Kadek Wara Urwasi – 17 August 2024 did not end up being a significant milestone for Nusantara, Indonesia's planned new capital city currently under development in East Kalimantan. That year, on the 79th anniversary of Indonesia's independence, outgoing president Joko "Jokowi" Widodo had intended to celebrate the inauguration of a brand new capital. Instead, amid delays caused as much by the Covid-19 pandemic as the unrealistic timeline for phase of the ambitious project, Nusantara saw scaled-back celebrations against the backdrop of incomplete government buildings.
This caused renewed uncertainty over the long-term prospects of the new city, despite pledges by the new president, Prabowo Subianto, to continue Jokowi's political legacy. Given current public dissatisfaction with Indonesia's political elite, it is worth examining not just the promises over the capital city relocation project but also some of the assumptions about its origins and development which have so far been taken more or less for granted.
Beginning with its political origins, this article explores how Nusantara was conceived and rationalised by policymakers during the Jokowi presidency (2014-2024). It shows that various internal contradictions that arose from the planning process, including its rushed timeline, ambiguous justificatory narratives, and developmentalist idealism, have led to the city looking more like a speculative urbanisation project than an inclusive city for all Indonesians. The arguments presented here are based in part on the author's recently completed doctoral thesis on the policy mobilities on Nusantara, which included 12 months of fieldwork in Indonesia and semi-structured interviews with policymakers, urban planners, architects, and consultants with first-hand knowledge of the capital city relocation project.
Hazy origins
The idea of relocating the national capital to somewhere more geographically central is not new in of itself. Indeed, Sukarno went so far as to develop a masterplan for relocating it to Palangkaraya, which later became the capital of Central Kalimantan. Sukarno wanted to develop a new capital to embed a new nationalist, modernist, and postcolonial identity for Indonesia, but later abandoned the plans due to technical and economic challenges and kept Jakarta as the de facto capital.
Nevertheless, the idea of fulfilling Sukarno's vision kept simmering in intellectual circles. It was invoked in official government discourse on the capital relocation process in the early years after Jokowi's official announcement in 2019, including in the Ministry of National Development Planning (Bappenas) Buku Saku (Handbook) in 2021. At the time of writing, Sukarno was still mentioned as the progenitor of the idea on the official webpage of the National Capital City Authority (O-IKN), the government body created to oversee Nusantara's development.
In reality, today's capital relocation project bears very little resemblance to Sukarno's vision and was initiated for entirely different motives. Although the idea of relocating the capital periodically surfaced in the 2000s, particularly in the aftermath of perennial flooding in Jakarta, there was no consensus on the best approach. Some states like Brazil, Nigeria and Myanmar had created purpose-built capitals far from their colonial-era capitals after independence, while Indonesia's neighbour Malaysia had chosen to create a new political capital, Putrajaya, only 25km away from the commercial capital of Kuala Lumpur.
The contemporary capital city relocation plan embodied in Nusantara can trace its origins to the lobbying efforts of Tim Visi 2033 (TV2033), a small private think tank founded in 2008 by Andrinof Chaniago together with two other academics and a policy analyst. Their small outfit promoted big ideas for Indonesia's development challenges, including relocating the capital city to the geographic centre of the country and building a network of new urban centres across the archipelago. In principle, this would help rebalance economic development and reducing the population burden of Java Island. Indeed, TV2033's official logo shows a series of interconnected cities centred around a hypothetical capital in the centre of the country, somewhere on the Eastern coast of Kalimantan; TV2033's founders, particularly Chaniago, made regular media appearances to spruik the idea of a capital relocation.
Figure 1: The logo of Tim Visi Indonesia 2033, with a hypothetical new capital city marked by a grey circle. (see original document)
In 2010, Chaniago was introduced to a young up-and-coming mayor from Surakarta (also known as Solo). This political upstart, Joko "Jokowi" Widodo, would be elected president of Indonesia just four years later. At the time, Chaniago and his colleagues saw a lot of potential in Jokowi's progressive and participatory approach to urban development, and began inviting him to Jakarta to participate in national television debates.
Meanwhile, Chaniago also began lobbying behind the scenes to have Jokowi put on the PDI-P ticket for the Jakarta Gubernatorial race in 2012 and, later, the 2014 Presidential elections. Although the general idea of relocating the capital did not originate with TV2033 – the idea was a common topic of debate among Indonesia's intellectual and political elites in the early 2010s – TV2033 clearly ended up having a significant influence on Jokowi. Chaniago became a close adviser to Jokowi, and during an official visit to the president-elect's office in 2014 handed Jokowi a copy of a TV2033 policy brief. Chaniago was briefly put in charge of the Ministry of National Development Planning (Bappenas) in 2014-2015, and oversaw the first of a series of internal feasibility studies undertaken by the government. However, plans for Nusantara soon began to mutate and take on a life of their own.
Figure 2: Andrinof Chaniago handing a Tim Visi 2033 policy brief to President-elect Jokowi in 2014. (see original document)
Sukarno's motivation for relocating Indonesia's capital was based on a desire to break free from the past and create a new modern, postcolonial identity for the country. In contrast, the current vision for Nusantara – what I like to call capital city relocation 2.0 – is predicated on the ideology that a new capital city can solve complex socio-economic and geographical development problems. Moreover, Jokowi's version of Nusantara gradually adopted various high-modernist rationales that attempted to legitimise the project as a smart, green utopia (although much of that rationalisation was decided post-hoc, as explained in the next section below).
