Assessing urban agriculture’s development in Central Jakarta

In Central Jakarta, grassroots movements and government institutions have implemented several households and community-scale urban agriculture (UA) initiatives to improve urban food security. However, there is a gap between the bottom-up initiative and formal support from policy planners. This study proposes system dynamics modeling as a viable approach to assess food production’s diverse reality in an urban context. We seek to analyze UA’s contribution to sustainable urban development in Central Jakarta through UA modeling. We developed our model’s structures from our UA practice findings that we gathered from questionnaires, focus group discussions, and field observations. From therein, area of productive green open space, social cohesion from social interactions from farming activities, and potential savings from growing foods were identified as main driving factors of the model, whereas land limitation was identified as a limiting factor. An intervention scenario was simulated to achieve Jakarta’s 2018-2030 UA roadmap target for installing productive green space in all child-friendly integrated green public space. Limitations of the models were acknowledged, and suggestions for model development were discussed.