Goodbye, Jakarta? Indonesia's president suggests new capital

Goodbye, Jakarta? Indonesia's president suggests new capitalNot only is the megacity of Jakarta besieged by a confluence of modern ills – including pollution, overpopulation and soul-destroying traffic – it is also one of the fastest-sinking capitals in the world.

So when Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo, known as Jokowi, this week suggested making somewhere else the capital, it did not come as a shock. Indeed, the idea of relocating the country’s administrative centre is almost as old as the republic itself – it was floated by Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, in 1957 and has been brought up again by several presidents since.

If the plan goes ahead, Indonesia would join a long list of countries that have changed capitals, often building cities from scratch for the purpose, from Nigeria and Brazil to Myanmar and Australia. Egypt is currently building a new, as-yet-unnamed capital in the desert to replace Cairo.

But hardly anyone in Jakarta is convinced Jokowi’s plan is serious. “People have heard this before but it is just getting more frequent now, it’s now every two to five years,” said Elisa Sutanudjaja, director of the Rujak Centre for Urban Studies, with a laugh. “It’s just really distracting.”

After a cabinet meeting on Monday days after the city was hit by severe flooding, Indonesia’s planning minister, Bambang Brodjonegoro, said the president had decided to move the capital. However, he provided almost no detail, prompting the ire and derision of Jakarta’s urbanists.

“You don’t solve a problem by just moving it away,” Sutanudjaja said. “Jakarta is quite similar to Tokyo in the 1960s, with its land subsidence, flooding, natural disasters and overcrowding. If you really want to solve the problem then they should tackle it, not just move it.”

The president’s Instagram account on Tuesday posted a bird’s-eye view photograph of Jakarta’s hyper-urban sprawl and mused about whether the city could continue to shoulder the burden of being both Indonesia’s economic and administrative hub.