Although these ideas are not necessarily contradictory to the Sukarnoist vision, they are qualitatively different in that they envision "a particularly sweeping vision of how the benefits of technical and scientific progress might be applied" through the central state, which James C. Scott saw as characteristic of high modernism. The clean slate approach to facilitating various forms of high-tech spatial interventions across a 256,000-hectare territory further sets Nusantara apart from the modernist vision of Sukarno. Therefore, and in contrast to scholars who characterise Nusantara as a form of techno-nationalist urbanism, I argue that Nusantara is essentially not a city, but a high-modernist and speculative development project. I will return to this point again below.
A discursive black box
During Jokowi's first term, the government (2014-2019) was focused on finding a suitable location for the new capital, whereas his second term (2019-2024) was defined more by the immense push to legitimise the relocation project. Legitimacy comes in different forms and depends on the audience being targeted. In the case of Nusantara, the post-2019 period saw Jokowi and his inner circle initially focusing their efforts on internal legitimacy within the state. These efforts included the creation of a strategic masterplan by a McKinsey-led consortium and various lobbying efforts in parliament to secure the 2022 Law on the National Capital passed without significant resistance by any of the political parties.
The 2022 law also sent strong external signals to potential investors and the general public, and was complimented by various forms of government discourse such as press releases, media statements, and other policy documents. Similarly, the design competition for the administrative core (Kawasan Inti Pusat Pemerintahan or KIPP) in late 2019, won by local urban design firm URBAN+, was an important tool for appropriating resistance among Indonesia's urban design professionals (which includes architects, planners, and landscape designer).
However, many key decisions – such as the size of Nusantara, the exact location of KIPP, and the emphasis on green urbanism – were driven more by the need to rationalise the capital relocation (and create consensus among political elites) than by any overarching policy goals. This should perhaps come as no surprise, as scholars of governance and public policy have previously shown that evidence-based policy making practices are a "myth" – and that more often than not, policy is evidence-making, with key planners selectively picking evidence to craft whatever narrative they think is most likely to compel other policymakers.
Importantly, the various internal and external legitimisation strategies pursued by the Indonesian state created a "collective lexicon" of discursive frames for politicians, planners and third-party consultants to draw upon. Indonesian policymakers were somewhat adept at adding new operational logics to justify Nusantara over time, especially in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, which led to concerns over national economic recovery. It did not take long for Nusantara to become burdened by a bewildering set of design ideals and discursive frames: green city, smart city, sustainable city, inclusive city, sponge city, resilient city, liveable city... the list goes on.
In my research, I categorised 64 different discursive frames – defining concepts, principles, and approaches – used in government discourse to legitimise Nusantara. This gado-gado of policy concepts has made it impossible to pinpoint what Nusantara actually is, or even stands for, thus undermining project coherence. The negative effects of this strategic ambiguity may have been unintentional, but it speaks volumes about how the government has sought to rationalise this megaproject and helps explain some of its internal contradictions.
The city that never was
There are several internal contradictions in the capital relocation project that the preceding sections can help us illuminate. The first is its rushed implementation towards the end of Jokowi's second term, which undermined due diligence and contributed to the chair and deputy of O-IKN resigning in June 2024.
Nevertheless, when considered from the perspective of an anxious executive that was running out of time, accelerating project implementation also served a strategic purpose, according to a forthcoming paper by Tim Bunnell, Anders Moeller, Priza Marendraputra, and Andrew Schauf: Jokowi, who was constitutionally barred from running for a third term, desperately needed to create path dependency for Nusantara to ensure that the crowning jewel of his political legacy outlived him. The rush led to coordination issues and contradictory design ideals among key planners involved in it, as well as a lack of meaningful inclusion of local communities in the planning process. It was also costly to accelerate construction efforts, and engineers and architects frequently had to amend plans on the fly due to insufficient geological data in the preparation phase. Nevertheless, and despite the lacklustre ceremony on Independence Day in 2024, Jokowi's rushed project timeline helped propel Nusantara forward and embedded it in people's imagination – at least amongst Indonesia's political elite.
Similarly, and as already described above, the rush to legitimise the project led to significant ambiguity over what the project stands for. Nusantara may have scores of attractive policy buzzwords, but it has no core goal or overarching operational logic guiding it. This has in effect turned Nusantara into a political black box that any policy ideal can be attached to, whether it is the promotion of high-tech pharmaceutical industry or spearheading a low-carbon economic model for the country. This has also led to increasingly idealistic claims, such as the idea that Nusantara will help fulfil the promises of Golden Indonesia 2045, the national policy goal of achieving developed-country status by the centenary of Indonesian independence, or to achieve civilisational progress for the country. In essence, this boils down to a logical fallacy: Nusantara is good because Nusantara is good. And who would not want to support a project that is good for the entirety of the country?
Source: https://www.newmandala.org/nusantara-the-city-that-never-was