of the legacy internal Javanese power structures.
(To add a further detail re. Java vs. Indonesia, because of the mercator projection it's hard to see how big Indonesia is. It would stretch from Maine, past California almost to Anchorage).
New capitals also help prevent revolutions and uprisings. It's a lot easier to have a government that's insulated from the unrest of the masses, when everyone in its capital is loyal to it.
I also imagine a lot of people who are admiring these megacities have never been to one. Jakarta has oceans of scooters and, when I was there to visit some customers with our country manager, she had a driver. With some exceptions like Singapore, SE Asian cities are horrible to get around.
Other than Singapore. I am not sure why SE Asian cities aren't going as all in on mass transit like China. Jakarta has a single subway line for 42 million people. They have some light rail line and buses. If you compare this with Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing its really night and day.
1) Lack of institutional knowledge. No one even knows how to get started and bringing in foreign expertise may be prohibitively expensive.
2) Economics don’t pencil out even in higher income countries compared to BRT systems, especially because high density and heavy traffic means the lines usually have to be grade-separated which adds additional costs compared to an at-grade system.
3) Corruption makes development impossible. No well-established processes for expropriation exist, or the country is given over to clientelism such that landlords won’t give up what they own and hamper the development process via political connections.
BRT is usually the most effective solution in places where grade-separated rail is not yet viable as it allows a right-of-way network to be established that can later be upgraded to rail. This doesn’t solve problem 3, which requires a comparatively authoritarian approach to overcome the incentive problems at play; this is why the Chinese have generally excelled in the space over the last 20 years.
Even in the US, a lot of right-of-ways were taken by the government for rail and, later, highways (which intersected with earlier railroads in many cases) before it would have been as difficult a process as it would be today. Not a political comment so much as an observation that it's harder to just take private land today.
1) I really don't see how it prohibilitivly expensive. Much poorer places have built them and there are tons of companies who are willing to do it. Specially if you have a 30 year plan.
2) Another one I don't buy if you have a 30 year plan. Buses have higher operating costs, need more space, have less capacity and the surrounding infrastructure gets more expensive. The only thing BRT is good at, is making it easier to get start because you initially don't need ground infrastructure.
3) This is much more likely.
But Ill grant you what BRT might allow you do to is ban cars from a corridor without to many people being angry, and that is a win by itself.
Nutrition is the point of eating, getting started isn't the point of public transport.
Any actual competent government cares about the long run, not just how fast to get started.
And even then, if you do a 'full' BRT its quite expensive. Its really just normal buses with some minimal priority that is much cheaper to get started.
And if you know its a route that eventually will have to get upgraded, its actually more expensive to first do the BRT and then upgrade.
The water table surely has something to do with it, but they could put much of it above ground like Bangkok does (erm, Bangkok should be listed as doing ok, even if they aren't doing as well as Singapore).
China built A LOT in the last 15 years. Beijing before 2008 had line 1, 2, a couple of suburban lines (13 and another one out east), and that was it. I don't think any other country has ever built infrastructure so quickly, so it isn't really fair to compare them to China.
KL has subways. Even better is the KL city bus network which is free, air conditioned, and has free wifi. Despite Malaysia being a nominally muslim state, I found it multicultural and tolerant. If it wasn't for the heat and humidity, I'd consider it a great place to retire.
If you leave KL city and go to the surrounding areas, such as Petaling Jaya or Subang Jaya, it becomes more manageable (entering KL from there feels like a 5-10C temperature increase). It gets better the further you go of course, but for tourists that may be a bit tricky as it won't be as easy to get around (at least not without a car).
Jakarta doesn’t have one metro line. It has 9 lines which it variously calls light rail, commuter trains, etc. but are metro lines in all but name, in terms of frequency, infrastructure, and service patterns. It’s not quite Beijing or Tokyo, but it’s also not as wealthy as either city.
Bangkok has built a lot of transit in the past decade, 6 lines on top of an already-substantial existing network. Still plenty of projects under construction as well. This alone puts it way ahead of Jakarta in terms of quality of life IMO.
It's a case of better late than never. KL has a reasonable mix of subway, monorail, elevated and suburban rail. Bangkok's above-ground BTS has been very popular and they have been building subways as well. Hanoi has a master plan and has opened its first subway line in 2021 and second in 2024. Manila is also digging subways right now and has wisely called in the Japanese to do it, given that city is simultaneously subject to typhoons, floods and earthquakes.
Probably a combination of overall wealth and government policies/stability/priorities. I'd probably add Hong Kong to the list of cities with pretty good public transit but, overall, it's pretty bad in that area of the world relative to cities that you'd generally consider to be "good."
Infrastructure is expensive. It costs lots of resources and human labor and intricate planning (most SE Asia cities are not looking like anything there was planned).
Most countries on the planet simply cannot afford good infrastructure. I'm almost sure there's not even enough resources like energy and metals to create a good infrastructure in every country on Earth.
> I'm almost sure there's not even enough resources like energy and metals to create a good infrastructure in every country
As better public transport infrastructure vastly reduces the number of cars, and centralizes the requirement for both material and energy, I doubt that is the case. Buses and trains need far less of both than the population-equivalent number of cars/motorcycles.
Infrastructure is not only cars/buses. It is also: roads (paved roads), electricity lines, water pipes, bus stops, traffic lights (you won't find many traffic lights in SEA countries), train stations, railroads, etc.
It's evident if you live for several months in almost any SEA city, that they lack even basic infrastructure. I'm sure it's not only matter of negligence, they simply cannot afford many things that people in developed countries see as granted.
I agree on the difficulty of distribution of resources, just not the idea of there being a lack of them. Maybe not relevant for any practical purposes.
Democratic governments are weak on deficit spending, especially poor ones, the debt from their tiny stretch of high speed rail almost became a scandal.
> I am not sure why SE Asian cities aren't going as all in on mass transit like China
Eminent domain and mass demolitions were very common in 1990s-2010s China, and to a degree that I have not seen in other authoritarian and nominally communist states like Vietnam or even Laos, let alone other less authoritarian states.
Entire neighborhoods, villages, and towns were razed to build the urban areas that make up China today.
Beijing [0][1], Shanghai [2][3], and other cities across China [4] all saw massive urban demolitions until the Central Government banned them in 2021 during the Evergrande crisis [5] due to limited utility and rising urban discontent.
Back in the day, it was somewhat common to see news about some random Jie commiting a terrorist act in retaliation for being evicted from their homes [6][7] due to this urban demolition program, and partially helped Xi consolidate power as most officials affiliated with these programs were deeply corrupt, and were often felled during the anti-corruption purges (ironically, Xi oversaw similar initiatives in Zhejiang in the 2000s).
Most other governments don't see the utility of implementing a similar style of program.
In Beijing alone, some activists said more than 1 million people were forced from their homes to make way for new sports venues for last year's Olympics.
And, while you can pick and choose data, Beijing's Olympic stadium is not really very widely used as far as I can tell. Of course you can also debate whether a lot of urban revitalization projects--even if leading to popular settings/venues--were worth the cost to neighborhoods that were basically flattened.
Taiwan's mass urban demolition spree happened towards the tail end of authoritarian rule, and did in fact play a role in garnering mass support for the democracy movement.
After democracy, Taiwan shifted towards trying to preserve traditional neighborhoods or working to normalize unofficial neighborhoods and slums - basically adopting a bottom up instead of top down approach [0]
For electric vehicles, in third world countries the most obvious bottlenecks are pricing and infrastructure. However despite that, I'm quite surprised by how fast adoption actually is even when it's not as fast as first world countries.
For bikes, we already have TON of powered bikes. I can actually see electric bikes opening the eye of Americans on the wonder of scooters.
Everytime I see the ocean of scooters, I wonder how horrible it'd be if scooters weren't invented but instead everyone use cars like in America. Either it'll make the most legendary traffic jam ever or GDP will be cut in half since no one can move anywhere. With our already overcrowded public transport, it's practically the only alternative.
I actually wonder how much better American traffic would be if scooters are more popular.
Most Dutch people can afford cars, but many are on bikes (including cargo/e-bikes), about 27% of all "movements" [0]. This is because of the way our infrastructure is set up, the bike is very often optimal (special bike lanes, shorter routes, better/free parking at destination or public transport hubs). Most people do own a car though.
It would be subways then, not cars I suspect. At least in a city like Rotterdam (673K inhabitants) that is by far the optimal way to get around, cars are really almost useless in the city center.
Here, most of the street is already reserved for bikes, with the sidewalks for pedestrians [0]. This is all a one way street.
I can't find the link anymore, but aeons ago I read a blog post on here claiming that the Netherlands is better characterized as a city state, if you're looking at it from an American point of view: the entire country is about the same size as NYC's metro area, and around the same population.
Car ownership correlates negatively with urbanization in NL, so no, I don't think so. And no 40M city (or 4M city) convinces me driving is an acceptable way to get around.
How would Indonesians use cars that cannot go anywhere? It's not about affording but about people/m² compression.
Here's a quick napkin math: a 1.3m² scooter can take 1-3 people, a toyota camry of 8.8m² can take 1-5 people. This gives the humble scooter aprox 3-5 times the space efficiency that of a car.
Not to mention the agility and parking benefits of scooters. There's no way any SEA city could get rid of scooters in favor of cars. Scooters are incredibly under-rated in the west and my favorite tool here in SEA - it's peak practical engineering at scale.
I agree with other commenter and speed is primary danger for scooters. I've been driving for 7 years (mostly in Thailand) and never had an accident as the risk distributions is incredibly obvious:
- stay within reasonable speed
- keep distance
- don't do highways
- project your intentions very clearly with no sudden moves
vast majority of accidents happen when this simple rule set is broken (aside from obvious DUI). If you're driving 40km/h max in a city you are surprisingly safe, especially as scooter traffic culture is very river like so once you're familiar with the area you are basically being carried by the traffic.
Most stats of SEA scooter deaths are coming from really bad driving, as in drunk uncle driving a scooter on the opposite side of the road with no headlights sort of bad driving (sadly very common). The culture can be very unserious about scooter safety when it's quite achievable in practice. It really is an incredible form of transportation when taken seriously.
Since this is scooters who rarely even reach >150cc, it's actually quite safe since it's slow and light. There are always high risk when we want to go to very rough roads that are also full of trucks (common in rural areas), but in well maintained roads like lots of Jakarta, it's mostly fine.
Though it really isn't helped by attitude of people around here who aren't even wearing helms.
Americans use a car because their infrastructure was build to support it. If they had cities like exist in South East Asia they wouldn't use it. Because if they did it would literally be no traffic, because the city would barly move and you wouldn't get anywhere.
These cities already have to much traffic while only a small number of people have cars.
I got curious to see how many people have cars in Jakarta. While cars per capita of Indonesia is extremely low (~80 / 1000 people), the one for Jakarta is at respectable ~300/1000 people, not far from NYC at ~400/1000 people. Still far away from other cities though.
From my experience also, scooter is still heavily used even by people that have cars because there's just a lot of small roads and neighborhood where it's very unsuitable for cars. This also makes scooter taxi very popular here since it's cheaper, faster, and can reach the deepest parts of Jakarta.
Hehe. Great point. I have lived and worked in 2 Delhi and Mumbai in India. With such terrible living condition, traffic, pollution and so on it sucked the soul out of me. At least I found it so bad in Mumbai that many a times while leaving from work to hostel, I would literally cry on train platform with massive crowd pushing and shoving from all directions while trying to get into bursting at seams trains.
And this all is 20 years back. During this time thing have gone worse many times over.
I’ve liked living in Delhi recently, much less congested than Bengaluru that gnaws on my soul with its insane traffic. The only reasonable way to live in India is to live away from the main streets, ideally in a gated community which is a bikeable distance from work.
> In 2019, Indonesia said it will be moving its capital to Nusantara, a new city which is under construction.
Because Jakarta is literally sinking into the ocean. It also has a terrible flood problem which is only going to get worse. Doesn’t bode well for the population.
I'm always surprised how big the population of Indonesia is yet it seems culturally underrepresented in the world compared to a lot of smaller countries
Almost 300 million people but it rarely comes up in the news or pop media
They don’t have a huge culture industry yet (or at least, not one that appeals to English-speaking audiences), but they’ve become a lot more prominent on the internet in the last 5 years due to better infrastructure and integration into various English speaking social networks (via both social media and people travelling in and out of Indonesia).
It’s a Muslim majority country and very conservative, so a lot of the themes you’d find in American film, music, and literature wouldn’t make much sense there, and the media that has commercial potential outside of Indonesia is generally coming from wealthy households that don’t have much to do with how the average Indonesian really lives (Nicole Zefanya being the example that comes to mind).
Indonesians (at least the ones who speak English) are quite similar to Latinos in that they have a desire to be accepted into the English-speaking world not only personally but culturally. This can manifest in attempts to whitewash oneself to fit in, adopting whatever seems to be popular on English-speaking social media, leading to comparatively old trends propagating in these countries.
You saw the same thing with the Chinese and the Koreans back in the 2000s and both developed their own internationally-competitive culture industries, but those were both secular countries already well-integrated into the international system. I wouldn’t expect to see anything quite like that in Indonesia until at least 2030, when more of the digital natives come of age.
> both developed their own internationally-competitive culture industries
Korea definitely, but China? Seems like most of China's modern cultural export came from Hong Kong, and even that has stopped. Conventional wisdom is that the Three Body Problem couldn't be published today.
I'm curious what (homegrown) Chinese cultural products are internationally competitive today. China seems to be punching far below their weight, considering their population and their economic position.
Mainland China is coming the other side through anime.
Productions like "The Legend of Hei" are of truly high quality and it's getting a decent reception in Japan for instance (not breaking the box office, but the fact it's there and talked about so no positively is already something)
> Seems like most of China's modern cultural export came from Hong Kong, and even that has stopped.
You’re probably right. I’m just saying that 20 years ago the label of being “Made in China” meant something was cheap and bad. The business culture still isn’t great from what I hear but people are more comfortable than ever buying Chinese products and I’ve been hearing that more exchange students have been going to China to study.
The impression I had of China’s cultural exports was mostly from having seen more Chinese expatriates and immigrants openly engaging with e.g. Chinese music and fashion influencers. This wasn’t particularly common 20 years ago; I started noticing it around 2019.
The other thing I should note is that when I said internationally competitive I primarily meant outside of the Anglosphere. K-dramas are an interesting one because you can find women (it’s almost always women) of all ages from all over the world who watch them. Korean media is not unheard of in the Anglosphere but it is not nearly as popular as it is outside of the Anglosphere.
It’s possible China doesn’t have anything like this yet, and maybe it never will due to being comparatively censorious, but my perception is that sentiment towards China has improved quite a bit outside of the Anglosphere. I haven’t done reading on that; it’s just a hunch.
Feels like in the West the only Indonesian movie that got popular is The Raid, which had a Welsh director anyway. And, uh, The Act of Killing which was also made by a Brit.
They're #4 by population, and the world's most populous Muslim country, but are also only a quarter century removed from a corrupt authoritarian regime.
They have very little in the way of exported cultural products ("The Raid" films?), are much worse in sports than would be expected based on population, spend relatively little on their military and don't do much in the way of regional power projection, and are growing economically but not remarkably, so there just aren't that many avenues for them to make international news.
I always thought it was interesting that, I guess due to Arab racism, it's also not very represented in the community of Islam.
Like, Indonesia (and together with Malaysia) makes up a really significant portion of all muslims. As an outsider it still seems like there isn't much cultural overlap- which seems like, even if Indonesian culture wouldn't reach Europe or the USA, at least it would reach to the middle east / north africa because of the the religious link.
I could have drawn some parallels between Catholics and South America, but there's already two Popes that have Latin American roots.
At least in the two holy cities itself, Indonesia has quite significant pull. Because our pilgrims heavily outnumber lots of other nations. To the point where sellers around the city usually knows a least a word or two of Indonesian.
Mostly just that it's easy for an American (or at least, myself circa several years ago) to assume that the overwhelmingly vast majority of Muslims live in middle eastern countries, and when I first learned that Indonesia was the world's largest Muslim majority country it proved that mental heuristic to be entirely inaccurate.
I suppose it shouldn't be too surprising though, I mean Christianity sure as hell got around too.
> Mostly just that it's easy for an American (or at least, myself circa several years ago) to assume that the overwhelmingly vast majority of Muslims live in middle eastern countries, and when I first learned that Indonesia was the world's largest Muslim majority country it proved that mental heuristic to be entirely inaccurate.
I live in Australia, and when I was growing up I thought the same, even though Indonesia are a very close neighbour of ours. Indonesia is featured quite a bit in our local news these days, and that together with lots of Aussie tourists in Indonesia, plus lots of Indonesian students studying here, has made us a little more knowledgeable about our neighbours.
The top five countries in the world by Muslim population are not in the Middle East/North Africa region: Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria.
That's so weird. What do they teach in American schools? Apparently not even basic geography? The fact that Indonesia was Muslim is something I learned very early on - certainly before high school.
> What do they teach in American schools? Apparently not even basic geography?
This doesn’t fall under the category of basic geography. I can guarantee you that the majority of people you attended school with would not be able to locate Indonesia on a map, much less tell you about the religions practiced there.
TBH, without going into overmuch detail, I wouldn't generalize from my educational experience to the American educational system as a whole. I think it was better in a lot of ways, and worse in a few ways, than what most people would have received, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were some particular holes in my knowledge due to taking part in multiple curricula from different institutions.
