The Plantation Logic of Nusantara

In early 2025, Indonesians learned that Jakarta remained the nation’s capital, at least for the time being. The capital was supposed to shift to Nusantara, the newly built city in East Kalimantan, in anticipation of Jakarta’s overpopulation and environmental risks. Yet civil servants, many of whom were expected to be the first ones to move to the new city in January 2025, received an official note stating that the transfer of their office has been indefinitely postponed. Amid a sweeping budget efficiency campaign initiated by recently elected President Prabowo, Minister of Public Works Dody Hanggodo announced that the construction progress on Nusantara would be halted and its construction budget frozen until further notice. Despite the exorbitant amount of taxpayer money already spent by the government to construct Nusantara in the last few years, the new city will lay dormant for now.

 

The government’s about-face aside, much has already been changed on the construction site of Nusantara. Since 2017, when then-President Joko Widodo first ordered an assessment study for a new capital, twenty thousands of hectares of green areas have been stripped to make way for buildings and infrastructural works, including roads connecting existing nodes with the new city and pipelines for water management and flood prevention (Figure 1). Much of the project’s Main Governmental Zone (Kawasan Inti Pusat Pemerintahan), the new city’s core and the site for the headquarters of national government’s various branches, has already been near completion. The National Axis (Sumbu Kebangsaan), an imaginary line connecting natural features and governmental structures, has already materialized through a series of parks, streets, and plazas, all well-equipped with modern street furniture and sculptures. At the end of the axis sits the State Palace, its functional structure topped by massive metalwork forming the mythical bird Garuda. The monument’s gigantic, green brass wings remind us that regardless of the new capital’s eventual completion, let alone its potential success, there is no looking back.

 

In a project like this, we are reminded that architecture continues to be instrumental to the materialization of power, particularly at times and in contexts in which power is contested or otherwise fleeting. The question is: Whose power does Nusantara represent? The Nusantara Capital City Authority (Otorita Ibu Kota Nusantara), the governmental agency tasked with managing the future capital, branded the city as “A Global City for All” (Kota Dunia untuk Semua), thereby orienting it toward the public. As stated on its website, in addition to serving as “a symbol of national identity” and “an economic driver for Indonesia’s future,” Nusantara is hoped to be “the world’s most sustainable city” and “the world’s first forest city,” thus responding to the current climate urgency while appealing to the concerns of citizens on all fronts. However, as K. Wayne Yang has cautioned us, sustainability is to the present as modernism and slum clearance was to the past: a narrative of progress that seeks to secure a settler colonial future very much founded on the exploitative spatial, social, and economic logic of plantation. Many aspects of Nusantara, from its legal standing to its architectural design, reiterate the same extractive thinking that drove a century of Dutch colonial governance in Indonesia.

 

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