Capitals of the future

Tim Bunnell, Priza Marendraputra, Anders Moeller, Andrew Schauf

Sage Publishing, Urban Studies

Feb 13, 2026

The decision to build a new Indonesian capital city on Borneo in 2019 sparked broad concern and criticism. The first-phase timeline, targeting the inauguration of the central government core area before the end of Joko Widodo’s presidential term, was widely judged as unrealistic. A rush on developing critical infrastructure for “Nusantara,” as the new capital project was known from 2022, cast further doubt on long-term prospects. This article examines the politics of Nusantara’s fast-tracked development from a vantage point after the end of Jokowi’s time as president, exemplifying and extending aspects of extant critical urban studies research on fast urbanism. Leveraging the concepts of projectization and friction, we show how the politics of speed can have a variety of direct consequences and spillover effects. The circumscribed political timeline for Nusantara’s core area has drawn attention to (in)completion and problematic implementation processes. Yet in overcoming politico-bureaucratic inertia, the project has also been generative of a range of new urban aspirations, imaginaries, and innovations, as well as the destructive outcomes and legacies that have been documented in recent urban research on speed.

Feb 13, 2026

Anders Moeller, Delik Hudalah, and Edi Setiawan

Sage Journal, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

Jan 12, 2026

Legitimacy is vital for policymakers to gather both internal and external support for new projects, especially for mega-infrastructure projects like new cities being built from scratch. However, urban and political geographers rarely address or explicitly theorize about legitimacy. This paper situates the concept of legitimacy within discussions of urban studies and organizational management and, using insight from critical policy studies, proposes a relational approach to studying how legitimacy is enacted in urban policymaking. This novel approach eschews positivistic typologies and instead focuses on the ways policymakers enact different legitimization strategies, thus accounting for the impacts of networked agency and the relational pathways through which policymakers construct operational logics. Through an empirical case study of Indonesia’s capital city of Nusantara, we find that internal and external legitimization strategies (vis-a-vis different audiences) dialectically influence one another and has led to a proliferation of discursive frames surrounding the project, thus resulting in a dominating yet fragile policy regime. This case study thus demonstrates that legitimacy serves as a valuable analytical lens for understanding the rationalization and socio-material embeddedness of urban development policies within the built environment.

Jan 12, 2026

Daniel PS Goh and Tim Bunnell

Sage Journal, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

Dec 25, 2025

Overcrowding, congestion and environmental degradation are often the reasons cited for the building of new administrative and business cities to locations away from existing metropolitan centers. In Asia, the planning of right urban densities has become the dominant paradigm for designing these new cities and selling these cities to investors and citizens. Following the wave of building eco-cities in Asia, framing and dressing this paradigm is the ecotopian imagination of a future of humanity living in harmony, with nature and each other, the right densities secured by technological progress in the age of climate crises. We see this imagination at its height in the ongoing planning and construction of Nusantara, the new capital of Indonesia in Kalimantan, heralded as a sustainable forest city sited in the Borneo rainforests. Using a genealogical analysis, we show that the ecotopian imagination began to take hold in Southeast Asia in the reviewing of urban densities and greening of planning and design in Putrajaya (Malaysia) and Singapore from the 1990’s to today, and that these are exercises in producing ecotopian densities to right-size urban societies. Analyses of these cities tend to focus on the postcolonial aspect of civilizational representation through spatial design to create nationalistic affects. We argue instead that these cities are sites of utopian futures constructed to disperse affects stemming from discontent regarding urbanization and globalization concentrated in capital cities. However, the ecotopian imaginations may not be potent or persuasive enough to disperse the affects, yet the state cannot afford for the projects to fail. Thus, the state is left with only the temporal fixes of delays and revisions pushing back eco-density targets.

Dec 25, 2025

Bosman Batubara

Taylor and Francis Journal, Capitalism Nature Socialism

Jun 23, 2025

This article uses value-based analysis to examine how landscape is subsumed under capital in Indonesia’s new capital city. It identifies three distinct yet interrelated phases which show the deepening processes of landscape subsumption under capital. First, on the basis of cutting down the primary forest, logging extraction started in the 1960s, demonstrating the formal subsumption of landscape under capital, producing absolute surplus value. Second, industrial plantations started in the 1990s replaced the self-growing forest, reflecting real subsumption, generating relative surplus value. Finally, the city’s development started in the 2020s embodies speculative subsumption of landscape under capital, marked by value-grabbing (extractive yet non-productive of value) and the shift of that place from an operational landscape of extended urbanisation to an urban centre. Based on documents (archive and policy) analysis and six months of fieldwork, the article shows how these transformations reproduce spatial unevenness, displacing Indigenous communities and dispossessing them of land and forest access.

Jun 23, 2025