I checked them for a few nations where I had solid on-the-ground knowledge, and the ranks and full-profile descriptions are straight up false. Usually propaganda involves lying by omission or hyperbole. In this case, it is just wrong.
It is a little bit wild that 3/5 all came from the same country. Without the partition of ‘47 - India would have by far the largest group of about 600M a full a third of the global Muslims and also at the same time be only a minority in that hypothetical country with 1.1B Hindus
Correct, it was around the time I learned how big Islam was in certain parts of Southeast Asia in general. It's just massively under-represented in news and popular culture and my historical/geographic education never really went into much detail on Asia.
How much of that is just because people aren't allowed to leave the religion though? My whole family would be considered Catholic if we still had those sorts of old thinking rules that Islam still has. Instead we have lots of people becoming Catholic and lots leaving balancing out.
Yeah and... articles like these are reminders that cultural representation as a concept in general is kind of broken. There's no website which topic distribution follows actual distribution of population of the world[1].
I dunno, I would think AT LEAST Jackie Chan is a household name due to the Rush Hour movies, and for anyone who grew up watching Hong Kong action flicks, they'd probably also know Jet Li at least, and Donnie Yen, Michelle Yeoh, and maybe Bolo Yeung and Sammo Hung too.
Yeah, Bruce Lee was born in San Francisco and had a US passport, but he grew up in Hong Kong. Point is, Chinese diaspora exists and can be seen for those who want to look. Projecting a viewpoint that no one knows about China or Chinese people because you don't want to think they do, so you feel slighted, and can then rage against that; it just seems kind of hollow to me.
I was hoping to talk more about (Mainland) China being uniquely bad at exporting pop culture, especially when compared to the success of Hong Kong, and to a lesser extent, Taiwanese pop culture.
The fact that nearly all celebs you mentioned were famous from HK film seems to at least confirm that.
Big Fish & Begonia was a good film that got a wide release in the west. Flavors of Youth is on netflix. Ne Zha was too I think. In animation at least they do better than a lot of countries. Mojin: The Lost Legend is the only live action movie I can remember seeing off the top of my head though.
The only ones I can name are from Hong Kong before the handover, off the top of my head: Wong Kar-wei, Jackie Chan, John Woo, Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung.
Authoritarian cultures aren’t known for freedom of expression so it makes sense there’s little cultural export. The same thing applies to Islamic countries, the iconoclastic bent kinda puts a damper on visual art.
Same with India. I heard its absolutely terrible there for small groups of women and impossible for solo travelling women. The advice I've heard that can help (a little) is wearing fake wedding ring and telling people that you're married.
I always find discussion of the world biggest city a bit of a pointless exercise considering it’s entirely dependent on how administrative lines are drawn.
Highly fragmented metro areas are regarded as smaller than consolidated metro areas, whereas they might be the same size overall.
These rankings always consider city to be a contiguous metro area, regardless of how internal lines are drawn. Otherwise most of them wouldn't show up on the list at all. "Los Angeles" for example has close to 200 indiviudal cities.
Demographics and geography approaches this through the notion of "metropolitan statistical area" (MSA) in the US, or equivalent concepts elsewhere. An MSA is defined as a "geographical region with a relatively high population density at its core and close economic ties throughout the region".
Other rough equivalents are metropolitan areas (UK), census metropolitan areas (Canada), functional urban areas (FUA) (EU), urban agglomerations (India). All of these use functional and behavioural characteristics to get around simple boundary-demarkation. Urbanisations may even span national borders, as with the greater Basel region, Lake Constance, or Strasbourg-Ortenau.
Being a large city should no longer be seen as a positive attribute. It just looks like a bigger wound in the middle of a forest and natural terrain. Packing millions of people into a vast paved area does no good. It socks all life from country due to concentration of work and services.
Early human settlements had an objective of collective strength against the predators, invaders and shared help for all problem. Cities no longer have these goals or characteristics. They exist only due to a vicious cycle of jobs and worker availability which propel each other because of each other.
There's probably a point where that stops scaling. Is there any proof a city of 40 million uses less resources per capita than a city of 1 million?
40 cities of 1 million seems preferable because then you can actually get outside the city once in a while without it being 2+ hours of travel.
I don’t understand the point of concentrating everything in a megacity. Take New York as an example: the cost of living is through the roof, while the quality of life is often the opposite. Corporations should stop renting offices in the most expensive areas of the country and instead prioritize locations where housing is affordable and people don’t have to spend more than 10 minutes commuting to work. The state should de-prioritize NYC and encourage companies to invest in smaller cities. This would bring jobs to those areas, reduce pressure on NYC, and support broader infrastructure development. Apply that approach across the country, and suddenly the entire nation can function more efficiently instead of relying on a few overloaded hubs.
Also, my own take is that the high rent in NYC is sort of proof that the quality of life is high. Or at least, NYC is desirable. People are willing to pay a premium to live there, which is a strong signal of their preference.
I think it's a situation akin to HOAs where there are absolutely people who prefer being in an HOA but it has this feedback loop which results in significantly more people being in an HOA than would prefer to be just because there are limited options and undoing an HOA is higher friction than new construction including one.
On one hand this is still preference. They pick to be in a city over the other options available. On the other hand the other options aren't available because enough people are already interested in centralizing life choice options into a city and so it just drives that feedback loop over and over as more people choose where the option of the day is rather than what they'd like. The only thing holding this loop back from runaway is large cities eventually seem to have population growth fall behind cost of living growth and that stops the runaway for the particular city.
Perhaps more simply: the immediate and big picture preference often don't align and this misalignment further drives a larger gap in those two preferences over time until the cost to scale the city finally becomes too high.
> Corporations should stop renting offices in the most expensive areas of the country and instead prioritize locations where housing is affordable and people don’t have to spend more than 10 minutes commuting to work.
What's the benefit to the corporation to do that? They move to a more affordable area, which corresponds to less concentrated, which corresponds to fewer workforce available, especially if the goal is to spend 10 minutes commuting, as you state.
Nobody's forcing anyone to live in a city, they want to because the jobs and culture and opportunities are there. And companies want to be there because that's where the workers are. It's a feedback loop, I guess cost is the main moderator. There is an argument for decentralizing a little but surely it's the governments job to incentivize that.
There are well known netowrk effects, that happen when economists study cities. You can just have each individual bank pick some random small town and set up an office there.
That said, I do agree that some amount of distribution of infrastructure spending makes a lot of sense. But even if you did that, New York itself could raise enough taxes to make its own infrastructure without having to tax the rest of the nation.
But I would say the US has done this reasonably well, NY is nowhere as dominatie any many other places. You have Boston with universities and medical, Valley, LA areospace/media, DC government and so on and so on.
But economics is pretty clear, hubs are good, getting a place with lots of experts togheter improves efficency for everybody. And getting enough people together that proper infrastructure pays for itself is also good.
Density has some obvious advantages. It also has a bunch of disadvantages. The millions of people living there seem to think it's worth the tradeoff, at least to the point of having enough inertia not to move elsewhere.
Canada has less people, even with a 10% increase in the last 4 years through imigration, some of which is from Indonesea presumably including a significant number from Jakarta, where the civil infrastructure must be epic
I don't even know what it would it even look like to "build a city" from scratch in the US. who does the building and puts together the central plan?
does the government build a bunch of public housing and a publicly owned commercial district? i guess they kind of have experience doing this with military bases, but at some point you need to encourage a bunch of private development and ownership, right?
or would the government just incentivize private developers to start building in the middle of nowhere and hope that a city arises as an emergent phenomenon? that approach seems like it would be rife with abuse and waste.
seems like this would be a lot easier to do with an authoritarian regime that could just decree "we're building a city here. the following industries will move their headquarters"
It's not particularly difficult to start a new city.
The government simply asks large companies to open offices/factories in the new city in exchange for tax breaks/subsidies. Or give funding to a university to open a satellite campus. All you need is a promise for like 20k people to initially move. Then the government builds roads and utility networks. Private developers will also build housing if given the right financial incentive.
The 20k people will automatically lead to the same number moving in due to cheap housing, or for creating every day businesses, hospitals, schools etc. Within a couple of years you can setup up a feedback loop where the population is growing at 5-10% every year. There is no need to force anyone to do anything. Financial incentives are enough.
Starting a city is easy, growing it into a real city is the hard part. If you look at the fastest growing cities of the last decades, they had economic freedom or booming industries, nothing that requires authoritarianism.
The western approach would almost certainly be a public-private partnership; we do that with all meaningful infra projects, where multiple industry consortia put together proposals and then one is selected to move forward. For example, for the ION Light Rail in Waterloo Region (~$1B), the winning consortium was composed of engineering and construction firms/consultants, a operations company that would run the system, plus a financier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GrandLinq
That said, for a project the scale of building a city, I can imagine it might actually be faster and more efficient for the government to just plan and build everything itself and then sell it off to private entities later.
Honestly, if you build transit, developers will build.
I wouldn't call it "building a city", but if you look at Northern Virginia today, you'll find that vertical districts are popping up along the Silver Line metro that now extends past Dulles airport.
At the end of the metro, there is literally a "town center" residential area on one side with buildings around 5 stories tall. On the other side of the tracks is literally fields, but the roads have been laid out like Sim City with empty plots and developers are now beginning to construct buildings starting from the outside perimeter first, working their way toward the metro station.
Throughout the DC suburbs, you will find densely populated areas with relatively tall vertical buildings (15-20 stories) that simply were not there 20 years ago. Reston is a good example. I've watched 4-6 buildings (over 10 stories) get built in Reston alone. They mostly started when the the metro line was finished.
tysons is a good example as well. I always think the development of the DC metro is some of the most impressive in the sense of 'cities' popping up along the train lines.
I haven't travelled the entire country but I've never seen anything quite like Silver Spring, Bethesda, or as you say, Reston. Super interesting.
City of Irvine corp and California Forever corp are two examples. But billionaires in the US are constrained by everyone else. The power of democracy is strength in numbers and we have them now though we didn’t fifty years ago.
Quick note that several cities were built from scratch in the UK in the 20th century. E.g. Milton Keynes. (City using the American definition, not the cathedral thing).
Down substantially from the peak in 2022. And that's nominal prices. Adjusting for inflation will show that real prices are lower now than they were in 2017.
Hrmm. What data source can I see to demonstrate this? I looked at a chart I have referenced before that shows nationwide USA housing starts over the last 20 years ranging from 2 to 8 per 1000 people. Then I searched for one for Canada and found one suggesting 1-2 per 1000 since 2005. And, evidently, the situation in Canada as developed/deteriorated to the extent there's a whole subreddit for the canadian housing crisis?
Yes so it looks like the Reddit people are committing major chart-crimes, showing quarterly data as such, rather than annualized rates, and not mentioning it. It looks like this is a source of truth: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=341001...
I have watched reddit become useless for any kind of nuanced debate over the last 5 years. It's rather sad to me, because once upon a time I learned a lot about others views - especially ones I disagree with.
Even HN is much less welcoming of the "I think I agree with you, but walk me through your thinking" replies than it used to be.
I presume this is reflective of a few broader societal trends, and it's.. not good.
Yes, it's easy to build entire cities from scratch in a centrally managed society, such as a dictatorship or communist nations.
It's also easy to have cities grow fast, if you're primarily a rural/agrarian nation, and suddenly have a transition to become urban. This was (for example) Canada in the 1900s. Mostly rural, yet now it's mostly urban.
Canada saw fast growth of cities back then.
It's maintaining large cities once the fast growth is over, that is a different story. How will, for example, China look in 50+ years? 100+ years? When all its newly built mega-city projects are crumbling.
> Yes, it's easy to build entire cities from scratch in a centrally managed society, such as a dictatorship or communist nations.
I would like to pushback on this assumption. I made that point because you mentioned Canada and its rapid immigration rise in the last 5 years. Western countries, namely Canada can do a lot to build more to ease the pressures on its housing demand.
Vast amounts of land is available to build amazing cities. There are specialist architect firms that can plan the most beautiful, walkable, livable, affordable cities very close to major hubs and metros currently.
In the 50s/60s/70s these very Western countries, spent a lot and built all kinds of infrastructure which led to meaningful increases in quality of life and perhaps created the most prosperous generation in these countries.
Even now when any government in the West wants to really do something, they don't really care about anything and it gets done, the money magically appears, the votes are found no matter how unpopular it may be. But for some reason building infrastructure, housing, mass transit has been completely forgotten.
The real bottlenecks are governance, bureaucracy, and NIMBYism. Like a few comments above pointed out, its keeping boomers happy with their high property values at the expense of the young.
Some things just don't make sense to me as an outsider. A few examples I read recently.
[1] It will take three decades to turn an 18-mile stretch of the A66 road in northern England into a dual carriageway.
[2] It will take 20+ years just to add another runway at Heathrow London and cost $64 Billion Dollars! [3] While Dubai is building a brand new whole airport for $35 Billion, I think the worlds largest when its finished.
Nearly all of the political problems in Canada, UK, Australia and much of the US (NYC,SF, etc.) will completely go away if they had the "Build, Baby Build" attitude. Just build housing like there is no tomorrow.
There is no such thing as an "oversupply" of a basic human need, livable shelter.
I can assure you, knowing how Asian countries like China approach governance, Chinese cities will have no major issues in 50+ years. Any outstanding issues will will resolved well before they start to become a problem with various 5-10 year plans. The same for Malaysia, Singapore etc.
At no point did I mention the current immigration rates in Canada, over the last five years. Instead, I mentioned historic growth, which is not necessarily immigration, going back 100 plus years.
In the early 1900s, on farms, Canadian families were much, much larger than they are now. Immigration was certainly a thing, and contributed to those numbers, but most of that growth was through simple population growth domestically.
Speaking to the development of cities in the past, that development was within certain strictures and guidelines, but entirely handled by the private sector.
No state-owned companies were developing houses. There were very, very rare exceptions where during situations like the end of World War II, Canada paid for base housing for its soldiers returning from war. Yet these were extraordinary circumstances. This was during the tail end of a wartime economy, and part of the transition to a peacetime economy.
This was not, and is not the normal way that Canada operates as a democracy. Not only was it to provide housing for all of the returning soldiers as they slowly left other countries that they were stationed in, it was also to provide jobs for people leaving factories that were producing munitions and other instruments of war.
Canada managed this transition exceptionally well, primarily due to projects just like this.
The point in all of this is that growth was driven organically by people simply moving to the cities. Again, yes, the cities have a planning department which dictates what may be where, how much residential space can be in a certain area, if there are going to be shops or malls or local shopping locations, where roads are going to be and so on. But that is an overall contributed by the community development plan. Developers have a say. Citizens have a say. This is called democracy.
Do not confuse nimbyism, which is primarily an American problem, with issues that have to do with building in Canada.
Again, I did not say there are no issues, I said NIMBYism is primarily in the US.
The real problem in Canada, and this is a solid show of how democracy works, is that people are concerned about things like the environment.
It's a little difficult to stomach that the very same people that will scream their heads off if environmental issues are not handled correctly, then get upset that building a house requires environmental assessments of land, environmental assessments of how population density will affect the land, insistence is that developers build parks, paths and green spaces.
When you hear the astronomical cost of building a house, when you hear the cost of red tape, what's being left out is that parts of the red tape are commitments to build things like parks, green spaces, paths, places for people to bike and walk without getting hit by cars.
All of these things add cost to the price of a house. They also add cost because developers do not follow plans, but constantly want to renegotiate over and over, and this indeed stretches out the time to build an entire subdivision.
Developers are also on hook for certain things, if they're building an entire subdivision. Roads, traffic lights, all sorts of things like this, including making sure that there's space for a local grocery store, so you don't have to drive or walk endless miles. Even things like the sidewalks when you're building a whole subdivision.
As a democracy in Canada, we like this. We prefer this. We prefer that you can get around with a car, but also you can get to your local grocery store if you want to just walk or take a bus a short distance.
If you are a person buying a single lot and wanting to build on that lot, things are not anywhere near as complex or onerous.
Yes, there are still environmental assessments. But who wants those environmental assessments? That's right, everyone, including the person buying the house, unless, of course, it might mean that they don't have a house quite as cheaply. Then, suddenly, they aren't environmentalists.
As someone who has bought land, that was pretty much the largest block on building. When it came to digging a well, when it came to building the house, when it came to the building plan that I submitted to my local municipality? All of that passed with flying colors unless of course I was doing something weird, such as building too close to the edge of the property or something else that was covered by simple, easy to understand bylaws.
I certainly support environmental assessments, but again I reiterate for a single person building a house they are typically not a problem.
There are certain segments of any society which believe that there should be no government involvement, in almost any portion of a society. These people are too far on one side, just as communism or dictatorships are too far on the other side. As with almost anything, moderation is key.
In Canada, we try to enable free enterprise. We try to keep red tape and other such issues as easy to bypass, and easy to work with as possible, while simultaneously ensuring that there is some degree of central planning and management that also has democratic citizen input.
Yet you will constantly see people of that belief trying to claim that all the issues with building houses have to do with some amount of red tape. Of NIMBYism. Yet when I look in my local community, I see people of all ages. I don't see the disparaging term that you used, boomers, causing a problem. There are people young, there are old people, there are people in their 30s, all owning houses.
Most people in Canada do not buy houses until their 30s or 40s. You may think this is a strange claim, but who wants to buy a house when they're in university? Who wants to buy a house on the first couple of years of their first job? Who wants to buy a house before they're even married? It doesn't make sense. It's not logical.
While I am an older person, I'm certainly not a boomer, as you call it, yet at the same time I did not buy a house until I was in my late 30s.
