Sustainability Matters : The Big Screen Dilemma

By Alistair G. Speirs

Welcome to our new column exploring sustainability issues in our lives, and in the context of Jakarta. Almost everything we do has an impact on the environmental, social or cultural sustainability of a city, even the seemingly mundane; and so this column brings these less obvious factors to light.

We start with an area that I am sure you have never thought of as being bad for the environment – annoying perhaps, diverting certainly, really contradictory to safety, also yes, but a problem for the environment, never thought about it!

So, what is it I am referring to? Giant video screens, also known as ‘jumbotrons.’ Yes, those humungous, movie-based billboards that are slowly taking over Jakarta’s skyline, with flashing advertisements all designed to grab the attention of those stuck in city traffic and the busiest roads. Now, ironically, rear seat passengers, or those on the bus, rarely get good visibility of these sky-high televisions, so who ends up getting hooked by this visual bait? Drivers and front seat passengers!

Let’s start with some bothersome aspects before we look at the environmental. These screens are designed to grab your attention, and they do, especially the very impressive 3D ones, which are really clever, seemingly about to pop out of buildings and onto the streets. But surely this is against the policy of the traffic police who fine people who use their personal phones while driving? These screens, meanwhile, are 100% designed to pull awareness from the roads and onto whatever they are selling - but billboard owners get away without any sense of responsibility, hmm...

On a more aesthetic note, these jumbotrons are simply not part of any urban design, they are an ‘overlay,’ superimposed on the city or upon buildings that architects and urban planners spent their effort to develop. It is not possible to create a harmonious urban landscape when billboards and jumbotron screens are added. Please see London, Paris, Rome, Lima, Rio de Janeiro as examples, where the presence of screens like these is restricted. In certain places like Piccadilly Circus in London, Times Square in New York, or Tokyo’s Shibuya crossing, these are very much pedestrian experiences, built into the cityscape – a very different story.

But the main point in my message is environmental. Jumbotrons use electricity, and lots of it. For example, if one jumbotron consumes 144 kWh every day, and there are 100 jumbotrons in the city, they already consume 14,400 kWh. That’s about the same amount of electricity in 360 homes in one day, and we know that there are a lot more of the giant screens in Jakarta than that. For a country that still has 85% of its electricity produced by coal-fired powerplants, that is a major blow to the environment. No matter that the advertisers are happy to pay for it, it remains an unnecessary expense when so many other, environmentally-friendly ways of advertising are available.

So, let’s start a campaign to restore Jakarta streets to calm normalcy like the great cities of the world. Rio and Lima have already cleared their streets and Singapore integrates the screens into their buildings which is slightly better, and there are very much fewer than Jakarta, the capital of big-screen entertainment! But for me, we already have so much information bombarding us from our phones and smaller screens that we really don’t need these which use a vast amount of resources for no gain to the people. So let’s reclaim Jakarta a non-commercial city again.

Oh wait… the Jakarta City Government makes a ton of fees from these, so that will never happen. When there is money on the line, real responsibility vanishes. Oh well, we can but try!