We Built This City
… from scratch, to serve as a new capital
Indonesia’s capital city is a polluted, sinking, crowded mess. So its government is building itself a new capital.
The new city, Nusantara, will be 700 miles from Jakarta, the current capital. In fact, it will be on a completely different island — Jakarta is located on Java, while Nusantara will be on Borneo.
This is a radical and expensive step — experts estimate that carving a new city out of the rainforest will cost $29 billion. The Indonesian President who began the project, Joko Widodo (usually known as Jokowi), justified the cost by arguing that Jakarta has become too big to be sustainable (his successor, Prabowo Subianto, promises that he’ll finish the project).
Jokowi had a point. Jakarta is one of the fastest-growing megalopolises in the world. Its population has more than tripled since the 1960s, and 30 million people live in its metropolitan area.
This growth, and the lack of long-term planning that has accompanied it, means that Jakarta, for all its charms, is a mess. Its roads are snarled with traffic, its transit system is overwhelmed, and its air is polluted. The city has pumped so much groundwater that it’s the world’s fastest-sinking city. The sinking, combined with rising sea levels, makes Jakarta the world’s most…
