Nov 1, 2025
Recently I went to see the new Indonesian capital city, IKN Nusantara. You can drive in now - lots of roads are blocked off for construction and for the usual who-knows-what reasons, but you can get around and see a lot.
The most obvious initial impression is that unlike anywhere else in Indonesia I’ve ever been, this place is being built properly. The roads are straight and flat and the surface looks high quality - won’t start washing away next time it rains. There are proper footpaths everywhere. It really is walkable, you don’t have to navigate uneven surfaces or choose between wading through mud or dodging traffic. There is real urban parkland with marked walking paths and public facilities.
The buildings have all been designed by someone, not just built. Some of them are attractive, others just interesting (eg the one that looks like the head of a Transformer ready to stand up and walk about). The apartment blocks look solid and attractive, despite being fairly uniform. They look like decently good places to live. Even the waste processing facility is an architectural work of note.
So far they have concentrated on building the government buildings and residences for employees. Retail, business and industrial is planned for later, in satellite towns. At the moment there are a few shops and restaurants about, but not many. The only government department actually occupying the site so far is the capital city construction authority itself. It’s not clear when other departments might move in, given the current government shows significantly less enthusiasm for the project than the previous one.
Maintenance is a persistent problem in Indonesia. Heavy rain, high humidity and high average temperatures are hard on any built infrastructure and the cost of maintenance often slips down the priority list. I wonder if that will happen here - ie in ten years will it still look this good? The plan to address the usual erosion problems is interesting. They remove all vegetation from a hill, pave it with concrete, cover the concrete with some sort of soil substitute, then plant creepers on the hillside. Seems heavy handed, but also seems to work - so far, at least.
It looks like they might have been trying for the clean lines of sight idea, like in Canberra or Washington DC, where you can stand at one building and have a straight line view down an avenue towards another prominent building. Almost - they missed by only about ten metres or so, it's so close you have to assume it really was the plan, but someone didn't get the memo. Stand near the presidential palace and look towards the Soekarno-Hatta monument on the hill, it is so close to lining up that it's jarring to look at.
If you drive back down the road a few kilometres you are back in normal Indonesia. A main road with potholes and a never ending row of warungs on either side, and a road project in progress to pave over the drainage to make more room for warungs. It looks a lot more lively and real - also a lot less prosperous. This is where the people working on the construction live.
The stark difference between IKN and the rest of the country really stands out. My brother-in-law said he felt like he was visiting another planet. He was clearly thinking it would be nice if even a fraction of this level of public investment could be applied elsewhere.
It will take an ongoing expenditure of both political capital and money to keep this project going. Given the prevailing atmosphere of suspicion of public officials spending the country’s money on themselves, that could prove difficult to maintain. We shall see, I suppose.