Infrastructure’s apogee: historicizing Indonesia’s new capital city Nusantara

Abstract

Slated for completion in 2024, Indonesia’s new capital city Nusantara has generated polarizing debates and popular contestation. Whereas most of intellectual endeavors have focused on its feasibility, environmental impact, and urban planning/design, little have been done in exploring the historical and conjunctural forces that shaped its emergence. This article attempts to historicize how Nusantara came to materialize through (1) various globally mobile urbanisms, (2) Indonesia’s long preoccupation with infrastructure-as-development, and (3) the changing geopolitics of infrastructural investments. Over a decade after smart urbanism captured elite and public imagination on how to run a city, Nusantara keeps this trend alive by adding to its plans ideas of the ‘eco-city’ and ‘sponge city’ amid a renewed focus on climate change. Meanwhile, Indonesia’s relative stable economic growth has allowed modernist and developmentalist imaginaries of the country to flourish, with urban development becoming both accumulation and political strategy. In the past decade, this focus on infrastructure was reignited through current president Jokowi’s brand of developmentalism. Concurrently, the increasing multipolar economic world has enabled different avenues of financing infrastructural (mega)projects, with the state turning to “urban-centered strategies of capital accumulation”. The role of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Indonesia’s infrastructure landscape and beyond, for instance, has emboldened Jokowi in going ahead with Nusantara. Adopting a conjunctural approach as explicated by Antonio Gramsci and others, I argue that these historical forces—planetary in nature—form the conditions of Nusantara’s emergence, coalescing into the apogee of Indonesia’s long history of infrastructural development.