With more and more Jakarta residents adopting active lifestyles, the city’s urban landscape must adapt to its citizens’ needs. What’s driven this massive increase, and is Jakarta ready to accommodate this new culture?
Strength in Numbers
In April 2025, the fitness tracking and social networking application, Strava, introduced Bahasa Indonesia as an official language on their platform. The update followed a period of significant growth for the app in Indonesia, recording a tenfold increase in users in the last five years. Women specifically showed a twentyfold increase.
Global 2024 data from the app also showed that 78 per cent of runs in South Jakarta were listed as ‘matched runs’, making it the city with the most group or community runs in the entire world.
Sports tech companies can teach us a lot. Garmin, one of the most popular wearable sports tracking accessories, sheds more light on Indonesia’s fitness trends through their 2024 report. They recorded a 56% increase in HIIT (high intensity interval training), a 42% increase in pilates and 25% increase in strength training from the previous year, marking a wave of higher frequency activity, or indeed new fitness enthusiasts altogether.
But we don’t need statistics to notice the trend, the evidence is all around us, especially in Jakarta, where it seems that everyone has joined a run club, padel club, spin class, pilates centre or, at bare minimum, a gym. The Jakarta International Marathon doubled its participants in just one year, from 15,000 to 30,000 runners (2024 to 2025). Clearly, Jakartans are fully embracing a more active, wellness-leaning lifestyle, but what exactly is fuelling this?
Crowds take to Sudirman on Car Free Day
The Covid Effect
It seems trite to always go back to the pandemic, but it was a significant catalyst in shifting the mindset and behaviour of the population. The increased risk of Covid-related issues from poor overall health must have struck a serious chord, and despite being a generally well-known fact, the pandemic made this reality more real, visceral and immediate, prompting a lifestyle change.
In parallel, those wealthy enough to take advantage of the pandemic’s empty streets took to cycling and running, starting a whole new wave of aspirational desire. As many of us know, Indonesia is afflicted by a cult of personality, and suddenly fitness was cool, the new form of social currency trickling down from the rich and famous. Global trends bolstered this with the rise of sports-related fashion, from athleisure to the latest Hoka and ON shoes, or the coolest sports gear.
But such aspirations, if not put into practice are just pipe dreams. In a 2024 report, OCBC Ventura noted “Indonesians are extremely price sensitive when it comes to paying for tertiary needs, e.g. fitness classes and gym memberships.” What helped to mobilise Indonesians into action was income growth, particularly of the middle class, enabling people to finally ‘buy into’ the lifestyle, from memberships to attire. The same report adds another interesting factor: vanity, finding correlations between gym memberships and cultural importance of physical appearance in different regions – just look at the gym trends in Canggu, Bali, and one will see clear evidence of this.
Jakarta may have its own specific reasons outside of these social drivers, and that has to do with the experience of the city itself. Until recently, Jakarta has never been a city that fosters ‘quality of life’ for its citizens: it’s been built on commerce, the urban buzz, being a political centre and melting pot. Residents complain about the same thing: traffic, work-life balance, that claustrophobic feeling of being constantly indoors, both for work and socially.
Sport has become the cure for this ‘urban malaise’. It’s opened up social opportunities (more on this in the following feature story), allowed people to disconnect and be present, and it’s become a way to actually interact with their city. Cycling down Sudirman on Sunday morning’s car-free day, rooftop HIIT sessions after work, running around Gelora Bung Karno Stadium – finally, a physical connection with one’s environment. These experiences make up part of the ‘je ne sais quoi’ of enjoying life in the city.
The Active City
What urban design features most effectively promote active lifestyles in cities?
Widely-regarded features include pedestrian-friendly infrastructure, comprised of wide, safe and well-connected sidewalks, as well as plazas and car-free spaces. Cycling infrastructure, which isn’t only about protected bike lanes, but also bicycle access integration with public transport. Of course, there’s the need for abundant parks and green spaces.
So how does Jakarta match up to these guidelines? As of 2025, Jakarta’s green space coverage remains very low, at approximately 5.36 percent of the city’s total area (BAPPEDA, 2025). Even then, these spaces are inequitably distributed across the city with South Jakarta enjoying more access with 2,3 percent, with the lowest district being East Jakarta at 0,01 percent. For comparison, Singapore currently provides 40 percent of green space to its citizens.