In Canada, housing pricing is where it is because of two primary reasons. The first is foreign investment. It's been so bad that in the past, that we have actually had motorandums on people that are not Canadian citizens buying houses. We have put, for example, in cities like Vancouver, taxes on empty houses because so many people from China were buying houses as investment structures.
The second reason is the lowest rate of inflation for the longest period of time, for decades.
Prior to the last few years, interest rates have been lower than they have ever been, and for a period of time longer than they had ever been.
This made housing cheaper than it has ever been before. Cheaper because when the low interest rates appeared, what the cost of a house is, is set by something called the market. Pricing is market derived. Pricing is predicated upon by what people will pay. So when interest rates drop dramatically from an amount of say 10 or 12% down to 0 or 1 or 2% over a period of about 5 or 6 years, suddenly housing is immensely more attractive. If you go to any mortgage calculator and use Canadian mortgage calculators, you can see the moving of interest rate from 1 or 2% at the bank, which I have had personally, up to say 11 or 12%, will literally more than double your monthly payment.
This means that if this condition exists for a long period of time, say almost 20 years like it did in Canada, slowly the price of houses will increase because people can afford more. This is how markets work. If people can afford more for housing then housing prices will go up just like any other type of free market competitive economy.
You can see this happening on any graph with the average price of housing compared to the price of inflation and you can see over 20 years the pricing of Canadian houses going up more than the rate of inflation and this is primarily why. Conjoin that with the massive speculation in the Canadian market and the pricing increases more.
If you take a house at $200,000 at 12% interest and you take a house at $400,000 at 2% interest, you will pay the same monthly payment approximately.
Canadian housing was quite affordable until interest rates went up. And slowly, as interest rates are higher, the price of Canadian housing cooled off and had started to come down a little bit, but now once again rates are dropping.
There are always blips in the marketplace. There are always shifts and changes. I have personally been through three separate recession events including the 2008 recession event, and all of these situations cause hardship for people first entering the housing market.
But this will pass. And it will pass and be solved. It won't be solved by turning to communism, to dictatorships. It won't be solved by getting rid of environmentalism or getting rid of planned communities.
It will be solved over a period of a few years as the market adjusts, and people can once again afford housing.
It will do so because the very people making the decisions, are not demonic old people. People have children. They have grandchildren. They want the best for their children and grandchildren. They want the best for their community.
You can be any age and be on the town council. You can be any age and be an MP.
Canada has had MPs who are under 20 in the last decade. Canada has had many MPs that are in their 30s.
There is no conspiracy. There is no attempt to stop young people from getting houses. There is no attempt to stop there from being a higher density housing in communities. We have plenty of land in Canada. We have plenty of space in Canada.
This lengthy response was engendered by the fact that you quite literally put words in my mouth. It was also engendered by the fact that people seem to think, even in Canada, that problems existing in Silicon Valley or in high-density US cities are the same problems that exist in Canada. They aren't. They are not the same problems. They are not caused by the same problems. It is not like you can copy and paste issues from American megacities into Canadian, much smaller cities.
The best way to fix some of the problems in California is to enforce open bidding on houses. When you do that, you reduce the uncertainty in bids, you reduce market pressures to increase the price of housing.
Been going there since mid 90s, not that often recently. Seen it change and yet stay the same.. Not cheap anymore but ofc not comparing to Singapore.
Issue is getting around.. For a city of that size + national capital, public transport options very limited. More like HCM or PP than Bangkok or KL.
Comparisons to Thailand inappropriate cos almost no pub culture and "entertainment". Even top end hotel bar like Raffles had near zero choice for wine etc. And lots more expensive.
Wish them well though.. Nicest people, nice memories.
I think the title should more accurately state "most populous" because Greater Tokyo is still significantly larger in the built up land area around the Tokyo Metropolis (Almost 2x Jakarta)
How is "city" defined, for the purposes of this metric? Is it the administrative boundaries of Jakarta according to Indonesian law? The catchment area where a large fraction of people commute to the city center? Something else?
If you find a better link for the methodology please let me know.
But simplified it's maybe exactly this from the UN reports glossary:
> Cities: According to the Degree of Urbanization methodology, contiguous geographic areas with a high population density (at least 1,500 people per km2) and a total population of at least 50,000 inhabitants.
If anyone is looking for a good movie to get a sense of what Jakarta is like, highly recommend "The Year of Living Dangerously" with Mel Gibson/Sigourney Weaver
I used to spend a lot of time in Jakarta for work, and it's an underrated city. Yes, it's hot, congested, polluted and largely poor, but so is Bangkok.
Public transport remains not great, but it's improved a lot with the airport link, the metro, LRT, Transjakarta BRT. SE Asia's only legit high speed train now connects to Bandung in minutes. Grab/Gojek (Uber equivalents) make getting around cheap and bypass the language barrier. Hotels are incredible value, you can get top tier branded five stars for $100. Shopping for locally produced clothes etc is stupidly cheap. Indonesian food is amazing, there's so much more to it than nasi goreng, and you can find great Japanese, Italian, etc too; these are comparatively expensive but lunch at the Italian place in the Ritz-Carlton was under $10. The nightlife scene is wild, although you need to make local friends to really get into it. And it's reasonably safe, violent crime is basically unknown and I never had problems with pickpockets (although they do exist) or scammers.
I think Jakarta's biggest problems are lack of marketing and top tier obvious attractions. Bangkok has royal palaces and temples galore plus a wild reputation for go-go bars etc, Jakarta does not, so nobody even considers it as a vacation destination.
I was there ~20 years ago. I had made friends with some Indonesia students in college and joined them on a trip home. We were mostly in Surabaya, but did spend some time in Jakarta as well. We had a great time.
The language is a hidden gem, you can learn enough to get around on the flight over which I can't say about any other SEA language. Phonetic spellings, Latin alphabet, no tonal sounds, dead easy grammar and a million loan words you already know.
Jakarta is definitely for the adventurous though, and you had better have an iron stomach.
> ...which I can't say about any other SEA language. Phonetic spellings, Latin alphabet, no tonal sounds, dead easy grammar and a million loan words you already know.
Nitpick: Sounds a lot like Tagalog (Filipino), another SEA language.
I've never studied it, but my understanding is that like Japanese, Tagalog has the pitched/stressed thing going on. My wife is Japanese and holy cow I can't tell the difference. Bridge or Chopstick? No idea, they sound exactly the same to my ears...
I'm pretty fluent, but my pronunciation was as good as it's gonna get like 10 years ago which is a frustration.
In Japan/ese, the pitch/stress thing is overrated, and so are regional language differences. When natives point it out to me, it strikes me a little more than cultural gatekeeping. Linguistic context matters much more. How often are you listening to your own native language and you are confused by two words that sounds similar (like 'hashi' in Japanese for bridge/chopsticks)? Almost never. Advice: Ignore it when natives that criticise your pronunciation. Ask them how is their German or Thai is... and they will freeze with shame.
Where I come from, to criticise a non-native speakers accent or small grammatical errors (that do not impact the meaning) is a not-so-subtle form of discrimination. As a result, I never do it. (To criticise myself, it tooks many, many years to see this about my home culture and stop doing it myself.) Still, many people ask me: "Hey, can you correct my <language X> when I speak it?" "Sure!" (but I never do.)
Well imagine somebody was talking about "bass" the fish, in a context of "bass" the instrument. If they pronounced it like the fish, certainly for a moment your language processing would stop, figure it out, fill in the gap, and continue.
Every time the wrong pitch accent is used, a similar process takes place. Especially in highly complex conversations, where a lot of processing power is going towards the semantics itself, and hopefully the person shouldn't have to worry about figuring out which word the other person is saying.
It's unclear if you yourself have native-level (or close to) pitch accent yourself. But if you don't, how can you know whether it's actually important or not?
Just remember, you can tune an instrument, but you can’t tuna fish.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Can_Tune_a_Piano,_but_You_...> (originally by Groucho Marx: <https://ultimateclassicrock.com/kevin-cronin-reo-speedwagon-...>).
Or perhaps more HN-appropriate: <https://unixhistory.livejournal.com/1808.html>.
Eh, in a discussion about homophones, homonyms, and ambiguity, I prefer the variant, "you can tune a bass, but you can tuna fish".
Right up there with "fruit flies like a banana, but time flies like an arrow".
>How often are you listening to your own native language and you are confused by two words that sounds similar
It confuses the hell out of me when non-natives misplace stress in Ukrainian and use wrong cases. It's that I want to gatekeep, but above certain rate of mistakes it's just difficult to follow what is being said.
Since the war, we have a lot of Ukrainians at our Flemish school. We just make it work, no time for gatekeeping.
Real question (because it took me, sadly, too long to learn it as an adult): Why don't they gatekeep? Do you think there is compassion for those who fled war in Ukraine, so people are more forgiving about linguistic and cultural differences?
Does "I'm just not going to be a dick to these people for ultimately trivial reasons" really need an explanatory framework in your world?
The GP wrote:
I assumed this meant high school or earlier (18 and under). Most kids I grew up with (including myself) wouldn't be mature enough to do this without explicit instruction (and some policing!). That is why I want to understand more. Example: Did they have a big school meeting where they explained to local kids: "There are bunch of war refugees coming. Here are some things we can do to make them feel more welcome. First: Don't criticize their accent when they are speaking Flemish/Dutch." It is also interesting from the lens of Belgian linguistic culture, as the country is broadly divided north is Flemish, south is French and a tiny part is German.So "not being a dick" really does need an explanatory framework in your world (and an elaborate one, with mostly irrelevant detail). That's.......a shame.
The problem here is just that upthread Muromec said “it’s that I want to gatekeep” when surely they meant “don’t,” and now there’s a whole chain of misunderstanding.
You're comparing apples to oranges. Kids learn foreign languages much faster than adults, plus get a lot more support and less judgement on mistakes from adults since school kids don't operate in a highly competitive environment.
But good luck reaching proficient fluency in a foreign language in your 30s where you'll face a lot more gatekeeping especially on the jobs market. Many western nations still gate-keep careers and opportunities based on regional accents alone, let alone not being a native speaker.
And before I get assaulted in the comments with the "umm acksually I could do it just fine it never was a problem for me exceptions, YES I know it's possible, it's just much much harder, especially when you've got a full time job and adult responsibilities, compared to doing it when you're 5-15 on the school playground, playing videogames with mates or watching cartoons.
You're conflating 2 issues here: judgement of adult attempts at a new language and the time required to learn it. The first is just a cultural thing, although it is sometimes valid for understanding a speaker (cases in Slavic languages, pronunciation in a homonym-heavy language like French, tones in Asian languages). Problem is that it's oftentimes more "cultural" than "valid" critique, which helps no one.
The second problem is more practical and it's not the only difference between child and adult speakers; the vocabulary required in most day-to-day settings for a child is considerably easier to master than the adult equivalent, regardless of language (describing symptoms to your doctor or getting through a bank or tax appointment will be much more difficult than describing the weather or what you want for lunch). Adults in general are just as good as children at learning new languages, it's just that life has different requirements from that age group.
Edit: that said, I actually am agreeing with your general sentiment
Sure some few adults can learn languages as fast as kids, but you completely missed my main points around gatekeeping that language skills always has on adults and less so on kids.
Because statements like the original I was replying to of "no time for gatekeeping" are simply not true, but more like the poster doesn't notice it because he (or his kids) are not affected by that gatekeeping.
> Sure some few adults can learn languages as fast as kids, but you completely missed my main points around gatekeeping that language skills always has on adults and less so on kids.
Adults in general are actually way faster at learning languages than kids if you control for time actually spent learning the language, but generally adults are required to fit language learning in around a full time job (and are also full of shame/embarrassment)
Can't concur. As a kid I learned foreign languages effortlessly, compared to now as an expat. And every other expat here my age shares the same experiences, where their 8 year old already speak the host country's language better than they do.
As another expat, I'd concur with him, with an asterisk. The thing is - your kids are surrounded by the language nonstop. Depending on your situation it may be spoken at school, certainly spoken by some of their friends, teachers, and so on endlessly. But "you" (speaking in generalities of expats and not necessarily literally you)? Unless you happen to have a local wife, then you probably speak it extremely rarely, there's a reasonable chance you can't even read it if it's non-latin, and there's no real need to move beyond that.
Living in one country for a rather long time, my fluency was basically non-existent beyond simple greetings, shopping/eating, and other basic necessities. By contrast somewhat recently I've taken a major interest in another language, one that's generally considered extremely difficult, and I've reached at least basic fluency in about 3 years. The difference? I immersed myself in the other language, my music playlist is overwhelmingly in that language, I've watched endless series and movies in that language, I've made efforts to read books in the other language, and any time I find another speaker I make sure to use the opportunity to talk with him in that language, and so on. If I was in a country where it was the native language, then I'd probably be near fluent by now.
We have the same in dutch, but, surprise twist: it is often the dutch that get it wrong. And indeed, it is confusing, but then again, it is just a bit of noise injected into the bitstream and easily worked around once you attune to that particular speaker.
Note that for people not attuned to a language some differences that are clear as day to the natives are absolutely inaudible.
The difference between 'kas' and 'kaas' in dutch is obvious to me and if your language uses stressed vowels it probably is obvious to you too but if your language skills do not yet include that difference you will not even hear these as two different words.
Why is this downvoted? This is a nice addition to the conversation. I see the same with Cantonese speakers. If you ask native speakers from Hongkong, Macao, and Guangdong, all of them will say "the other sounds weird"... but they work it out. And all three groups are happy to listen to a foreigner speak Canto (yes, there are a few). All will probably say: "Weird accent, but I understand what they are saying." Plus, Canto language communities probably exist in over 50 countries in the world. All of them will have slight tonal differences.
As a Japanese, I will mention that I've seen Japanese people correct each other on this, both in private and in public. Its because we might get the meaning by context, but if you pronounce it wrong, it sounds very strange in that context where its clearly wrong... To default to an assumption that this is due to racism / cultural gatekeeping says a whole lot about your world view and perception about Japanese people and culture than it does my people.
For example, examine your own words when you say that where you come from its a subtle form of discrimination. Well, you are saying it yourself that an action is deemed discriminatory according to the standards of your own culture, not to the standards of the other culture. You realize that could be cultural misunderstanding? There is a word for evaluating another culture by the standards of one's own culture: ethnocentrism.
If you are actually living in Japan, you should self-reflect a bit about what problems you face that you attribute subconsciously in your head to malicious intent, rather than cultural misunderstanding.
Anyways, I'm often disappointed by the comment section on this website when its anything about Japanese people. This is just another reminder for me to avoid the comments.
As a foreigner living in Japan, I'd like to take the opportunity to let you know that it's not ethnocentrism, but that Japan is for the most part quite xenophobic, and racist. It's common to hear Japanese folks make fun of other people's accents in what should be obviously extremely inappropriate settings, like at work, for example. The fact that you consider this ethnocentrism furthers the point that xenophobia and racism is commonplace, and that you feel that it's on foreigners to accept it.
If you're nitpicking a foreigner's accent pitch, think about how it would make you feel if they nitpicked your english pronunciation. My wife points out when I make mistakes in Japanese, but I ask her to do so. If a coworker or stranger were to do so, it would be embarrassing, and that's the difference that matters.
Yes, I also find it hilarious (in any culture) when someone is critical of a foreign speaker. Then when that person speaks a foreign language, usually their accent and style is so predictably awful that people are hiding under their desks. That is why I made the joke about asking natives: "So, how is your Thai... or German?" Those two languages are pretty rare to hear in Japan, especially for non-native speakers. It acts as the perfect monkeywrench in their gears.
Another great point. In my experience, the very best language lessons are from casual interactions when a stranger makes a correction to my foreign language when replying me, but not in a derogatory manner. Most of the time, you can tell they are trying to be subtle and give you a helpful hint.I mean there are widely spoken regional dialects that make no pitch distinction between the pronounciation of 橋 and 箸. You may get looked down on for not speaking the Queen's English (I mean standard Tokyo Japanese) but you are still speaking fully correct Japanese.
This is exactly why I say it is nothing but cultural/linguistic gatekeeping. Even natives between regions disagree on the "correct" way to pronouce these terms. This further proves to me how little Japanese varies throughout the country. It is freakishly regular for the size of Japan.
Consider a place like UK with four constituent countries: England, Wales, Scotland, and North Ireland (not to mention the channel islands and other oddities). They range of accents (without huge mountain ranges!) is wildly different. And the change in vocabulary for vernacular speech is far larger than the United States, which Google AI tells me is 40x larger(!).
Japanese actually has a much smaller set of phonemes (~half as many as English), resulting in extensive homophones. When combined with its greater tendency toward ambiguity, correct use of pitch can actually have a larger impact on intelligibility, as compared to many other languages.
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Nice theory, but my experience is exactly the other way around.
Even after several years of learning Chinese I still had trouble communicating with Chinese people, especially those who had no experience talking to foreigners. When I arrived in China and asked the way to the university I was going to (which was close by and very famous) they just didn't get what I was saying. In the end I had to show them the written word.
I don't speak Japanese, but when I arrived and said the name of the city and they immediately understood where I wanted to go. After my experience with Chinese I was flabbergasted that that went so smooth.
I blame the tones in Chinese (which I admit I'm not very good at)
You might have been trying too hard with tones and the stilted speech didn’t help with understanding. My first trip to China before I spoke Chinese well enough…the Beijing taxi drivers, you needed to speak more naturally for them to get you, not more correctly. You were better off talking like a farmer than trying to talk like a broadcaster.
