Negotiating Extended Urbanisation: A Responsive Development Pathway for Banten, Indonesia

Banten Province, Indonesia, is a critical yet overlooked frontier of urbanisation. Despite being one of Southeast Asia’s fastest-urbanising regions, its secondary cities, towns and peri-urban hinterlands remain marginal in urban studies and sustainability science. This neglect is consequential. Future urban growth will increasingly concentrate in such settlements, yet debates on urbanisation in Indonesia and Southeast Asia remain focused on metropolitan regions such as Jakarta, one of the world’s largest urban areas. This paper addresses this gap by combining a cross-sector participatory horizon scan with a responsive development pathway for under-resourced territories. Thirty-four participants from academia, government and professional associations co-produced insights into Banten’s urban trajectories, triangulated with literature and secondary data. To our knowledge, this study draws on the first expert workshop on Banten’s urbanisation of this scale, cross-sectoral reach and disciplinary breadth, spanning six domains: economic development, physical infrastructure, social development, cultural heritage, environment and biodiversity, and disaster vulnerability. The deliberations also identified nine cross-cutting issues—including governance deficits, environmental injustice and climate risk—that underpin territorial inequality. From these findings, the paper synthesises a responsive development pathway that supports coordinated planning and governance across Banten’s urbanising settlements and offers a transferable model for negotiating extended urbanisation in rapidly urbanising Global South regions.