Indonesia’s Spatial Planning Act actually has a law on Green Open Space (GOS), Law Number 26 of 2007, setting the ideal at 30 percent of a city’s total land area, with 20 percent public space and 10 percent private space. The good news is that Jakarta’s Provincial Government has actually targeted figure this for 2030, with 21 GOS spaces planned to be built in 2025 alone (Berita Jakarta). Adding to this, in May 2025 they also announced plans to add 3,8km of dedicated pedestrian and cycling paths in their ‘Complete Streets’ development programme – this adds to Jakarta’s 11km of protected cycling lanes, much of which was developed during the pandemic after a massive 340% increase in cyclists citywide (ITDP, 2021).
These will be highly consequential for Jakarta’s everyday citizens. Speaking from experience, my own neighbourhood in Jagakarsa benefited from additional parks made during Governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama’s tenure, and I’ve witnessed children, families, groups of women enjoy these spaces to play, organise group yoga and aerobics. It made me think, ‘What were they doing before these spaces existed?’ It’s proof that urban design plays a significant role in shaping behaviour, opening opportunities for citizens to be active and healthy.
This is a sentiment shared by Jakarta’s running and cycling groups, who feel like options are limited when it comes to running or cycling destinations. The majority will congregate at Senayan’s GBK sports area, which is becoming crowded, or wait until Car-Free Day which now hosts up to 1,78 million people every Sunday along Sudirman. At the end of June, Car-Free Night was launched, testing out a Saturday evening free of vehicles starting at 10pm, also along the Sudirman-Thamrin stretch.
The car-free day concept is clearly popular and successful in getting citizens to be active and outdoors, but this brings us back to the issue of equitable distribution. More areas need similar initiatives to improve access for regional citizens and decrease travel time for those already participating.
The Caveat
The elephant in the room is invisible. Whilst Jakarta is gradually developing its outdoor spaces, this positive initiative is somewhat dampened by the city’s poor air quality.
In the first half of 2025, Jakarta’s air quality index (AQI) averaged between 70–80, fluctuating between 50 and 120 (aqi.in). For reference, US-EPA 2016 standards state 0–50 is Good, 51–100 Moderate, 101–150 Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups. This remains similar even on Sundays, where millions are out on the street, limiting equitable access to sensitive groups.
The good news is that the solutions to improving active lifestyles in the city will have parallel benefits for air quality too. Additional green spaces, increased pedestrian and cycling paths, additional car-free hours and the massive developments in integrated public transportation systems will likely contribute to decreased air pollution in the long run. But the lesson is clear, these two crucial aspects should be developed in tandem to ensure a better quality of life in the city.
What’s Next?
Jakarta is still at the beginning of its active lifestyle awakening, with fitness participation nationwide still at 1% of the population, meaning there is still huge room for growth.
Jakarta’s highly social nature will likely see more people joining sports groups and communities, fuelled by FOMO (fear of missing out), bolstered by the increasing number of sports-related businesses which improves access and reduces prices. The proliferation of budget-friendly gyms (e.g. Fit Hub, FTL, Anytime Fitness) is a great example of this, as is the number of padel courts being built across Jakarta, which doubled between 2024-2025 (27 to 55 courts respectively) and is estimated to reach 250 courts by 2026.
This will have interesting effects on the economy too, with Indonesia’s sports economy reaching $2.3 billion in 2024 (Ministry of Youth and Sports), and the running footwear market alone projected to generate US 77.8 million this year (statista.com).
But this is more than just about being fit and healthy, this rise is about citizens reclaiming the city, carving out spaces and experiences that make life in Jakarta enjoyable, redefining the city’s previous focus on work, commerce and malls. I believe the next evolution of this will be in wellness, with new spaces and venues that help Jakartans reclaim not only their physical health, but mental and spiritual wellbeing too. Watch this space.
Download our latest edition now: The Active City
References
- Strava Year in Sport (2024) | partners.strava.com
- 2024 Garmin Fitness and Wellness Insights | garmin.co.id
- OCBC Ventura May 2024 Newsletter | ocbcnispventura.substack.com
- Jakarta Rise #20: Path Towards Global City (Book 5) | bappeda.jakarta.go.id
- Lessons Learned from Jakarta’s Journey to Integrated and Resilient Transport Systems (2021) | mobilize.itdp.org
- The Analysis of Green Open Space Policy in South Jakarta, Indonesia (Rafa Nismara Dahayu and Erda Rindrasih) | Asian Development Perspectives 2024
