In an effort to prevent other major Indonesian cities from succumbing to the tangle of infrastructure and social ills that afflicts the capital, the government on Wednesday announced it would soon be designating seven other growing urban areas as metropolises.

The move would grant the government the legal right to compel the cities, along with their surrounding municipalities, to implement urban planning, economic and social welfare programs geared toward making them cleaner, safer and more efficient.

“In two weeks we will finish drafting the spatial planning for three of them: Medan, Denpasar and Makassar,” Imam Santoso Ernawi, spatial planning directorate general of the Public Works Ministry, said on Wednesday.

“The other four cities — Semarang, Surabaya, Bandung and Banjarmasin — are also in the process,” he said.

All of the cities, save Denpasar, have populations exceeding a million residents. Surabaya, the nation’s second-largest city by population, has about 2.7 million inhabitants.

Imam said that after the cities were declared metropolises, their budgets would be prepared by the central and regional governments. He added that each urban hub would also be evaluated annually to ensure development was progressing smoothly.

“We also need to pay attention to the impact those cities have on their surrounding regions,” he said.

Indonesia to Name Bali Capital a Metropolis | The Jakarta Globe