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.
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