Page 76 - Bulletin, Vol.83 No.2, September 2024

NEW CAPITALS

By Odette FOUDRAL

INDONESIA

Indonesia is changing its capital. Gone is Jakarta, and now Nusantara will be the
symbol of Indonesia. This project comes at a time when the city of Jakarta is threatened
by rising water levels.

It's the symbol of a new capital that is set to make Indonesia shine: Nusantara, and its
bird-winged presidential palace. This monument was inaugurated with great fanfare on
Saturday 17 August, but it is only one of the buildings to have been completed in this
fledgling city. For the time being, the rest of the city is a huge construction site with
13,000 workers working on complicated roads. The project is titanic: to move the capital
Jakarta, with its 11 million inhabitants, to an island 1,200 kilometres away, in Nusantara.

Rising waters threatened Jakarta

The government's aim is to rebalance the archipelago's development away from the
island of Java, which alone accounts for 58% of GDP. But there is another emergency:
rising sea levels, which are now threatening Jakarta. To escape, a new capital is being
built in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the jungle.

The budget is 30 billion euros, 80% of which is being financed by private investors, with
the stated ambition of making Nusantara a carbon-neutral city by 2045. The first civil
servants will move to Nusantara this autumn, and the city expects to welcome 2 million
inhabitants within 20 years.

Source France INFO

74 AAFI-AFICS BULLETIN, Vol. 83 No. 2, 2024-09

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