Scrutinising Nusantara: the making of an authoritarian city

In August 2019, Indonesian President Joko Widodo unexpectedly announced the plan to build a new capital called Nusantara. It will relocate the capital from Jakarta to East Kalimantan by 2024. This paper critically examines Indonesia’s ambition to build Nusantara within a short time. In this paper, a narrative policy framework is applied to unpack the core reasons and assumptions that underpin Widodo’s adamant decision to carry out a large-scale urban project of the new capital despite social and financial constraints. By interrogating two fundamental fallacies underlying the Nusantara project, in the rationales and the construction process, I show how the new capital project is deeply problematic. The notion of techno-nationalist urbanism is proposed to underline the contradiction in the logic and rationality of Nusantara’s urban system as a result of authoritarian symptoms. Further, the paper links Nusantara to the nature of power embodied in Widodo’s strong desire for a legacy and its impact on Indonesian democracy in the future.