I think that you are right that your problem must have been caused more by the Chinese tones than by any other characteristic of Chinese, and perhaps also from some of their consonants that do not have a straightforward English equivalent.
On the other hand, the Japanese pronunciation is one of the easiest in the world to learn, even taking into account the subtleties of pitch.
People are allowed to disagree with you. Your caricature of them doesn't add to the conversation.
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Says it’s overrated and non semantic… on authority of what? Being foreign to it and not knowing the language, naturally
I correct my kids when they do mistakes, how else would they improve?
Calling people racist when they try to be helpful might say more about you than them.
I mean what I say and say what I mean is also something worth striving for.
Other adults aren't your kids, and it isn't your place to correct them, unless they ask for help.
Strong agree
Japanese pitch accent actually varies across regions. Some have no pitch accent at all! I think this shows that it's not very important unless you want to sound like a native speaker. I never bothered to learn the "standard" pitch accents but I tend to imitate the Kansai pitch accent of my wife :)
Kagoshima where there is no pitch accent is like a different language entirely though, and nearly unintelligible
Native Kyushu conversations are literally unintelligible to me as a Japanese speaker. There are actually numerous Japanese dialects and accents that aren't so mutually intelligible, though of course post-TV generations understand TV Japanese.
That's kind of a secret to how CJK languages are each supposedly being a unique linguistic isolates: the rest of the families are hiding in the "dialects".
Both are Austronesian languages
Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia and the Philippines share a lot (language, food, genetics and customs). Look up Austronesian people. They do exist as minorities in Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. After a while (4 years so far in SEA), you get to notice them in these countries among the masses.
They are both Austronesian languages (also related to the Polynesian languages), so the similarity is not due to coincidence. In SEA there are also other completely unrelated language families besides Austronesian, e.g. the Thai language and the Khmer language belong to different language families with no relationships to Austronesian languages, like Malaysian (besides recent linguistic borrowings between neighbors).
All Austronesian languages are simple phonetically. Also the phonetic simplicity of Japanese is likely to have been caused by an Austronesian substrate related to that of the aborigine Taiwanese people.
> Also the phonetic simplicity of Japanese is likely to have been caused by an Austronesian substrate related to that of the aborigine Taiwanese people.
That's being asserted with too much confidence, I think. While I was aware some kind of Austronesian connection has been suggested, as far as I know there's zero actual consensus among linguists on any kind of relationship between Japanese and any other language family. Like, there's theories relating Japanese to everything from Korean to Turkish to Greek floating around - but nothing to my knowledge that we should really be describing as "likely" at the point, even a connection with the grammatically extremely similar Korean.
Now that said, I don't know a lot about the Austronesian languages or this particular hypothesis. I did find an article about a possible Austronesian substratum ("Does Japanese have an Austronesian stratum?" by Ann Kumar), but it seemed mostly preoccupied with drawing that connection through similarities in vocabulary rather than phonology. Do you have pointers to scholarly sources on the subject?
Japanese is likely to have been a hybrid language, somewhat similar with many European languages that had both a substrate and a superstrate, e.g. a Romance language like French had a Celtic substrate and a Germanic superstrate.
However, in the case of such European languages the 3 combined languages were not radically different, but they belonged to the same great language family, only to different branches. For Japanese, its sources have come from completely unrelated language families, which is the probable cause of the difficulties in determining the affinities of Japanese.
The grammar of Japanese is very similar to its Western neighbor, i.e. Korean, while its phonology is very similar to its Southern neighbor, i.e. the Austronesian languages of Ancient Taiwan and Philippines.
On the other hand, for the vocabulary of native Japanese, before it incorporated the huge amount of borrowings from Chinese, it has been more difficult to find relationships with other languages. Besides the Southern and Western influences, Japanese was also affected by a Northern influence, from people related to Ainu. As there are no old enough recorded sources about languages related to Ainu, it is possible that many of the words that do not appear to have a Southern or Western source may have come from a Northern contribution to the Japanese language.
I did not find any linguistic publication that does an adequate analysis of the relationships of Japanese with other languages. To be fair, such an analysis would require a huge amount of work, because unlike for Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic languages, where a large amount of texts have been preserved from several millennia ago, when the evolution of the languages had not changed most words so much as to make their correspondences in related languages unrecognizable, for Japanese many of the languages related to those which have contributed to the formation of Japanese have probably disappeared before leaving any written records. A credible analysis of the possible relationships of Japanese would require the compilation of a great amount of information about poorly documented languages, in order to try to reconstruct their earlier stages, where similarities with Old Japanese could be identified.
Korean has old written records, but only about as old as Japanese itself, so those are not very helpful to reconstruct the stage from many centuries before, which could have provided a component of Japanese. A language related to Korean appears to have contributed to Japanese, but only as a late superstrate that has applied a new grammar on the vocabulary inherited from the previous inhabitants of the islands. The language providing this superstrate was probably the language of the Yayoi people, who immigrated in Japan more than two thousand years ago.
For the Southern and Northern languages that could have contributed to the vocabulary and phonology of the language of Japan before the Yayoi immigration, there are extremely low chances of becoming able to reconstruct them as they were a few millennia ago, so it is unlikely that the origin of Japanese will ever be known with certainty.
Still, the fact that the languages that share features with Japanese are exactly its former neighbors in the 3 directions besides the Ocean (from before Taiwan became Chinese), is not surprising at all, but it is exactly what would be expected. What are not known are the details of what exactly each source has contributed and when did this happen.
>Jakarta is definitely for the adventurous though, and you had better have an iron stomach.
I love, love, loved backpacking across quite a bit of southeast Asia. I did not like the massive gastrointestinal problems nearly the entire time though.
I spent big money on four things for that trip: the flight, shoes, backpack, and toilet paper. I would've killed and eaten someone to get my hands in alcohol free wet wipes.
It'd be nice if there was some way to "acclimate" your gut prior to a trip like that.
> which I can't say about any other SEA language
maybe this doesn't qualify as "south east asian", but Korean is very easy to learn how to read too. It's not latin alphabet, but you only need to learn 20 symbols, and then everything is phonetic! you can have a lot of fun "reading" all the signs after you study a bit on the plane. Not as many loan words though
How did the language end up with a Latin alphabet?
Same as Vietnam: No dominate written language at the time of European Colonialization.
Sort of. Indonesian had Jawi, based on the Arabic script. People in today's Vietnam mostly wrote in Chinese AFAIK. Those methods of writing were dominant among the people who could write. But the populations were mostly illiterate, so it was easy for colonial administrators to supplant the existing writing systems with Latin as they introduced European-style schooling.
Despite its name, Jawi wasn’t used all that much in Java – it had always been more popular in the Malay peninsula. Java, as with many parts of Indonesia, used Brahmic abugidas descended from the Pallava script of Southern India (just like the Thai and Khmer scripts). Latin was chosen to write the Indonesian language for the same reason Malay was chosen as the language’s base: it was a politically neutral choice to unite a diverse archipelago.
Jawi is also not popular nowadays among the malaysian malays.
Every now and then it will pop up in the news due to politicians using it as a tool to cause racial divide.
Vietnam adopted the Latin alphabet from a missionary of some sort a couple of centuries before they were colonized by France --at the time Vietnam was decolonizing from China. The French made some modifications to how the alphabet was used to represent their phonemes.
Btw, after a couple of days being super-confused in Thailand I reverse-engineered this history from signs in English I kept seeing that in no way matched the Thai pronunciation. Finally the penny dropped that whoever had come up with the "English" phonetic spelling of Thai words, was not an English speaker.
How well do Chinese characters mesh with Vietnamese?
I mean I note that there are some Chinese languages, with millions of speakers, where the largest written text they have is a bible written in a Roman script. If those are a challenge surely Vietnamese must be as well.
> How well do Chinese characters mesh with Vietnamese?
Not very well. The old vietnamese script with Chinese characters had a lot of custom additions not in Chinese to make it work. It clearly was ducktaped.
There are non-Chinese languages in China that use Chinese characters phonetically for writing. Most of these are newer though, since the 1950s.
That was kind of like that with vietnamese, a mix of phonetic-only characters, fully custom characters and standard ones all blend together, it's quite a mess. I doubt any Chinese speaker can understand that.
The colonial administration didn't have to push too hard to make people switch, the customized chinese script wasn't very popular.
Chinese speakers won't understand Zhuang, Yi, or Bai as well. Latinization would probably be more effective, but China would lose some face. They even re-popularized an old form of Uighur script for Mongolian (while Mongolians in outer Mongolia/Russia use Cyrillic).
Like this - https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m
Like Korean and Japanese it has a different grammar and vocabulary. Japanese added a bunch other characters and Korean just made up a new (phonetic) script.
> No dominate written language at the time of European Colonialization
Vietnamese used to be written using Chinese orthography just like Japanese.
The French forcibly cracked down on this form of orthography, and following independence, later modernists attempting to copy Ataturk along with latent Sinophobia due to the Chinese colonial era meant this for of orthography has largely been relegated to ceremonial usage.
A similar thing happened with Bahasa Indonesia, as Indonesia's founding leadership was more secular and socialist in mindset compared to neighboring Malaysia where Jawi remained prominent because of the Islamist movement's role in Malaysian independence.
Another factor is that literacy rates were very low before colonization, in Vietnam to read or write using Chinese characters was never a broadly known skill (outside of the elite). This is a pretty big contrast to Japan, which had double-digit rates of literacy during the same era.
One word: Colonization
Malay culture adopted Arabic alphabet without colonization. I think colonization had less to do with it and more with the fact that the Alphabet is better and more practical. Same thing with modern numbers.
> Malay culture adopted Arabic alphabet without colonization
Is that just because you define "colonization" as "by western countries"?
Do you have evidence that Malaysia was "colonized" by Arabs?
There is evidence that Parameswara converted to Islam following his infatuation with and marriage to a girl from the Samudera Pasai Sultanate.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parameswara_of_Malacca
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samudera_Pasai_Sultanate
> There is evidence that Parameswara converted to Islam following his infatuation with and marriage to a girl from the Samudera Pasai Sultanate.
Doesn't that seem like the silliest thing you ever read? When the infatuation ended ( like all infatuations do ), did he convert back? The only thing royals are infatuated with is wealth and power. If anything, don't you think the guy converted to get preferable treatment from the arab traders or get special access to the arab trading network? There is more to the story for sure. But I'm not buying that fanciful story.
> Doesn't that seem like the silliest thing you ever read?
Not even close to be frankly honest.
Leaving aside the delibrate silliness of Edward Lear, Roald Dahl, et al and focusing just on origin stories relating to the spread of various beliefs ...
* Have you heard the one about the Buddist Monk, the Monkey, Pig, Fish, Dragon, and Horse spirits ?
* the tale of a great snake that carved rivers ?
* maybe that fishing boat passenger that got out and walked across the water ?
> If anything, don't you think the guy converted to get preferable treatment from the arab traders
I suspect the marriage was political .. but he wasn't marrying into a family of arab traders, Sultan Malikussaleh (the progenitor of the Samudera Pasai Sultanate) was an Acehnese man from part of what is now called Sumatra, a part of Indonesia.
> special access to the arab trading network
Was pretty low key wrt volume between the modern middle east and Indonesia back in the time we are looking at - the trade advantages by volume (ie. that which mattered) was all local to the greater archipelago.
Moreover, returning to the original point upthread, there's no evidence of colonisation by arabs in the sense of colonisation by the British of India or various parts of Africa, colonisation by the Dutch in the East Indies, colonisation by the Germans in Africa and PNG, by the French in Vietnam, etc.
No. But Arabs didn't colonize the Malay islands. They just adopted Islam from their internal politics. Not sure why this triggered you, pretty much everybody is a colonizer.
The same way the latin world ended up with a Latin Alphabet. It's more practical and they never developed their own. Malaysia, for example, has Jawi which is the Arabic alphabet of the their language. The short answer: the language never developed an "alphabet" and thus adopted one.
The dutch colonization of indonesia started in the 1600s and ended in 1949. So plenty of time for the locals, especially the elites, to learn dutch and the alphabet.
most SEA languages are similar btw
I spent a month in Jakarta earlier this year and wasn't impressed.
Traffic was terrible. I almost missed my flight due to taking a bike over a car, but then it started pouring rain and I had to huddle under a bridge while I waited for a car.
Jakarta has a noise problem. The temples blasting the prayers is disruptive to sleep and inner peace. The traffic does not make anything either.
Also, Indonesian food IMHO is at the bottom of SEA food culture. MY has wayyy better food (both in quality and diversity).
>Also, Indonesian food IMHO is at the bottom of SEA food culture. MY has wayyy better food (both in quality and diversity).
I won't speak for the quality but this seems like an extremely dubious statement. Malay cuisine is certainly diverse, owing to settled migrant populations from other parts of Asia, but they don't have the dizzying array of indigenous cuisines on offer in Indonesia, many of which aren't readily available in Java.
> Also, Indonesian food IMHO is at the bottom of SEA food culture. MY has wayyy better food (both in quality and diversity).
Agreed! Malaysia is really underrated, or at least it was by me. Now it's one of my favorite spots in the world, food is great (not as Thai's but comes close), wonderful sea, wonderful jungle, Kuala Lumpur is becoming a really nice city and CoL is value for money.
The teh tarik tea (served in a glass mug! paper cups don't count) is my favorite drink right now.
Also Malaysian Indian food is one of my favorite foods (especially the sweet roti).
Putting Indonesian below Filipino food is quite something.
Made me remember again how disappointed I was (food-wise) that time I went backpacking in the Philippines after backpacking in Thailand. Most days we had to choose between dry rice with tasteless fried chicken, or tasteless fried chicken with dry rice.
True. I forgot about Filipino food. Filipino bbq pig was good tho
I'll see anything you get in Indonesia, and raise you Balut... Or Betamax... or Helmet. Their national dish was designed to hide the aroma of rotten meat, FFS.
To be fair, this describes any sort of preserved or "reuse" food: toast, pickle, …
lol... try being in poultry. Every time you go to the Phillipines it's: all Balut, all the time.
> Indonesian food IMHO is at the bottom of SEA food culture
I take it you haven't been to Burma / Myanmar
Having been to both Indonesia and Myanmar, I can say confidently Burmese food is much better. The one exception is the dessert Martabak you can get in Java is to die for.
???
Burmese food is absolutely delicious. Burma Love in SF, Rangoon Bistro or Burma Joy in Portland. They're some of my favorite restaurants.
Burmese food in the US is very different from the food you encounter in the country itself.
Not only is Burmese food in Myanmar far better, but even the small, modest restaurants bring out a whole spread of complimentary small dishes (pickles, salads, crunchy snacks, all kinds of delicious little sides) before the main meal. It's just built into the dining culture there, and it's incredibly generous compared to what you see abroad.
Not sure if it's still there, but Burma Super Star is the one I go to and it's good.
Those restaurants had none of the food I ate in Burma
Lived in SE Asia for well over 15 years, and Burmese food is great.
Nice. I'm an ex-tour guide, and had many jovial discussions with a colleague who toured Myanmar and LOVED the food - he knew I thought it was pretty average, at best.
Of course, that crazy guy didn't really like Thai food...
haha, I have not.
A little tip for your next visit to Jakarta :
- Indonesia is a tropical country, and Jakarta is in the vicinity of the sea, so depending on the month of year, it can rain anytime on the day. So, if you are not comfortable with rain, always use a taxi/grab/gocar to go around.
- If you are pressed for time, I suggest you use airport train to go to the airport. At least you won't get stuck on traffic.
- About the noise problem, I think it won't be a problem if you sleep in a tall building. The last time I go there, I sleep in a relatively good hotel and deliberately choose the higher floor. And the noise doesn't become a problem for me.
Hope this help and you can get a nicer experience on your next visit
When you say "temples", do you mean masjid (mosque)? It is pretty normal anywhere in the Islamic-majority world to sing prayers over a loud speaker a few times a day.
This is an appeal to normality fallacy, just because something is normal doesn't mean it's good, or in this case that it doesn't disrupt sleep.
U.S. cities have noise laws.
I don’t think Tokyo is considered loud.
Yes, temples blasting prayers.
I can tell you that Tokyo is very loud. Constant road traffic noise everywhere, drunk people singing on the streets, pointless warnings from the local municipal office on the public alert system, noisy street advertisements, constant announcements in train stations, bousouzoku gangs constantly revving their bikes in silent neighborhoods every night, flight traffic noise, railroad noise of the trains passing, level crossing barriers constantly ding-donging, etc
Tokyo isn't loud at all. Go 2-3 blocks from any major street and they are practically silent.
> drunk people singing on the streets
never seen this
> bousouzoku gangs constantly revving their bikes in silent neighborhoods every night
seen this maybe twice in 25 years
> flight traffic noise
do you live next to the airport? this is not a thing relatively to any other major city I've lived in
> railroad noise of the trains passing, level crossing barriers constantly ding-donging
This is only a thing if you live next to a track which is like 1% of housing
Well, then it's clear you don't have enough experience to objectively judge the situation.
I lived near 5 different stations in Tokyo in 10 years and all of those were how I described it.
I also lived in Saitama and Kanagawa. It's the same there too.
Maybe you should get more exerience first and live longer in Japan?
I lived in Japan 2x long than you. You just said you lived near stations so there you go. Of course it’s loud next to the station. Walk 3 minutes perpendicular to the station and it’s silent
noisy street advertisements.. and jingles... shops of all shapes and sizes blaring music...
I live in Japan and this is something that I will never get used to. Yes, the people are quiet, but shops are ridiculously loud. Go to any supermarket and there are seven different jingles playing in parallel! Honestly, I don't understand how the employees don't go crazy.
