While Jakarta with its over 11 million inhabitants is sinking due to climate change and the resulting rise in ocean levels, theIndonesia has already started building its new capital, which should be ready in 2045: it will be called Nusantara, will rise on the island of Borneo, It will cost 32 billion of dollars and in the government's plans it will be a forest city, that is, one of those ecological utopias that are in fashion these days in Asia for replace the model now surpassed by the current metropolises, highly polluted and at risk of collapse due to overpopulation and global warming.
In Asia it's fashionable to move capitals
They've already done it Myanmar with new capital Naypyitaw , South Korea with Sejong City, which has effectively become – with its just 300.000 inhabitants – the administrative centre of the country, to decongest the capital Seoul. China is doing the same, which not far from Beijing is building Xiong'an from scratch, which by 2035 will become the management hub to serve the Beijing Tianjin-Hebei economic triangle, the so-called “Jing-Jin-Ji cluster”, that is, an area populated by approximately 110 million people and with a GDP of over 1.500 billion dollars.
Indonesia's Plan: Creating a Forest City
Il Indonesian plan, announced at the end of 2022 by the popular centre-left president Joko Widodo and which will now be carried forward by his successor, the former sovereignist and pro-Russian military man Prabowo Subianto, is of a forest-city, or better yet a “sponge city”, capable of absorb rainfall increasingly abundant and violent in the tropical climate zones. The Thailand might have the same idea that would like to "scrap" Bangkok, but the theory that massive interventions in existing cities would not be more expensive than building new ones is gaining ground among experts. And it would avoid having to clear other green areas to make room, albeit with all the necessary precautions, for roads and buildings. In short building a sustainable city wouldn't be so sustainable after all, according to some technicians such as the Chinese Kongjian Yu, professor at Beijing University and theorist of “sponge cities”: “Building a new city will in any case create greater inconvenience for people, who will be forced to move. And in any case no city will ever be certain to last forever. It would be better to intervene in existing cities by reducing carbon dioxide emissions, cooling urban areas thanks to the solutions offered by nature itself, that is, greenery, and equipping ourselves in time against the rise in sea levels”.
Greenpeace's warning: 20 thousand hectares of forest already destroyed
However, President Subianto intends to continue on and so barring any twists and turns, Nusantara, Indonesia's intended capital, will see the light of day. Although there is no shortage of those who agree with Kongjian Yu: according to Greenpeace, since the project started, there have already been 20 thousand hectares of rainforest destroyed, that is 200 square kilometers, just to make room for construction sites. “Today – warns Greenpeace – only 31.364 hectares of native forest remain in the Nusantara area, including a 12.819 hectare mangrove area”. Moreover, not even a green city arises from nothing, even if the idea would be to create a circular economy system aimed at eliminating waste and promoting the continuous reuse of resources. But it is not a given that it will work: for example, water is already contaminated by rotting wood and in some places it is no longer drinkable. A green area that is now damaged, like the one where Nusantara will be built, no longer offers guarantees in terms of water supply: to put it simply, the Construction of new city could cause drought problems of which it and its millions of inhabitants would then pay the consequences. Not to mention that all this endangers, in addition to the indigenous tribes, a wildlife ecosystem consisting of rare and endangered species, such as orangutans, proboscis monkeys and clouded leopards.
This is why, despite the great opportunity for foreign companies too, the project is actually going slowly, and at the moment there are no major international investors to build the “city of the future”, not even from neighboring China or its ally Russia. The risk is that we will end up like Sejong City, in Korea, which is in fact depopulated: its inhabitants stay there only to work, from Monday to Friday, while on the weekend they willingly return to the chaotic life of Seoul, which is just over 100 kilometers away.
