At the mouth of the Ciliwung River, with a bay which hosts the Thousand Islands and opens out onto the Pacific Ocean after traversing the Java Sea, the Indonesian capital of Jakarta is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in all of Southeast Asia. An important trading post which specialised in pepper, the harbour area of Sunda Kelapa during the apogee of the Sunda Kingdom was renamed Jayakarta when it became a fiefdom of the Banten Sultanate. Under colonial rule, as the city of Batavia it was the de facto capital of the Dutch East Indies, until the tumult of war resulted in full independence for Indonesia and Jakarta by the turn of 1950.
Today Jakarta remains the financial and political epicentre of Indonesia, the multicultural heartbeat of the globe’s most populous island, home to the second-largest metropolitan area in the world. But Jakarta is sinking, with torrential wet seasons and shoddy drainage making the capital prone to flooding, a problem only exacerbated by rising sea levels and groundwater extraction which increasingly subsides layers of rock and sediment. The Giant Sea Wall Jakarta and a series of underground water tunnels remain under construction in a bid to alleviate the city’s plight, but on average Jakarta is sinking by anywhere between 1 and 15 centimetres each year.
That’s why ever since 2017 the Joko Widodo administration has been ramping up efforts to move the Indonesian capital away from Jakarta and the island of Java, with a ten-year plan to transfer all government offices to a new capital city announced in April of 2019. That August the seventh and ruling president of Indonesia confirmed that the new capital would be based on the east coast of Borneo, which is currently part of the province of East Kalimantan and boasts a diverse wildlife amid the landscape of rolling hills and sprawling forests, winding rivers and ocean bays.
This week the national development planning minister of Indonesia confirmed that the new capital city will be called Nusantara, which roughly translates to ‘the outer islands’ in Old Javanese. Beyond its central location among the 17,000 islands which make up Indonesia, the new capital aims to reduce developmental disparities between Java and the rest of the country while mitigating some of the congestion, ecological damage, and other assorted growth pressures which beset Jakarta and its immediate surrounds. Alongside the naming of the city, a bill to confirm the construction of the capital was approved on Tuesday by the People’s Representative Council.
The planning ministry of Indonesia estimates that the cost of relocating the capital will be in the region of $32.7 billion, with $40 billion to be spent in a concerted effort to save Jakarta over the same time frame. While the project has been delayed by the coronavirus pandemic, Joko Widodo previously announced his intention to move into the new presidential palace prior to the end of his second term in 2024. Following the completion of a national parliament and government offices, the entire relocation process as Indonesia shifts footing from Jakarta to Nusantara is expected to last until 2045.
