Indonesia has been transformed by urbanization. As a new World Bank report titled Time to ACT: Realizing Indonesia’s Urban Potential shows, when its independence was proclaimed in 1945, only one in eight Indonesians lived in towns and cities, and the country’s entire urban population stood at about 8.6 million, roughly that of London today. By contrast, today about 151 million, or 56% of Indonesians live in urban areas, roughly 18 times the population of London.

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