Nusantara’s Silent Streets: When the Capital-of-the-Future Falters

The idea of a city born in the jungle of Borneo, rising from creeks and palms into the capital of a nation, carried with it a kind of romantic promise. In 2019 the Indonesian government announced the establishment of Nusantara to replace the overburdened, sinking city of Jakarta. The vision was of a sleek, forest-city-capital, one that would place Indonesia’s future in its less-crowded heartlands. Yet as the months unfolded, the silence in Nusantara’s broad boulevards and the sparsity of its resident life began to whisper a softer but deeply uneasy story.

Walking through Nusantara’s planned government zone—an expansive grid of wide avenues and towers of glass that gleam in satellite imagery—one senses not quite a blank canvas, but something close. Reports show that only a fraction of the planned core zone has been built so far: out of the planned 6,600 hectares, only about 800 hectares have been developed to date. The grand population target—nearly two million by 2045—remains far off. The skeleton of a city lies there, but the flesh has yet to arrive.

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