Creating a new capital isn't a goat cough at midnight
It is four months before Prabowo Subianto, a former dark history general, became the eighth president of Indonesia after winning the presidential elections on 14 February this year. And just two months on August 17, coinciding with the 79th birthday of the declaration of independence, the Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, who has presided over the last ten years, officially inaugurates the new capital of the country, Nusantara. If the forecasts are met. In case of doubt.
The biggest thing is that it is not clear that Prabow wants to go ahead with the expensive plan of his predecessor. It wouldn't be Prabow's first change of mind.
If we were not talking about the fourth most populous country in the world (280 million inhabitants), perhaps the incident could have been taken with another agility. It is not the first time in the world that a great historical capital has been abandoned and a new and “rational” capital has been built, ex novo, or in a previously lost people.
Brasilia is often cited in these cases, but it would still be closer, for example, to Naypyidaw, the new capital of Myanmar; Doma, Tanzania; or Abuja, Nigeria. And how did Washington emerge? A little more special would be the Xiong’an project they currently have in their mission in China.
The causes are diverse, but similar, and the result, almost always, is the same: that the new capital, born out of nothing, becomes a Megapolis in a very short time. It is one of the most obvious manifestations of what they call “capital effect.”
The case of Indonesia, however, has great peculiarities. On the one hand, those for the Jakarta that should be left. Dutch colonialism made Batavia the nexus of maritime trade, becoming one of the largest megapolis in the world (11 million inhabitants) since independence. Like the entire island of Java where it sits (150 million inhabitants), it has a demographic problem... But also the urbanistic, which is sinking physically and suffering from increasing floods. Not to mention traffic problems.
In a city like this, the pressures to maintain capital will not be weak. The move proposed and launched by Jokowi is not a kind of “New Delhi”. The new Nusantara is not in Java, but 1,250 kilometres from Jakarta, in the centre of the Makasar Strait, in Kalimantan, east of the island of Borneo. It is therefore a move that can alter all socio-political balances throughout the country.
In a country where balances are already fluctuating.
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