Indonesia makes plans for a utopian future capital

Imagine more than 30 million people, a population larger than that of Australia, all crammed into one city by the sea.

A city with grinding traffic, smoggy air and E. coli in the tap water. Where highways and factories and high rises are piled upon its marshy soil, pushing ever downward, until sections of the city have sunk below sea level.

And in just one generation — as glaciers keep melting and oceans keep rising due to climate change — much of the city could be underwater.

This city is Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia — a megacity with mega problems. To tackle them, officials decided to adopt a radical idea: build an entirely new capital from scratch.

Construction on the new capital began three years ago on the island of Kalimantan, also known as Borneo. It’s best known for orangutans and proboscis monkeys, which have long, floppy noses. And it’s home to a hilly site that’s expected never to experience an earthquake, a volcanic eruption or devastating floods — being positioned on an elevated site away from fault lines and volcanoes.

The government has deemed it an excellent place to build Nusantara, a capital designed to withstand an era of climate instability.

The man meant to govern the future capital is Basuki Hadimuljono, a veteran technocrat with more than four decades of experience, who is enthralled by the idea.

“This is not just a project for me, OK? This is like a baby,” Hadimuljono said. “So, we really have to manage this with love.”

Nusantara’s master plan calls for a capital unlike any other. It is in many ways the opposite of Jakarta, which is an old Dutch colonial port town that expanded  haphazardly over the last few centuries.

Every square meter of Nusantara is being planned to a tee. And if those plans go right, by 2045, it will be a city twice the size of New York but with zero carbon emissions.

Virtually everything will be solar-powered, from street lamps to electric buses. Biometric scanners will be everywhere, and much of the city’s systems will rely on artificial intelligence. To top it all off, there are even plans for autonomous flying taxis. Asked if drone taxis are truly achievable, Basuki said, “That’s the ultimate goal,” characterizing it as “important” but not “urgent.”

Currently, much of Nusantara is still a construction site, but its core downtown does already resemble a real city. In lieu of skyscrapers, though, there are low-slung buildings draped in vines. The avenues are wide and lined by tidy sidewalks that are often not found in other South East Asian megacities.

Looming over it all is a massive bird wrought from copper. This “garuda,” a mythical winged creature, is taller than the Statue of Liberty and much wider. The monument’s expansive wings seem to embrace the city like a protective mother.

What’s missing at the moment are loads of people, especially for a city that nearly 2 million are expected to call home by 2045.

At present, aside from construction workers, almost all of the inhabitants are Gen Z civil servants. They live together by the thousands, in high-rise dorms with assigned roommates.

Officials with families are harder to uproot — especially since Nusantara’s K-12 school system is not fully online — so the government has deployed a small army of the young and unmarried to start.

There are no nightclubs, few restaurants, and little to do but burrow into work. So, that’s what these young people do. Zeal for the project runs hot. Kathleen Mora Berta, a junior official helping oversee Nusantara’s state-of-the-art recycling facility, said her generation is determined to avoid the mistakes of those who came before.

“Those fears are [giving us a burning desire] to build a better version of a capital city,” Berta said. “We are Gen Z. We have a lot of ideas, and a lot of time and energy. We’re making sure everything goes into building a better Indonesia.”

Another civil servant in the public affairs office, Kevin Juan Jonathan Jefferson, 27, left a corporate job to live a more spartan life in Nusantara. His generation grew up viewing the world through smartphones (he improves his English by binging “Family Guy”) and, he said, they feel a “calling” to create a city the outside world will envy — even officials in much wealthier countries.

“I’ve seen Hong Kong. I’ve seen Singapore,” Jefferson said. “And I have the same dream to build Indonesia to be the same as advanced countries.”

They are off to an impressive start. Nusantara’s small downtown already resembles a small chunk of  Singapore — one of Asia’s richest cities — teleported into the middle of nowhere.

From Jakarta, reaching Nusantara requires a two-hour plane ride to the nearest airport and another two-hour drive along winding roads with signs warning people to watch for crossing monkeys. But a nearly finished toll road should cut the trip down to 45 minutes.

Just a few years ago, the site was part of a vast plantation that grew trees for papermaking. Monocrop plantations are like ecological dead zones for wildlife; there was little bird song overhead.

But Nusantara’s fledgling government hired a former environmental campaigner, Myrna Safitri, to plant trees and return the area to its natural state: a rainforest.

“You can hear birds now,” she said, taking a break from planting a rambutan tree in the dark soil.

When asked if she ever imagined that an activist such as herself would be tapped as the future capital’s top environmental official, Safitri said, “frankly speaking, never.”

If their utopian dreams are fulfilled, according to a government decree, Nusantara must fully come to life as Indonesia’s official “political capital” by 2028. Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto is expected to move there, along with his cabinet and hundreds of lawmakers, judges, military officials and others.

But doubts that this will actually happen — or even should happen — are widespread. Criticism of the project is well summed up by opposition politician Johan Rosihan, who told parliament last year, “Put this ‘prestige’ project in [Nusantara] on hold. Divert this money to rice.”

The total cost of building Nusantara over the next two decades could top $45 billion. Meanwhile, Indonesia, a sprawling archipelago, remains a country where more than one in five children don’t get enough to eat.

Subianto seems to agree with the critics. He has lavished more attention on a signature program: free meals for school kids and pregnant women. And his office has slashed next year’s Nusantara construction budget by more than half, casting doubts on the project ever fully coming to life.

Nusantara’s top official, Hadimuljono, is adamant the project will defy warnings of its failure. So, too, are the legions of young officials serving under him.

They are fervent in their mission to create a capital where citizens can at least drink from the tap and breathe clean air, if not soar above the rainforest in flying drones. They are also quick to remind their fellow citizens of the alternative: watching the current capital, Jakarta, sink into the sea.

“We are at the point of no return,” Hadimuljono said. “We are here now. Veni, vidi, vici,” he said, quoting Julius Caesar who famously said, “I came, I saw, I conquered.”