Residents often refer to Jakarta as 'a big village'. After all these years, it actually still is, though in the past decades it has been given a modern twist. This comes in the form of hi-tech office buildings, star-rated hotels, luxurious aparments, super-malls and sophisticated art galleries, to name just a few.
Perhaps the best way to describe Jakarta is to call it a developed village struggling to become a modern city. As such, it can be an interesting and rewarding experience to witness the city transform itself and rise to a new and higher level.
If succeeding governors have had limited success in coping with the city's problems, especially when it comes to traffic jams and floods, it is more due to its magnitude rather than their competence.
To be sure, Jakarta possesses an air of seediness that is 
inevitable in most large cities, most of which find its niche in downtown area. Slum dwellings and trash in the wrong places continue to be the city's eyesores, with very little being done to deal with it. For all its modern pretenses, Jakarta has yet to succeed in getting rid of its Third World label.
Jakarta is now almost five centuries old but still growing (painfully) while modernizing itself. It is certainly not one of the best places in the world, but ask any Jakarta true believer if he or she would like to live elsewhere, you can be sure the reply would be an emphatic no.
Jakarta, warts and all, does have its charms not found elsewhere.