I've known a few younger people who can't go into shops they used to do their part-time work (バイト) at, simply because the looped jingles did, in fact, drive them nuts.
That is sad, but kind of expected.
But seriously, why do the shops do that? Why does nobody complaint? Do Japanese people really like those jingles?
I've heard that some places, such as train stations, did away with jingles (etc.) to bring more silence. The feedback was that those places felt "lonely."
Neither the US, nor Japan are considered developing countries. I'm confused by your comment.
Cars and mopets have a noise problem not cities.
But I guess the mosque doesn't help.
Catholic churches ring bells twice a day. It's less then mosques that do their call 5 times a day both as non-religious person both are disappointing to me.
> Traffic was terrible. I almost missed my flight due to taking a bike over a car, but then it started pouring rain and I had to huddle under a bridge while I waited for a car.
I guess people perceive this very differently. One sees it as an adventure while another one sees it as a hustle. Jakarta is a hustle. Some people like it and make them feel alive. If you don't enjoy it, it'll make you miserable.
> Also, Indonesian food IMHO is at the bottom of SEA food culture.
I agree. I hate the food but Malay food is similar. What Malaysia has is two other major races (Chinese and Indians) and a strong expat community (ie: Thai, Viet and Japanese) that bring lots of food diversity.
Rain, noise, traffic... welcome to SEA
Bangkok doesn't have nearly the noise issues of Jakarta; the traffic proceeds without every vehicle beeping most of the time in Bangkok. Also no prayer calls.
Man if you think Seattle has too much noise and traffic you should stay away from basically every other mid-large sized city anywhere in the world.
I presume they mean South East Asia.
The regional abbreviation, or the airport code?
.... what? Either works?
Seattle's not really known for noise. The opposite, if anything. Rain (caveat it's not the rain it's the dark and it's mostly mizzle blah blah blah) and traffic though, sure.
And homeless drug addicts.
I’ve never been there, but the US version of the tv series The Killing is so great and it sure gives a grim impression of the weather.
Not that serial killers are any better on a nice day in pleasant weather.
Jakarta doesn’t need to turn itself into a sex tourism city like Bangkok. It shouldn’t. Thailand sold its people out to make some business and government people rich in my opinion.
I spent a lot of time in Jakarta. It has some serious issues like pollution, worst traffic in SEA, unwalkable city, actually far more expensive for what you get than other SEA areas. It isn’t surprising to me that people don’t want to travel there for holiday. There are far better places for tourism.
Sounds wonderful if you're OK with Indonesia's ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing of West Papua.
> Widespread atrocities committed by Indonesian forces have led human rights groups to describe the situation as a genocide against the indigenous Papuan population. Reports of mass killings, forced displacement, and sexual violence are extensive and credible. According to a 2007 estimate by scholar De R. G. Crocombe, between 100,000 and 300,000 Papuans have been killed since Indonesia's occupation began.[19][23] A 2004 report by Yale Law School argued that the scale and intent of Indonesia’s actions fall within the legal definition of genocide.[24] State violence has targeted women in particular. A 2013 and 2017 study by AJAR and the Papuan Women's Working Group found that 4 in 10 Papuan women reported suffering state abuse,[25] while a 2019 follow-up found similar results.[26][27][Note 1][Note 2]
> In 2022, the UN condemned what it described as "shocking abuses" committed by the Indonesian state, including the killing of children, disappearances, torture, and large-scale forced displacement. It called for "urgent and unrestricted humanitarian aid to the region."[28] Human Rights Watch (HRW) has noted that the Papuan region functions as a de facto police state, where peaceful political expression and independence advocacy are met with imprisonment and violence.[29] While some analysts argue that the conflict is aggravated by a lack of state presence in remote areas,[30] the overwhelming trend points to systemic state violence and neglect.
> Indonesia continues to block foreign access to the Papuan region, citing so-called "safety and security concerns", though critics argue this is to suppress international scrutiny of its genocidal practices
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papua_conflict
Tabaran: Recorded Pacific Gold Studios, Rabaul, PNG, July to August ‘88
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XX5p1sjvW6s
They also have not prosecuted the earlier genocides they made: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_19...
I have personally flagged them as a country non-grata.
Is there any place you can go now that isn't doing a genocide? USA is out, Europe is out, Russia is out, China is out. Obviously the middle east is out. Most of Africa. Australia? They're strongly aligned with the USA though. And they did one in the past. Tiny Pacific islands but they're basically USA colonies?
This could be a general issue with SE Asia, but one thing that was a breath of fresh air for me as I departed Jakarta from my Bali trip last year was a thought that I no longer need to worry about quality of water being used to wash salad veggies or clean my toothbrush with.
Clean safe water from the sink was definitely not something I experienced in Bali in 2024 and I had the similar impression in Jakart
Clean safe water from the sink is not something you'll find in most of the world, in fact. It's not just SEA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Safe_drink_tap_water_map....
So basically it's only safe to drink tap water in western countries + Japan, Singapore, Chile, South Korea, and a few of the rich Arab countries.
I would argue that even the blue areas here would be speckled with lots of non-drinkable areas if you zoomed in, due to old lead piping and so on.
Any idea why that is? Why is safety of tap water high(I hope) priority in some parts of the world and not the others?
Is it simply the economics of water purification and delivery or something else?
The price of clean water is at least an order of magnitude less than the price of electricity, but the cost of creating a water grid is probably more expensive than the electricity grid.
You will notice that many of the countries with unsafe tap water also have electricity reliability problems. If the economics of electricity don't work, then the economics of safe water don't work at all.
It's expensive to control the quality of water from source all the way to tap. Just having visible clean running water is hard.
Bottled (mineral) water is a big business in Indonesia. Not sure if "people" are incentivized to change that anytime soon.
I don't think there's any conspiracy like this. It's just economic + (lack of) beauracracy. Installing and maintaining a functioning potable water supply across an entire country is expensive, but even harder is setting and maintaining standards.
I traveled often between Jakarta and Japan in 2018, 2019 and 2020. The real breath of fresh air for me was literally the fresh air back in Japan. After running around for a week through Jakarta, I would inevitably develop a deep cough and a clogged nose. That said, the people, the food, and as someone else pointed out the nightlife is amazing.
Somebody I know had asthma while she lived in Jakarta. It went away when she moved to Europe. I really liked Jakarta, but the air quality is one of the reasons why I won't go back again.
Bangkok is not what you described. Bangkok is a great city, not too polluted, there are not a lot of poor people. Bangkok is like Manila.
I spent a lot of time working is South East Asia. Jakarta is the worst city, yes it is big but very filthy like New Delhi or India in general. Second filthiest is Malaysia.
The cleanest city is without a doubt Singapore.
> not too polluted
Are we talking about the same Bangkok? I'm talking about the Bangkok in Thailand where they literally shut down the schools due to air pollution being so bad [0].
What Bangkok are you referring to?
Malaysia is wayyy cleaner than Indonesia, both in air quality and trash on the ground.
[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/24/bangkok-pollut...
Bangkok has seasonal haze incidents that can get bad enough to close schools etc. Those are a scourge across all of SEA and are generally caused by slash-and-burn agriculture practices. It's much different from having bad AQI year-round.
I'd hardly say Bangkok is a clean air capital, but it's next to the ocean with no significant mountains nearby so usually pollution gets blown out to sea.
> it's next to the ocean with no significant mountains nearby so usually pollution gets blown out to sea.
So is Jakarta, and it's still pretty polluted.
For me Manila is the uncontested worst city in SEA. All of Jakarta's downsides, plus an absolutely horrific airport, worse traffic, extremely limited public transport network (which doesn't extend at all to the places where most business travellers go, namely Makati/BGC), higher crime and more violent crime too (lots of guns around), and worse food.
About the only upside is that most people speak some English, which is manifestly not the case in Jakarta.
I guess we just have different experience of Manila. In most places you would go as a visitor, either tourist or business, you're not really likely to see a lot of violence. I've been there 10 times over 10 years, and really nothing truly bad happened or even seen or heard by fellow travellers. I've been harassed by street kids, that's about it.
Do people talk that crime exists? For sure. You have to be smart, just like any other big city. But I don't see how you'd truly put yourself into a dangerous situation. There's lots of security everywhere westerners might hang out.
Airport has seen lots of improvements recently.
But yes, traffic is horrendous, public transit as well.
> I spent a lot of time working is South East Asia. Jakarta is the worst city, yes it is big but very filthy like New Delhi or India in general. Second filthiest is Malaysia.
Malaysia's a pretty decent size country, not a city. Can't say as I'd have referred to KL as filthy on any of my visits (admittedly only 3 times over the past 12 years). Kuching wasn't filthy either.
This is such an odd position to create a burner account to argue...
If it seems odd, maybe it's not what they're doing.
N=1 but my experience with Philippines and Malaysia is exactly the opposite.
what is the cheapest for a nomad
Vietnam.
source: I've been to almost every country in SEA at least 3x. (Brunei was once, never went to Timor-Leste).
Check the forex changes and rent prices if you don't believe me.
Harder to factor in is visa costs. Vietnam, you need to leave every 90 days. So you need to buy a $25usd visa + flights/buses + hotels for 3-5 days while you get your next visa. Thailand, you only need to leave every 6mo on the DTV.
Thailand is cracking down on visa runs and people staying quasi-permanently on short-stay visas: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/nri/visit/thailand-step...
The parent mentions the DTV visa which is the opposite of the visa-run strategy. Realistically though, if you're a "nomad" from a country with a powerful-ish passport you can come to Thailand for 60 days, extend once for 30 days for a total stay of 90 days. After that you can do a bit of a loop between Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Philippines in whatever order you prefer and come back to Thailand in a year. They'll have no problem letting you in again.
It's pretty easy to spend a year in SEA without raising eyebrows at any border if you're willing to change countries somewhat often and don't mind AirAsia flights.
That is basically my life. I've visited almost every country in the region this year (+ China and Japan) on a tourist visa.
The problem for me personally is this life is stressful on relationships, health, and personal productivity. Spending a weekend every 1-2 months to deal with travel (and arrangements) is exhausting and expensive on productivity hours.
> very filthy like New Delhi
Think you mean Delhi NCR? New Delhi is pretty small, and mostly houses political and social elite.
I love that they put all the diplomats in Chanakyapur which would be like Italy putting them on Machiavelli Lane
I'd take Bangkok over Singapore any time of the day/month/year. There's still a bit of chaos in Bangkok in 2025 but once you spend a few days there and learn how to avoid peak traffic hours and areas it's incredibly charming and charistmatic city with loads of activities and opportunities for all classes of people. Singapore while clean is incredibly dull and characterless unless you're a billionaire.
"Learn how to avoid peak traffic hours." Most people living in Bangkok cannot do this. Also, a very high percent of the time, the Icon Siam area is extremely congested (even on weekends). Yes, you can avoid living in or going to that area, but there are also very few nice areas in Bangkok in general.
Most don't have the luxury of the flexibility to avoid certain areas and/or certain peak travel times (which in BKK are many throughout the day)
> "Learn how to avoid peak traffic hours." Most people living in Bangkok cannot do this
you can absolutely do this. Once you learn how to live there and design your own routes with motorbike taxis, sky train etc you do save a lot of time. It's still quite bad but it's 20 minutes vs 2 hours sort of better.
Every time I tried taking a motorbike taxi, they charged me probably three times more than a local to just travel maybe 1km, not to mention Bangkok has one of the deadliest roads in the world, if not the deadliest. I have explored pretty much all of Bangkok and I don't think the MRT and BTS are as convenient as some people make it out to be. It is built as it is in any other city where it's very concentrated around the city centre but anything right outside of that is terrible.
Also, for two weeks in December you have the Red Cross festival. I challenge you to schedule your day every single day to avoid that mass of hell if you live anywhere in a 2km radius of that. Even if you call a tuktuk or a motorbike, they will absolutely NOT come to get you if they think there's too much traffic, or worse, they will tell you to get off somewhere where it's convenient for them.
Like a lot of foreigners, you seem to have built your life avoiding many things in Bangkok, which you can do in any city, but that's not the point. You are compensating for how poorly the city is built and how poorly the city is ran. A city is not appealing if you have to self-impose so many restrictions and find so many workarounds.
This comment is proof that the parent commenter has never actually lived in either city.
After a while, a city's 'character', 'charm', and 'charisma' all become annoyances. People live, work, go to school, file taxes, use transport, not just visit tourist attractions. Singapore's quality and efficiency of administration is light-years beyond any other country, perhaps bar Switzerland. 6.1 million people live in Singapore; they're not all multimillionaires.
It's hard to put into words how unsafe Singapore makes me feel.
No, literally, it's hard to put it into words. I feel that if I criticize the country, the govt might take revenge the next time I visit. (See also: Bald JD Vance)
Metrics aren't everything. Singapore might be on paper a great place to live, but it could never be a home.
I agree it's hard to explain why Singapore is so dull. I go there every year or so as that's where the closest Lithuanian embassy is and the entire country feels like a shopping mall.
It's a great example how "on paper" metrics don't match reality but it's hardly surprising given that manipulating paper is the entire function of the country.
Lots of people labouring under weak and old stereotypes here...
I wonder what people would think if I said that about London, if I only visited central London and said 'it feels like a tourist trap'. London is huge, as is Singapore (for a city, it's pretty big— it has a larger population than all of the Baltics and the Nordic except Sweden).
Oh, for goodness' sake, drop the melodrama and hyperbole. I take it you haven't lived in the country either.
Singapore is not North Korea, the PRC, or any of the Gulf countries, where people just get disappeared (or sawn into pieces and stuffed into a suitcase) for 'criticising the government' or 'criticising the country'.
I am Singaporean.
I can absolutely call the ruling People's Action Party a bunch of ivory tower-dwelling bureaucrats who have lost touch with the issues of the populace, and are mostly far cry from Lee Kuan Yew's days. I can say that Ms Josephine Teo really needs to keep her mouth shut, and that Mr Ng Chee Meng, MP for Jalan Kayu, didn't deserve to win his constituency one jot. I can say the ruling party regularly gerrymander the districts so they keep winning, even though they deny it. I can say they stifle the development of creative pursuits and the arts with their heavy-handed censorship. I can say they have their vices backwards by being extremely light on drink-driving, but simultaneously extremely harsh on cannabis, which smells horrible but isn't a big problem in terms of addiction or withdrawal.
I can say they are strongly influenced by Anglospheric right-wing Christian evangelism, and they need to root it out before it settles too deep into the country's psyche. I can say they are trying to build a cult of personality of Lee Kuan Yew, who has been dead for 10 years; it's time the country, the government, and the ruling party built on his legacy and moved forward instead of circling around him and his memory.
If you want more criticism, how about actually watching the Singapore Parliament, and deciding for yourself?
Oh, and if you ever decide to drop by, leave the hard drugs at home (including weed), if you want to leave with your head on its neck.
As for metrics: Singapore is both on paper and in reality a pretty good place to live, if you can stand the humidity and heat (frankly, that's the only truly oppressive thing about the place, how ruddy hot it gets). Why do you think people still emigrate to it, from lower-income countries, and from the West?
And finally, 'bald JD Vance', I don't understand how US politics is related to Singapore. They are countries hemispheres apart. One occupies a full third of a continent and has a population of 350 million. The other is a tiny island city-state of 6 million.
The politics of the US have also degraded to something worse than sports rivalries and the discourse is generally of extremely poor quality; it is only a reflection of the competence (or lack thereof) of its leadership and the majority of its people.
I agree with everything you say, however I would note that Singapore has a substantial resident (ordinary definition of the word) population on various types of work permits who, rightly or wrongly, don't feel so free to speak out as you do.
A substantial proportion of those would like to become PR or even citizens, but can't risk prejudicing an already-opaque process in doing so.
> you need to make local friends to really get into it
Well, that might sound like an impossible task!! So, just sign up for Experiences from any of the leading travel portals. They’d get you into any of the local party scenes.
Shame their water is poison.
and air
What is the air quality like to actually breathe in your experience? I have noticed Jakarta on lists of poor AQI and it doesn't look great [1] but I think the AQI number is kind of an abstraction.
[1] https://www.aqi.in/us/dashboard/indonesia/jakarta/jakarta/hi...
I found it probably the worst of anywhere I've ever been, you can taste it and just being outside slightly burns the back of your throat. I still really like visiting though.
Air quality is terrible. AQI does not lie. It's even worse when you're sitting on the back of a motorbike 6ft away from 10 other gas powered bikes.
There is slow adoption of electric vehicles, but still very low adoption rate (like less than 10% of motorbikes).
> Air quality is terrible. AQI does not lie.
Heh. To get a sense of what the page's numbers might mean, I checked on Kaohsiung, where you can taste gasoline in the air as you walk down the street.
And hey, reported air quality in Kaohsiung is abysmal, so that checks out. Jakarta even looks good by comparison.
https://www.aqi.in/us/dashboard/taiwan/kaohsiung/kaohsiung
https://www.aqi.in/us/dashboard/indonesia/jakarta/jakarta
AQI appears to have Jakarta pegged at an average "66", which looks pretty respectable for the region. They seem to have much more carbon monoxide than Kaohsiung or Shanghai, but much less fine particulate.
Hmm it's a bit surprising. Usually when I checked, it'll never be under 100. Maybe the current rainy season helps?
I don't feel that AQI in reasonably normal ranges corresponds at all to the subjective experience of how nice the air feels to breathe.
