Lessons from the PB Selayang Land consolidation project in Medan, Indonesia

The National Land Agency (BPN) carried out the PB Selayang Land Consolidation (LC) Project on 79 ha of urban fringe land in Medan from 1986 to 1990 as a pilot project for North Sumatra Province. Although it did not include the construction of the network infrastructure, the project provided valuable benefits and lessons. It demonstrated the feasibility of the LC technique in the Medan context, including the preparation of the needed land parcel map of the site and the 90% landowner support for the project. It created a planned layout of roads and public facility sites and reshaped land parcels with the public lands in government ownership and the private land parcels with registered titles. It also provided lessons to guide the future use of LC in Medan and for all urban LC projects by BPN, including the need to incorporate the construction of the network infrastructure in each project, the desirability of undertaking the projects as joint BPN/ municipal government projects, and the need to make each project self-financing by the sale of some of the new parcels/plots to recover the project costs.