Urban Leadership and Digital Resilience: The Experience of Megacity Jakarta by Dr Anies Baswedan

Leading a megacity through a crisis is one of the most challenging tasks for every urban leader. Jakarta, like almost every megacity in the world, encountered a major crisis during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-2021 when the city’s resilience was being tested. However, what sets Jakarta apart is how the city and its leadership handled the crisis, enabling them to turn a moment of crisis into a moment of opportunity. The Jakarta urban leadership effectively managed the crisis using three principles: transparency, collaboration, and a science-based approach. The capacity for managing the crisis has enhanced Jakarta’s transformability, allowing them to take advantage of the rapid changes during the crisis to accelerate the city transformation, particularly the digital infrastructures. As a result, Jakarta underwent a rapid digital transformation along with institutional transformations of the city during and after the COVID-19 crisis. In this lecture, Dr Anies Baswedan will elaborate on the model of leadership he utilized to guide Jakarta through the crisis and to drive the city’s transformation. He will also show how this model of leadership can be adopted on a larger scale in the country.