The best breathing I've done was in Mumbai. Felt like a silk blanket both in the lungs and on the skin. I'm sure it would be bad for me if I stayed there a few decades, but it didnt feel bad at all when visiting.
Are you from Mumbai? or a place with notably bad AQI? Do you smoke?
Mumbai is one of the most polluted cities on earth, many people report being unable to perform aerobic exercise or describe breathing the air as being similar to smoking.
I'm from a place with excellent AQI (semi-rural Sweden). I do not smoke. I usually don't mind when other people smoke, but I don't like how they smell just after finishing. :-)
I know that the Mumbai air is not healthy, but my subjective experience of it was very positive.
> it's hot, congested, polluted and largely poor, but so is Bangkok.
That's a wild comparison, makes me wonder how much time you spent in Bangkok. Bangkok has a much higher standard of living compared to Jakarta, and I've yet to meet anyone who spent more than a month in both places and prefers Jakarta. Living costs are cheaper in Jakarta for sure, but that's about it.
Is being an attractive vacation destination necessarily a good thing for a city? They're the biggest city, didn't they "win"?
Thanks for sharing. I’m wondering whether they have a large retro computing market?
I'll just chime in that Chinatown in Glodok might have been that place a couple decades ago, but seemed quite deserted now :/ There's still some shops around though.
The nightlife is wildest in SEA but definitely for the bold and brave.
> lunch at the Italian place in the Ritz-Carlton was under $10
I'm curious, what does a beer or a glass of wine cost?
A local beer in a bar will normally be around 60k IDR so $3-4, wine is more expensive generally in SEA you'll normally pay around 90-100k IDR per glass.
Alcohol is more expensive than other countries, in general.
Due to high taxation, apparently to appease the religious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_in_Indonesia
Thanks for posting this. Really interesting perspectives
Whats the food like for vegetarians/ vegans?
If you're strict or allergic, very difficult. Fish sauces and pastes like terasi and patis are culinary staples on the level of soy sauce and make it into otherwise seemingly vegetarian dishes.
If you're willing to flex a bit and just avoid obvious meat/fish, you'll survive, there's plenty of tofu, tempeh, veg etc. Gado-gado is always veg, nasi/mee goreng, etc.
Tempeh is an Indonesian staple and from what I understand pretty popular with vegans.
Why compare Jakarta to Bangkok?
Because they're both hot, polluted, congested and mostly poor, but Bangkok is literally the world's most popular tourist destination city while Jakarta is not.
What? Jakarta's biggest problem is the rising sea level and the sinking ground. Jakarta is one of the fastest sinking cities globally. Venice or Miami are nothing compared to this. 40% will be gone soon.
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/7a9fa31104334f3db4c01d0...
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So - hot, congested, polluted, no public transit, cheap taxis, cheap luxury hotels, amazing food, fun night activities (but you'll need to know locals). Other than the no crime claim (which I find dubious) you've just described every big city in every developing country on the planet.
Alternative Link: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/jakarta-world-s-most-p...
Key Facts: Number of megacities, urban areas with 10 million or more inhabitants has quadrupled from 8 in 1975 to 33 in 2025.
Jakarta is now the world’s most populous city, with nearly 42 million residents. The current population of Indonesia is 286 million.
In 2019, Indonesia said it will be moving its capital to Nusantara, a new city which is under construction.
To add some more detail regarding the new capital, Jakarta has some structural governance problems in the sense that it's very hard to improve infrastructure improve / stop the sinking of the city (mostly caused from over reliance on ground water pumping and permitting corruption / bad river management). Those problems might never be solved.
And separate of it's economic power it remains a center of power where the city mayor/governor always becomes a major national political figure.
Indonesia is actually a plurality of distinct island cultures, but with Jakarta, Java and Javanese culture sits at the top of the national political hierarchy. (Not to mention a sort of internal Javanese colonialism similar to the USSR).
The new capital could be part of dismantling some of the legacy internal Javanese power structures.
(To add a further detail re. Java vs. Indonesia, because of the mercator projection it's hard to see how big Indonesia is. It would stretch from Maine, past California almost to Anchorage).
New capitals also help prevent revolutions and uprisings. It's a lot easier to have a government that's insulated from the unrest of the masses, when everyone in its capital is loyal to it.
Some say the straight Paris boulevards were intended for cannon grapeshot ...
France had the inverse problem, all the nobles were sequestered away in Versailles, and weren't particularly interested in actually running the state.
I also imagine a lot of people who are admiring these megacities have never been to one. Jakarta has oceans of scooters and, when I was there to visit some customers with our country manager, she had a driver. With some exceptions like Singapore, SE Asian cities are horrible to get around.
Other than Singapore. I am not sure why SE Asian cities aren't going as all in on mass transit like China. Jakarta has a single subway line for 42 million people. They have some light rail line and buses. If you compare this with Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing its really night and day.
The usual patterns that crop up are:
1) Lack of institutional knowledge. No one even knows how to get started and bringing in foreign expertise may be prohibitively expensive.
2) Economics don’t pencil out even in higher income countries compared to BRT systems, especially because high density and heavy traffic means the lines usually have to be grade-separated which adds additional costs compared to an at-grade system.
3) Corruption makes development impossible. No well-established processes for expropriation exist, or the country is given over to clientelism such that landlords won’t give up what they own and hamper the development process via political connections.
BRT is usually the most effective solution in places where grade-separated rail is not yet viable as it allows a right-of-way network to be established that can later be upgraded to rail. This doesn’t solve problem 3, which requires a comparatively authoritarian approach to overcome the incentive problems at play; this is why the Chinese have generally excelled in the space over the last 20 years.
For anyone interested in the issues with Indonesian economy, politics and development may I suggest a great book: Indonesia, Etc. by Elizabeth Pisani.
Even in the US, a lot of right-of-ways were taken by the government for rail and, later, highways (which intersected with earlier railroads in many cases) before it would have been as difficult a process as it would be today. Not a political comment so much as an observation that it's harder to just take private land today.
1) I really don't see how it prohibilitivly expensive. Much poorer places have built them and there are tons of companies who are willing to do it. Specially if you have a 30 year plan.
2) Another one I don't buy if you have a 30 year plan. Buses have higher operating costs, need more space, have less capacity and the surrounding infrastructure gets more expensive. The only thing BRT is good at, is making it easier to get start because you initially don't need ground infrastructure.
3) This is much more likely.
But Ill grant you what BRT might allow you do to is ban cars from a corridor without to many people being angry, and that is a win by itself.
> The only thing BRT is good at, is making it easier to get start because you initially don't need ground infrastructure.
The only thing rice is good at is being a cheap source of nutrition.
Nutrition is the point of eating, getting started isn't the point of public transport.
Any actual competent government cares about the long run, not just how fast to get started.
And even then, if you do a 'full' BRT its quite expensive. Its really just normal buses with some minimal priority that is much cheaper to get started.
And if you know its a route that eventually will have to get upgraded, its actually more expensive to first do the BRT and then upgrade.
The water table surely has something to do with it, but they could put much of it above ground like Bangkok does (erm, Bangkok should be listed as doing ok, even if they aren't doing as well as Singapore).
China built A LOT in the last 15 years. Beijing before 2008 had line 1, 2, a couple of suburban lines (13 and another one out east), and that was it. I don't think any other country has ever built infrastructure so quickly, so it isn't really fair to compare them to China.
That is a fair argument. China's level of infrastructure development is pretty absurd.
KL has subways. Even better is the KL city bus network which is free, air conditioned, and has free wifi. Despite Malaysia being a nominally muslim state, I found it multicultural and tolerant. If it wasn't for the heat and humidity, I'd consider it a great place to retire.
If you leave KL city and go to the surrounding areas, such as Petaling Jaya or Subang Jaya, it becomes more manageable (entering KL from there feels like a 5-10C temperature increase). It gets better the further you go of course, but for tourists that may be a bit tricky as it won't be as easy to get around (at least not without a car).
I was in KL for a business event. Can't say I cared for it much but it was just a few days. Didn't interact with public transit at all.
Did like Penang afterwards though.
KL?
Kuala Lumpur
Jakarta doesn’t have one metro line. It has 9 lines which it variously calls light rail, commuter trains, etc. but are metro lines in all but name, in terms of frequency, infrastructure, and service patterns. It’s not quite Beijing or Tokyo, but it’s also not as wealthy as either city.
Bangkok has built a lot of transit in the past decade, 6 lines on top of an already-substantial existing network. Still plenty of projects under construction as well. This alone puts it way ahead of Jakarta in terms of quality of life IMO.
It's a case of better late than never. KL has a reasonable mix of subway, monorail, elevated and suburban rail. Bangkok's above-ground BTS has been very popular and they have been building subways as well. Hanoi has a master plan and has opened its first subway line in 2021 and second in 2024. Manila is also digging subways right now and has wisely called in the Japanese to do it, given that city is simultaneously subject to typhoons, floods and earthquakes.
Probably a combination of overall wealth and government policies/stability/priorities. I'd probably add Hong Kong to the list of cities with pretty good public transit but, overall, it's pretty bad in that area of the world relative to cities that you'd generally consider to be "good."
Infrastructure is expensive. It costs lots of resources and human labor and intricate planning (most SE Asia cities are not looking like anything there was planned).
Most countries on the planet simply cannot afford good infrastructure. I'm almost sure there's not even enough resources like energy and metals to create a good infrastructure in every country on Earth.
> I'm almost sure there's not even enough resources like energy and metals to create a good infrastructure in every country
As better public transport infrastructure vastly reduces the number of cars, and centralizes the requirement for both material and energy, I doubt that is the case. Buses and trains need far less of both than the population-equivalent number of cars/motorcycles.
Infrastructure is not only cars/buses. It is also: roads (paved roads), electricity lines, water pipes, bus stops, traffic lights (you won't find many traffic lights in SEA countries), train stations, railroads, etc.
It's evident if you live for several months in almost any SEA city, that they lack even basic infrastructure. I'm sure it's not only matter of negligence, they simply cannot afford many things that people in developed countries see as granted.
I agree on the difficulty of distribution of resources, just not the idea of there being a lack of them. Maybe not relevant for any practical purposes.
Democratic governments are weak on deficit spending, especially poor ones, the debt from their tiny stretch of high speed rail almost became a scandal.
> I am not sure why SE Asian cities aren't going as all in on mass transit like China
Eminent domain and mass demolitions were very common in 1990s-2010s China, and to a degree that I have not seen in other authoritarian and nominally communist states like Vietnam or even Laos, let alone other less authoritarian states.
Entire neighborhoods, villages, and towns were razed to build the urban areas that make up China today.
Beijing [0][1], Shanghai [2][3], and other cities across China [4] all saw massive urban demolitions until the Central Government banned them in 2021 during the Evergrande crisis [5] due to limited utility and rising urban discontent.
Back in the day, it was somewhat common to see news about some random Jie commiting a terrorist act in retaliation for being evicted from their homes [6][7] due to this urban demolition program, and partially helped Xi consolidate power as most officials affiliated with these programs were deeply corrupt, and were often felled during the anti-corruption purges (ironically, Xi oversaw similar initiatives in Zhejiang in the 2000s).
Most other governments don't see the utility of implementing a similar style of program.
[0] - https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollecti...
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/jun/06/sport.china
[2] - https://web.archive.org/web/20130324195541/http://www.unhabi...
[3] - https://archive.nytimes.com/sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/201...
[4] - https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1002775
[5] - https://english.www.gov.cn/statecouncil/ministries/202108/31...
[6] - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-18018827.amp
[7] - https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna34450213
In Beijing alone, some activists said more than 1 million people were forced from their homes to make way for new sports venues for last year's Olympics.
Wow...
And, while you can pick and choose data, Beijing's Olympic stadium is not really very widely used as far as I can tell. Of course you can also debate whether a lot of urban revitalization projects--even if leading to popular settings/venues--were worth the cost to neighborhoods that were basically flattened.
And don't forget Beijing's forced eviction of tens of thousands of so called 'low end population' in the middle of winter.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/world/asia/china-beijing-...
Even in democratic Taiwan they have this mindset to an extent - private land must not stand in the way of infrastructure.
Taiwan's mass urban demolition spree happened towards the tail end of authoritarian rule, and did in fact play a role in garnering mass support for the democracy movement.
After democracy, Taiwan shifted towards trying to preserve traditional neighborhoods or working to normalize unofficial neighborhoods and slums - basically adopting a bottom up instead of top down approach [0]
[0] - https://www.taiwan-panorama.com/en/Articles/Details?Guid=5fc...
Heck, even US use these tactic: https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/brent-cebul-tearing-do...
Or electric bikes and cars
For electric vehicles, in third world countries the most obvious bottlenecks are pricing and infrastructure. However despite that, I'm quite surprised by how fast adoption actually is even when it's not as fast as first world countries.
For bikes, we already have TON of powered bikes. I can actually see electric bikes opening the eye of Americans on the wonder of scooters.
Everytime I see the ocean of scooters, I wonder how horrible it'd be if scooters weren't invented but instead everyone use cars like in America. Either it'll make the most legendary traffic jam ever or GDP will be cut in half since no one can move anywhere. With our already overcrowded public transport, it's practically the only alternative.
I actually wonder how much better American traffic would be if scooters are more popular.
The Netherlands had over 1000KM (621 miles) of traffic jams Monday morning.
Americans use cars because we can afford them. The Indonesians would too if they could.
Most Dutch people can afford cars, but many are on bikes (including cargo/e-bikes), about 27% of all "movements" [0]. This is because of the way our infrastructure is set up, the bike is very often optimal (special bike lanes, shorter routes, better/free parking at destination or public transport hubs). Most people do own a car though.
[0] https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/visualisaties/verkeer-en-vervoer/pe...
True, but if there was a city of 40 million in the Netherlands, I'm afraid very few would venture out on bikes there too.
It would be subways then, not cars I suspect. At least in a city like Rotterdam (673K inhabitants) that is by far the optimal way to get around, cars are really almost useless in the city center.
Here, most of the street is already reserved for bikes, with the sidewalks for pedestrians [0]. This is all a one way street.
[0] https://maps.app.goo.gl/EkUV5WQaQXFgv8KG8
I can't find the link anymore, but aeons ago I read a blog post on here claiming that the Netherlands is better characterized as a city state, if you're looking at it from an American point of view: the entire country is about the same size as NYC's metro area, and around the same population.
Car ownership correlates negatively with urbanization in NL, so no, I don't think so. And no 40M city (or 4M city) convinces me driving is an acceptable way to get around.
How would Indonesians use cars that cannot go anywhere? It's not about affording but about people/m² compression.
Here's a quick napkin math: a 1.3m² scooter can take 1-3 people, a toyota camry of 8.8m² can take 1-5 people. This gives the humble scooter aprox 3-5 times the space efficiency that of a car.
Not to mention the agility and parking benefits of scooters. There's no way any SEA city could get rid of scooters in favor of cars. Scooters are incredibly under-rated in the west and my favorite tool here in SEA - it's peak practical engineering at scale.
That makes sense, but I have to assume driving a scooter is a pretty dangerous way to get around a giant city?
I have biker friends who call cars "cages", and I get the sentiment. But they have a lot more concussions than any other group of people I know.
I agree with other commenter and speed is primary danger for scooters. I've been driving for 7 years (mostly in Thailand) and never had an accident as the risk distributions is incredibly obvious:
- stay within reasonable speed
- keep distance
- don't do highways
- project your intentions very clearly with no sudden moves
vast majority of accidents happen when this simple rule set is broken (aside from obvious DUI). If you're driving 40km/h max in a city you are surprisingly safe, especially as scooter traffic culture is very river like so once you're familiar with the area you are basically being carried by the traffic.
Most stats of SEA scooter deaths are coming from really bad driving, as in drunk uncle driving a scooter on the opposite side of the road with no headlights sort of bad driving (sadly very common). The culture can be very unserious about scooter safety when it's quite achievable in practice. It really is an incredible form of transportation when taken seriously.
Since this is scooters who rarely even reach >150cc, it's actually quite safe since it's slow and light. There are always high risk when we want to go to very rough roads that are also full of trucks (common in rural areas), but in well maintained roads like lots of Jakarta, it's mostly fine.
Though it really isn't helped by attitude of people around here who aren't even wearing helms.
Americans use a car because their infrastructure was build to support it. If they had cities like exist in South East Asia they wouldn't use it. Because if they did it would literally be no traffic, because the city would barly move and you wouldn't get anywhere.
These cities already have to much traffic while only a small number of people have cars.
I got curious to see how many people have cars in Jakarta. While cars per capita of Indonesia is extremely low (~80 / 1000 people), the one for Jakarta is at respectable ~300/1000 people, not far from NYC at ~400/1000 people. Still far away from other cities though.
From my experience also, scooter is still heavily used even by people that have cars because there's just a lot of small roads and neighborhood where it's very unsuitable for cars. This also makes scooter taxi very popular here since it's cheaper, faster, and can reach the deepest parts of Jakarta.
Hehe. Great point. I have lived and worked in 2 Delhi and Mumbai in India. With such terrible living condition, traffic, pollution and so on it sucked the soul out of me. At least I found it so bad in Mumbai that many a times while leaving from work to hostel, I would literally cry on train platform with massive crowd pushing and shoving from all directions while trying to get into bursting at seams trains.
And this all is 20 years back. During this time thing have gone worse many times over.
I’ve liked living in Delhi recently, much less congested than Bengaluru that gnaws on my soul with its insane traffic. The only reasonable way to live in India is to live away from the main streets, ideally in a gated community which is a bikeable distance from work.
> In 2019, Indonesia said it will be moving its capital to Nusantara, a new city which is under construction.
Because Jakarta is literally sinking into the ocean. It also has a terrible flood problem which is only going to get worse. Doesn’t bode well for the population.
I'm always surprised how big the population of Indonesia is yet it seems culturally underrepresented in the world compared to a lot of smaller countries
Almost 300 million people but it rarely comes up in the news or pop media
They don’t have a huge culture industry yet (or at least, not one that appeals to English-speaking audiences), but they’ve become a lot more prominent on the internet in the last 5 years due to better infrastructure and integration into various English speaking social networks (via both social media and people travelling in and out of Indonesia).
It’s a Muslim majority country and very conservative, so a lot of the themes you’d find in American film, music, and literature wouldn’t make much sense there, and the media that has commercial potential outside of Indonesia is generally coming from wealthy households that don’t have much to do with how the average Indonesian really lives (Nicole Zefanya being the example that comes to mind).
Indonesians (at least the ones who speak English) are quite similar to Latinos in that they have a desire to be accepted into the English-speaking world not only personally but culturally. This can manifest in attempts to whitewash oneself to fit in, adopting whatever seems to be popular on English-speaking social media, leading to comparatively old trends propagating in these countries.
You saw the same thing with the Chinese and the Koreans back in the 2000s and both developed their own internationally-competitive culture industries, but those were both secular countries already well-integrated into the international system. I wouldn’t expect to see anything quite like that in Indonesia until at least 2030, when more of the digital natives come of age.
> both developed their own internationally-competitive culture industries
Korea definitely, but China? Seems like most of China's modern cultural export came from Hong Kong, and even that has stopped. Conventional wisdom is that the Three Body Problem couldn't be published today.
I'm curious what (homegrown) Chinese cultural products are internationally competitive today. China seems to be punching far below their weight, considering their population and their economic position.
Mainland China is coming the other side through anime.
Productions like "The Legend of Hei" are of truly high quality and it's getting a decent reception in Japan for instance (not breaking the box office, but the fact it's there and talked about so no positively is already something)
> Seems like most of China's modern cultural export came from Hong Kong, and even that has stopped.
You’re probably right. I’m just saying that 20 years ago the label of being “Made in China” meant something was cheap and bad. The business culture still isn’t great from what I hear but people are more comfortable than ever buying Chinese products and I’ve been hearing that more exchange students have been going to China to study.
The impression I had of China’s cultural exports was mostly from having seen more Chinese expatriates and immigrants openly engaging with e.g. Chinese music and fashion influencers. This wasn’t particularly common 20 years ago; I started noticing it around 2019.
The other thing I should note is that when I said internationally competitive I primarily meant outside of the Anglosphere. K-dramas are an interesting one because you can find women (it’s almost always women) of all ages from all over the world who watch them. Korean media is not unheard of in the Anglosphere but it is not nearly as popular as it is outside of the Anglosphere.
It’s possible China doesn’t have anything like this yet, and maybe it never will due to being comparatively censorious, but my perception is that sentiment towards China has improved quite a bit outside of the Anglosphere. I haven’t done reading on that; it’s just a hunch.
Xanxia and Wuxia
As far as I can tell, that export mostly came out of Hong Kong and has mostly stopped.
Most of my contact with it has been via TV shows and English/Korean writers
Feels like in the West the only Indonesian movie that got popular is The Raid, which had a Welsh director anyway. And, uh, The Act of Killing which was also made by a Brit.
For anyone else who enjoyed The Raid, the sub-genre of graphic and brutally violent Indonesian action movies is a gem.
The Raid 2; The Night Comes For Us; The Shadow Strays....those should get anyone started going down the rabbit hole.
They're #4 by population, and the world's most populous Muslim country, but are also only a quarter century removed from a corrupt authoritarian regime.
They have very little in the way of exported cultural products ("The Raid" films?), are much worse in sports than would be expected based on population, spend relatively little on their military and don't do much in the way of regional power projection, and are growing economically but not remarkably, so there just aren't that many avenues for them to make international news.
The only time I see Indonesia in the news is when some unfortunate soul gets swallowed by a giant snake:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/python-kills-woman-swallowed-in...
Many such cases.
The island of Bali has outsized impact from all the tourism.
I always thought it was interesting that, I guess due to Arab racism, it's also not very represented in the community of Islam.
Like, Indonesia (and together with Malaysia) makes up a really significant portion of all muslims. As an outsider it still seems like there isn't much cultural overlap- which seems like, even if Indonesian culture wouldn't reach Europe or the USA, at least it would reach to the middle east / north africa because of the the religious link.
I could have drawn some parallels between Catholics and South America, but there's already two Popes that have Latin American roots.
At least in the two holy cities itself, Indonesia has quite significant pull. Because our pilgrims heavily outnumber lots of other nations. To the point where sellers around the city usually knows a least a word or two of Indonesian.
I also did a double take when I learned that they were Muslim-majority too. It flies in the face of a lot of assumptions.
Which assumptions are those?
Mostly just that it's easy for an American (or at least, myself circa several years ago) to assume that the overwhelmingly vast majority of Muslims live in middle eastern countries, and when I first learned that Indonesia was the world's largest Muslim majority country it proved that mental heuristic to be entirely inaccurate.
I suppose it shouldn't be too surprising though, I mean Christianity sure as hell got around too.
> Mostly just that it's easy for an American (or at least, myself circa several years ago) to assume that the overwhelmingly vast majority of Muslims live in middle eastern countries, and when I first learned that Indonesia was the world's largest Muslim majority country it proved that mental heuristic to be entirely inaccurate.
I live in Australia, and when I was growing up I thought the same, even though Indonesia are a very close neighbour of ours. Indonesia is featured quite a bit in our local news these days, and that together with lots of Aussie tourists in Indonesia, plus lots of Indonesian students studying here, has made us a little more knowledgeable about our neighbours.
Also, the Indonesia that most Australians only ever visit is Bali, which is mostly Hindu.
The top five countries in the world by Muslim population are not in the Middle East/North Africa region: Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria.
That's so weird. What do they teach in American schools? Apparently not even basic geography? The fact that Indonesia was Muslim is something I learned very early on - certainly before high school.
> What do they teach in American schools? Apparently not even basic geography?
This doesn’t fall under the category of basic geography. I can guarantee you that the majority of people you attended school with would not be able to locate Indonesia on a map, much less tell you about the religions practiced there.
TBH, without going into overmuch detail, I wouldn't generalize from my educational experience to the American educational system as a whole. I think it was better in a lot of ways, and worse in a few ways, than what most people would have received, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were some particular holes in my knowledge due to taking part in multiple curricula from different institutions.
He’s being obtuse, it isn’t common knowledge at all.
Now figure out how Christianity got around in SEA region.
[dead]
India (also not Middle Eastern) has the largest population of Muslim people, but it is not 'majority Muslim'.
Only 20% of the Muslims in the world live in the Middle East.
Yeah if i only went by TV news i'd come to the same general conclusion. And if i narrowed it down to just Fox i'd probably think it was the UK.
It seems things are improving for Christians in Indonesia in 2025 - or is the data missing?
https://www.opendoors.org/en-US/persecution/countries/
I would treat these rankings with suspicion.
I checked them for a few nations where I had solid on-the-ground knowledge, and the ranks and full-profile descriptions are straight up false. Usually propaganda involves lying by omission or hyperbole. In this case, it is just wrong.
There no middle-eastern countries among the top 5 muslim countries by population.
It goes: Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh & Nigeria, in that order.
It is a little bit wild that 3/5 all came from the same country. Without the partition of ‘47 - India would have by far the largest group of about 600M a full a third of the global Muslims and also at the same time be only a minority in that hypothetical country with 1.1B Hindus
Ask someone in the West what the largest muslim country is.
You must not have known about Malaysia then either?
Correct, it was around the time I learned how big Islam was in certain parts of Southeast Asia in general. It's just massively under-represented in news and popular culture and my historical/geographic education never really went into much detail on Asia.
What sorts of assumptions?
Check out the predominant races there, you’ve probably never heard of them!
Why? It's a big religion in the world and I heard it grows at 30% per year
How much of that is just because people aren't allowed to leave the religion though? My whole family would be considered Catholic if we still had those sorts of old thinking rules that Islam still has. Instead we have lots of people becoming Catholic and lots leaving balancing out.
typo? Rounding it up to 2 billion, 30% means 600 million per year
Maybe. Could be somebody was repeating some sort of misinformation. Quick check says more like 20% in 10 years.
Yeah and... articles like these are reminders that cultural representation as a concept in general is kind of broken. There's no website which topic distribution follows actual distribution of population of the world[1].
1: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_per...
I think it's just because there aren't large immigrant communities in Western countries besides Australia and the Netherlands.
I feel the same way about China tbh
Like how many of you can name a Chinese movie or pop star or TV show?
I dunno, I would think AT LEAST Jackie Chan is a household name due to the Rush Hour movies, and for anyone who grew up watching Hong Kong action flicks, they'd probably also know Jet Li at least, and Donnie Yen, Michelle Yeoh, and maybe Bolo Yeung and Sammo Hung too.
Don't forget Bruce Lee, Jet Li, Chow Yun-fat, Maggie Cheung, Leslie Cheung, Zhang Ziyi, Michelle Yeoh, Donnie Yen, Wu Jing, Michelle Yeoh, Simu Liu, Donnie Yen, Jason Tobin, Olivia Cheng, Dianne Doan,
Lucy Liu isn't famous in China but she is in the US.
Not Chinese but recognizable because of HBO's The Warrior: Andrew Koji, Hoon Lee, Joe Taslim
(I cheated, my parents are from Hong Kong.)
Not sure if I'm being whooshed here, but a large chunk of those people are not from China.
Michelle Yeoh is Malaysian
Bruce Lee is American, baby
A lot of the others are Hong Kong celebrities, from before Hong Kong was returned to China
(Probably should've specified Chinese as people from China, specifically the mainland)
Yeah, Bruce Lee was born in San Francisco and had a US passport, but he grew up in Hong Kong. Point is, Chinese diaspora exists and can be seen for those who want to look. Projecting a viewpoint that no one knows about China or Chinese people because you don't want to think they do, so you feel slighted, and can then rage against that; it just seems kind of hollow to me.
I was hoping to talk more about (Mainland) China being uniquely bad at exporting pop culture, especially when compared to the success of Hong Kong, and to a lesser extent, Taiwanese pop culture.
The fact that nearly all celebs you mentioned were famous from HK film seems to at least confirm that.
I was going off of
> Like how many of you can name a Chinese movie or pop star or TV show?
and wanted to say that Chinese people exist to westerners. You're totally right that China specifically doesn't export well for whatever reason.
Big Fish & Begonia was a good film that got a wide release in the west. Flavors of Youth is on netflix. Ne Zha was too I think. In animation at least they do better than a lot of countries. Mojin: The Lost Legend is the only live action movie I can remember seeing off the top of my head though.
The only ones I can name are from Hong Kong before the handover, off the top of my head: Wong Kar-wei, Jackie Chan, John Woo, Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung.
Authoritarian cultures aren’t known for freedom of expression so it makes sense there’s little cultural export. The same thing applies to Islamic countries, the iconoclastic bent kinda puts a damper on visual art.
The west deliberately blocks Chinese media.
In asia, China's culture is far more prevalent and gaining quickly.
What Chinese media is blocked in the west? First time I’m hearing of this
Japan and Korea, yes. China, not really.
Unless you want to include Hong Kong, but even then
Random Chinese culture routinely comes up on my IG reel.
Opression makes it much harder to export culture. See also China.
For Europeans wanting a megacity experience within weekend jaunt range, Cairo can be kind of a mad experience, with things like the Garbage City https://www.adventuresnsunsets.com/cairo-garbage-city/ and cave church https://www.egypttoursportal.com/en-gb/blog/egypt-attraction... plus the usual pyramids etc. Very cheap Ubers like $8/hr.
Try not to be a woman
Same with India. I heard its absolutely terrible there for small groups of women and impossible for solo travelling women. The advice I've heard that can help (a little) is wearing fake wedding ring and telling people that you're married.
Family went together. Mum, dad, and us two boys. ‘07 or so. Very friendly people. But armed soldiers everywhere. Perhaps have changed since then.
Well, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_Crisis_(2011%E2%80%93... definitely did change some things around. I currently would not recommend visiting Egypt, when there are so many safer and more pleasant options available.
What's the problem?
We were in a group with women but solo might be hard work.
Or gay
Perhaps Istanbul would be more accessible (and safe) for Europeans in terms of megacity experience?
I always find discussion of the world biggest city a bit of a pointless exercise considering it’s entirely dependent on how administrative lines are drawn.
Highly fragmented metro areas are regarded as smaller than consolidated metro areas, whereas they might be the same size overall.
These rankings always consider city to be a contiguous metro area, regardless of how internal lines are drawn. Otherwise most of them wouldn't show up on the list at all. "Los Angeles" for example has close to 200 indiviudal cities.
That is true for this report, based on the methodology
https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.deve...
However, instead of an arbitrary administrative definition, they used an arbitrary cutoff for population density.
Thus it still comes down to a subjective drawing of lines around the city.
Demographics and geography approaches this through the notion of "metropolitan statistical area" (MSA) in the US, or equivalent concepts elsewhere. An MSA is defined as a "geographical region with a relatively high population density at its core and close economic ties throughout the region".
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area>
Other rough equivalents are metropolitan areas (UK), census metropolitan areas (Canada), functional urban areas (FUA) (EU), urban agglomerations (India). All of these use functional and behavioural characteristics to get around simple boundary-demarkation. Urbanisations may even span national borders, as with the greater Basel region, Lake Constance, or Strasbourg-Ortenau.
and Los Angeles City would still be on the list
Los Angeles city has 3.8 million people so no, it is nowhere close to a megacity.
Being a large city should no longer be seen as a positive attribute. It just looks like a bigger wound in the middle of a forest and natural terrain. Packing millions of people into a vast paved area does no good. It socks all life from country due to concentration of work and services.
Early human settlements had an objective of collective strength against the predators, invaders and shared help for all problem. Cities no longer have these goals or characteristics. They exist only due to a vicious cycle of jobs and worker availability which propel each other because of each other.
Dense cities use up a lot less resources and land than the same number of people spread out in smaller cities or suburbs.
There's probably a point where that stops scaling. Is there any proof a city of 40 million uses less resources per capita than a city of 1 million? 40 cities of 1 million seems preferable because then you can actually get outside the city once in a while without it being 2+ hours of travel.
It is unclear what leaving the city quickly has to do scaling or resources per capita. You seem to value this; most big city dwellers do not.
I don’t understand the point of concentrating everything in a megacity. Take New York as an example: the cost of living is through the roof, while the quality of life is often the opposite. Corporations should stop renting offices in the most expensive areas of the country and instead prioritize locations where housing is affordable and people don’t have to spend more than 10 minutes commuting to work. The state should de-prioritize NYC and encourage companies to invest in smaller cities. This would bring jobs to those areas, reduce pressure on NYC, and support broader infrastructure development. Apply that approach across the country, and suddenly the entire nation can function more efficiently instead of relying on a few overloaded hubs.
There's a whole subfield of economics that studies clustering in cities ("agglomeration"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration There are lots of benefits.
Also, my own take is that the high rent in NYC is sort of proof that the quality of life is high. Or at least, NYC is desirable. People are willing to pay a premium to live there, which is a strong signal of their preference.
I think it's a situation akin to HOAs where there are absolutely people who prefer being in an HOA but it has this feedback loop which results in significantly more people being in an HOA than would prefer to be just because there are limited options and undoing an HOA is higher friction than new construction including one.
On one hand this is still preference. They pick to be in a city over the other options available. On the other hand the other options aren't available because enough people are already interested in centralizing life choice options into a city and so it just drives that feedback loop over and over as more people choose where the option of the day is rather than what they'd like. The only thing holding this loop back from runaway is large cities eventually seem to have population growth fall behind cost of living growth and that stops the runaway for the particular city.
Perhaps more simply: the immediate and big picture preference often don't align and this misalignment further drives a larger gap in those two preferences over time until the cost to scale the city finally becomes too high.
> Corporations should stop renting offices in the most expensive areas of the country and instead prioritize locations where housing is affordable and people don’t have to spend more than 10 minutes commuting to work.
What's the benefit to the corporation to do that? They move to a more affordable area, which corresponds to less concentrated, which corresponds to fewer workforce available, especially if the goal is to spend 10 minutes commuting, as you state.
Nobody's forcing anyone to live in a city, they want to because the jobs and culture and opportunities are there. And companies want to be there because that's where the workers are. It's a feedback loop, I guess cost is the main moderator. There is an argument for decentralizing a little but surely it's the governments job to incentivize that.
There are well known netowrk effects, that happen when economists study cities. You can just have each individual bank pick some random small town and set up an office there.
That said, I do agree that some amount of distribution of infrastructure spending makes a lot of sense. But even if you did that, New York itself could raise enough taxes to make its own infrastructure without having to tax the rest of the nation.
But I would say the US has done this reasonably well, NY is nowhere as dominatie any many other places. You have Boston with universities and medical, Valley, LA areospace/media, DC government and so on and so on.
But economics is pretty clear, hubs are good, getting a place with lots of experts togheter improves efficency for everybody. And getting enough people together that proper infrastructure pays for itself is also good.
Density has some obvious advantages. It also has a bunch of disadvantages. The millions of people living there seem to think it's worth the tradeoff, at least to the point of having enough inertia not to move elsewhere.
Article is a paywalled summary of the UN press release: https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2025/11/press...
And the full report as PDF: https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.deve...
> The U.N.'s report highlighted what areas are expected to be the next megacities and surpass the 10 million mark, including:
> [...]
> - Hajipur, India.
Estimated population of Hajipur in 2025 is 213k people. Not sure why it's on the list. Throws the rest of the article into question for me.
I have sent an email to the contacts listed in the press release regarding this. Let's see what they say.
I believe you are correct. They have made a mistake in the report. Hajipur is a small town near Patna, Bihar which is much bigger than it is.
Canada has less people, even with a 10% increase in the last 4 years through imigration, some of which is from Indonesea presumably including a significant number from Jakarta, where the civil infrastructure must be epic
The West just refuses to build anything. Whereas in Asia its not uncommon to build entire cites from scratch.
I don't even know what it would it even look like to "build a city" from scratch in the US. who does the building and puts together the central plan?
does the government build a bunch of public housing and a publicly owned commercial district? i guess they kind of have experience doing this with military bases, but at some point you need to encourage a bunch of private development and ownership, right?
or would the government just incentivize private developers to start building in the middle of nowhere and hope that a city arises as an emergent phenomenon? that approach seems like it would be rife with abuse and waste.
seems like this would be a lot easier to do with an authoritarian regime that could just decree "we're building a city here. the following industries will move their headquarters"
It's not particularly difficult to start a new city.
The government simply asks large companies to open offices/factories in the new city in exchange for tax breaks/subsidies. Or give funding to a university to open a satellite campus. All you need is a promise for like 20k people to initially move. Then the government builds roads and utility networks. Private developers will also build housing if given the right financial incentive.
The 20k people will automatically lead to the same number moving in due to cheap housing, or for creating every day businesses, hospitals, schools etc. Within a couple of years you can setup up a feedback loop where the population is growing at 5-10% every year. There is no need to force anyone to do anything. Financial incentives are enough.
Starting a city is easy, growing it into a real city is the hard part. If you look at the fastest growing cities of the last decades, they had economic freedom or booming industries, nothing that requires authoritarianism.
The western approach would almost certainly be a public-private partnership; we do that with all meaningful infra projects, where multiple industry consortia put together proposals and then one is selected to move forward. For example, for the ION Light Rail in Waterloo Region (~$1B), the winning consortium was composed of engineering and construction firms/consultants, a operations company that would run the system, plus a financier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GrandLinq
That said, for a project the scale of building a city, I can imagine it might actually be faster and more efficient for the government to just plan and build everything itself and then sell it off to private entities later.
Honestly, if you build transit, developers will build.
I wouldn't call it "building a city", but if you look at Northern Virginia today, you'll find that vertical districts are popping up along the Silver Line metro that now extends past Dulles airport.
At the end of the metro, there is literally a "town center" residential area on one side with buildings around 5 stories tall. On the other side of the tracks is literally fields, but the roads have been laid out like Sim City with empty plots and developers are now beginning to construct buildings starting from the outside perimeter first, working their way toward the metro station.
Throughout the DC suburbs, you will find densely populated areas with relatively tall vertical buildings (15-20 stories) that simply were not there 20 years ago. Reston is a good example. I've watched 4-6 buildings (over 10 stories) get built in Reston alone. They mostly started when the the metro line was finished.
tysons is a good example as well. I always think the development of the DC metro is some of the most impressive in the sense of 'cities' popping up along the train lines.
I haven't travelled the entire country but I've never seen anything quite like Silver Spring, Bethesda, or as you say, Reston. Super interesting.
If I had Musk or Bezos levels of wealth my middle-age retirement project would be buying a million acres somewhere and playing real life SimCity.
City of Irvine corp and California Forever corp are two examples. But billionaires in the US are constrained by everyone else. The power of democracy is strength in numbers and we have them now though we didn’t fifty years ago.
Quick note that several cities were built from scratch in the UK in the 20th century. E.g. Milton Keynes. (City using the American definition, not the cathedral thing).
Why spend billions building when you can just keep raising rents on existing infrastructure?
Canada has been building housing at a much higher rate than the US in the last 2 decades. Not enough, but more.
They have been underbuilding compared to their population trends as we see their prices continue to skyrocket
Down substantially from the peak in 2022. And that's nominal prices. Adjusting for inflation will show that real prices are lower now than they were in 2017.
https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/average-house-prices
Hrmm. What data source can I see to demonstrate this? I looked at a chart I have referenced before that shows nationwide USA housing starts over the last 20 years ranging from 2 to 8 per 1000 people. Then I searched for one for Canada and found one suggesting 1-2 per 1000 since 2005. And, evidently, the situation in Canada as developed/deteriorated to the extent there's a whole subreddit for the canadian housing crisis?
Looks to be averaging around 250,000 per year over the last decade. That'd be over 12 per 1000. https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/housing-starts
Yes so it looks like the Reddit people are committing major chart-crimes, showing quarterly data as such, rather than annualized rates, and not mentioning it. It looks like this is a source of truth: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=341001...
I have watched reddit become useless for any kind of nuanced debate over the last 5 years. It's rather sad to me, because once upon a time I learned a lot about others views - especially ones I disagree with.
Even HN is much less welcoming of the "I think I agree with you, but walk me through your thinking" replies than it used to be.
I presume this is reflective of a few broader societal trends, and it's.. not good.
Yes, it's easy to build entire cities from scratch in a centrally managed society, such as a dictatorship or communist nations.
It's also easy to have cities grow fast, if you're primarily a rural/agrarian nation, and suddenly have a transition to become urban. This was (for example) Canada in the 1900s. Mostly rural, yet now it's mostly urban.
Canada saw fast growth of cities back then.
It's maintaining large cities once the fast growth is over, that is a different story. How will, for example, China look in 50+ years? 100+ years? When all its newly built mega-city projects are crumbling.
> Canada saw fast growth of cities back then.
It still does—Vancouver and Calgary have both almost doubled in population over the past 30 years [0] [1].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Vancouver#Demographics
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Calgary#Civic_...
> Yes, it's easy to build entire cities from scratch in a centrally managed society, such as a dictatorship or communist nations.
I would like to pushback on this assumption. I made that point because you mentioned Canada and its rapid immigration rise in the last 5 years. Western countries, namely Canada can do a lot to build more to ease the pressures on its housing demand.
Vast amounts of land is available to build amazing cities. There are specialist architect firms that can plan the most beautiful, walkable, livable, affordable cities very close to major hubs and metros currently.
In the 50s/60s/70s these very Western countries, spent a lot and built all kinds of infrastructure which led to meaningful increases in quality of life and perhaps created the most prosperous generation in these countries.
Even now when any government in the West wants to really do something, they don't really care about anything and it gets done, the money magically appears, the votes are found no matter how unpopular it may be. But for some reason building infrastructure, housing, mass transit has been completely forgotten.
The real bottlenecks are governance, bureaucracy, and NIMBYism. Like a few comments above pointed out, its keeping boomers happy with their high property values at the expense of the young.
Some things just don't make sense to me as an outsider. A few examples I read recently.
[1] It will take three decades to turn an 18-mile stretch of the A66 road in northern England into a dual carriageway. [2] It will take 20+ years just to add another runway at Heathrow London and cost $64 Billion Dollars! [3] While Dubai is building a brand new whole airport for $35 Billion, I think the worlds largest when its finished.
Nearly all of the political problems in Canada, UK, Australia and much of the US (NYC,SF, etc.) will completely go away if they had the "Build, Baby Build" attitude. Just build housing like there is no tomorrow.
There is no such thing as an "oversupply" of a basic human need, livable shelter.
I can assure you, knowing how Asian countries like China approach governance, Chinese cities will have no major issues in 50+ years. Any outstanding issues will will resolved well before they start to become a problem with various 5-10 year plans. The same for Malaysia, Singapore etc.
[1] https://archive.md/PcOZV
[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-chooses-heathrow-airport...
[3] https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/4/29/dubais-ruler-ann...
At no point did I mention the current immigration rates in Canada, over the last five years. Instead, I mentioned historic growth, which is not necessarily immigration, going back 100 plus years.
In the early 1900s, on farms, Canadian families were much, much larger than they are now. Immigration was certainly a thing, and contributed to those numbers, but most of that growth was through simple population growth domestically.
Speaking to the development of cities in the past, that development was within certain strictures and guidelines, but entirely handled by the private sector.
No state-owned companies were developing houses. There were very, very rare exceptions where during situations like the end of World War II, Canada paid for base housing for its soldiers returning from war. Yet these were extraordinary circumstances. This was during the tail end of a wartime economy, and part of the transition to a peacetime economy. This was not, and is not the normal way that Canada operates as a democracy. Not only was it to provide housing for all of the returning soldiers as they slowly left other countries that they were stationed in, it was also to provide jobs for people leaving factories that were producing munitions and other instruments of war.
Canada managed this transition exceptionally well, primarily due to projects just like this.
The point in all of this is that growth was driven organically by people simply moving to the cities. Again, yes, the cities have a planning department which dictates what may be where, how much residential space can be in a certain area, if there are going to be shops or malls or local shopping locations, where roads are going to be and so on. But that is an overall contributed by the community development plan. Developers have a say. Citizens have a say. This is called democracy.
Do not confuse nimbyism, which is primarily an American problem, with issues that have to do with building in Canada.
Again, I did not say there are no issues, I said NIMBYism is primarily in the US.
The real problem in Canada, and this is a solid show of how democracy works, is that people are concerned about things like the environment.
It's a little difficult to stomach that the very same people that will scream their heads off if environmental issues are not handled correctly, then get upset that building a house requires environmental assessments of land, environmental assessments of how population density will affect the land, insistence is that developers build parks, paths and green spaces.
When you hear the astronomical cost of building a house, when you hear the cost of red tape, what's being left out is that parts of the red tape are commitments to build things like parks, green spaces, paths, places for people to bike and walk without getting hit by cars.
All of these things add cost to the price of a house. They also add cost because developers do not follow plans, but constantly want to renegotiate over and over, and this indeed stretches out the time to build an entire subdivision.
Developers are also on hook for certain things, if they're building an entire subdivision. Roads, traffic lights, all sorts of things like this, including making sure that there's space for a local grocery store, so you don't have to drive or walk endless miles. Even things like the sidewalks when you're building a whole subdivision.
As a democracy in Canada, we like this. We prefer this. We prefer that you can get around with a car, but also you can get to your local grocery store if you want to just walk or take a bus a short distance.
If you are a person buying a single lot and wanting to build on that lot, things are not anywhere near as complex or onerous.
Yes, there are still environmental assessments. But who wants those environmental assessments? That's right, everyone, including the person buying the house, unless, of course, it might mean that they don't have a house quite as cheaply. Then, suddenly, they aren't environmentalists.
As someone who has bought land, that was pretty much the largest block on building. When it came to digging a well, when it came to building the house, when it came to the building plan that I submitted to my local municipality? All of that passed with flying colors unless of course I was doing something weird, such as building too close to the edge of the property or something else that was covered by simple, easy to understand bylaws.
I certainly support environmental assessments, but again I reiterate for a single person building a house they are typically not a problem.
There are certain segments of any society which believe that there should be no government involvement, in almost any portion of a society. These people are too far on one side, just as communism or dictatorships are too far on the other side. As with almost anything, moderation is key.
In Canada, we try to enable free enterprise. We try to keep red tape and other such issues as easy to bypass, and easy to work with as possible, while simultaneously ensuring that there is some degree of central planning and management that also has democratic citizen input.
Yet you will constantly see people of that belief trying to claim that all the issues with building houses have to do with some amount of red tape. Of NIMBYism. Yet when I look in my local community, I see people of all ages. I don't see the disparaging term that you used, boomers, causing a problem. There are people young, there are old people, there are people in their 30s, all owning houses.
Most people in Canada do not buy houses until their 30s or 40s. You may think this is a strange claim, but who wants to buy a house when they're in university? Who wants to buy a house on the first couple of years of their first job? Who wants to buy a house before they're even married? It doesn't make sense. It's not logical.
While I am an older person, I'm certainly not a boomer, as you call it, yet at the same time I did not buy a house until I was in my late 30s.
In Canada, housing pricing is where it is because of two primary reasons. The first is foreign investment. It's been so bad that in the past, that we have actually had motorandums on people that are not Canadian citizens buying houses. We have put, for example, in cities like Vancouver, taxes on empty houses because so many people from China were buying houses as investment structures.
The second reason is the lowest rate of inflation for the longest period of time, for decades.
Prior to the last few years, interest rates have been lower than they have ever been, and for a period of time longer than they had ever been.
This made housing cheaper than it has ever been before. Cheaper because when the low interest rates appeared, what the cost of a house is, is set by something called the market. Pricing is market derived. Pricing is predicated upon by what people will pay. So when interest rates drop dramatically from an amount of say 10 or 12% down to 0 or 1 or 2% over a period of about 5 or 6 years, suddenly housing is immensely more attractive. If you go to any mortgage calculator and use Canadian mortgage calculators, you can see the moving of interest rate from 1 or 2% at the bank, which I have had personally, up to say 11 or 12%, will literally more than double your monthly payment.
This means that if this condition exists for a long period of time, say almost 20 years like it did in Canada, slowly the price of houses will increase because people can afford more. This is how markets work. If people can afford more for housing then housing prices will go up just like any other type of free market competitive economy.
You can see this happening on any graph with the average price of housing compared to the price of inflation and you can see over 20 years the pricing of Canadian houses going up more than the rate of inflation and this is primarily why. Conjoin that with the massive speculation in the Canadian market and the pricing increases more.
If you take a house at $200,000 at 12% interest and you take a house at $400,000 at 2% interest, you will pay the same monthly payment approximately.
Canadian housing was quite affordable until interest rates went up. And slowly, as interest rates are higher, the price of Canadian housing cooled off and had started to come down a little bit, but now once again rates are dropping.
There are always blips in the marketplace. There are always shifts and changes. I have personally been through three separate recession events including the 2008 recession event, and all of these situations cause hardship for people first entering the housing market.
But this will pass. And it will pass and be solved. It won't be solved by turning to communism, to dictatorships. It won't be solved by getting rid of environmentalism or getting rid of planned communities.
It will be solved over a period of a few years as the market adjusts, and people can once again afford housing.
It will do so because the very people making the decisions, are not demonic old people. People have children. They have grandchildren. They want the best for their children and grandchildren. They want the best for their community.
You can be any age and be on the town council. You can be any age and be an MP.
Canada has had MPs who are under 20 in the last decade. Canada has had many MPs that are in their 30s.
There is no conspiracy. There is no attempt to stop young people from getting houses. There is no attempt to stop there from being a higher density housing in communities. We have plenty of land in Canada. We have plenty of space in Canada.
This lengthy response was engendered by the fact that you quite literally put words in my mouth. It was also engendered by the fact that people seem to think, even in Canada, that problems existing in Silicon Valley or in high-density US cities are the same problems that exist in Canada. They aren't. They are not the same problems. They are not caused by the same problems. It is not like you can copy and paste issues from American megacities into Canadian, much smaller cities.
The best way to fix some of the problems in California is to enforce open bidding on houses. When you do that, you reduce the uncertainty in bids, you reduce market pressures to increase the price of housing.
> Yes, it's easy to build entire cities from scratch in a centrally managed society, such as a dictatorship or communist nations.
This is generally true, but Indonesia is neither
The civil infrastructure in Jakarta is horrible, especially compared to other Asian cities.
Been going there since mid 90s, not that often recently. Seen it change and yet stay the same.. Not cheap anymore but ofc not comparing to Singapore.
Issue is getting around.. For a city of that size + national capital, public transport options very limited. More like HCM or PP than Bangkok or KL.
Comparisons to Thailand inappropriate cos almost no pub culture and "entertainment". Even top end hotel bar like Raffles had near zero choice for wine etc. And lots more expensive.
Wish them well though.. Nicest people, nice memories.
Here's a better link, though maybe it's too late:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-25/jakarta-overtakes-tok...
It was posted to HN recently (not by me):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46042447
Were they going to "move" Jakarta to a new location, because of climate change?
I think the title should more accurately state "most populous" because Greater Tokyo is still significantly larger in the built up land area around the Tokyo Metropolis (Almost 2x Jakarta)
How is "city" defined, for the purposes of this metric? Is it the administrative boundaries of Jakarta according to Indonesian law? The catchment area where a large fraction of people commute to the city center? Something else?
I was wondering the same. I guess it comes from this "UN figure":
> The UN figures include a mixture of city proper, metropolitan area, and urban area.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities
I haven't looked into the details of that definition.
But there is a somewhat standard definition to "metropolitan area" derived from something like "area where there is at least X per square km"
So it's not related a somewhat random definition of a "city" and its borders.
If you find a better link for the methodology please let me know.
But simplified it's maybe exactly this from the UN reports glossary:
> Cities: According to the Degree of Urbanization methodology, contiguous geographic areas with a high population density (at least 1,500 people per km2) and a total population of at least 50,000 inhabitants.
https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.deve...
If anyone is looking for a good movie to get a sense of what Jakarta is like, highly recommend "The Year of Living Dangerously" with Mel Gibson/Sigourney Weaver
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086617/
Maybe 50 years ago, and with Manila standing in for Jakarta.
Can't speak for the accuracy at the time but great film!
Behind a paywall.
https://archive.ph/qoimk
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Previous submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46038863
Who submitted that?
I did
I know!!! By this time I should realize there's no place for irony...
doener had submitted it previously.
See my comment just above yours.
No, but, doener submitted it.