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Capital city: Beyond Nusantara, metaverse and Garuda
In dire need of investment, the new capital city has now emerged as a real estate development project, with Cabinet members somehow acting as the marketing team.
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Build anew: Construction materials are scattered across a plot of land that makes up the third segment of Indonesia’s new capital city in Penajam Paser Utara regency, East Kalimantan, on Feb. 2. (Antara/Bayu Pratama S)
"We are preparing the nation's capital city in the form of a metaverse. We were very excited about holograms yesterday, but now we have a metaverse. Hopefully, in four months, Bappenas [the National Development Planning Agency] can show about the IKN [Nusantara Capital City] in the metaverse [..] The new capital city masterplan development will include technological advances. Fiber optic infrastructure will go beyond the 4.0 or 5.0 era, given that in the future it will be the era of 6.0 to 7.0," Suharso Monoarfa, the National Development Planning minister told a meeting with the House of Representatives’ Special Committee for the IKN bill on Jan. 13.
The House eventually passed the bill and Nusantara became the name of the new capital city on Jan. 18.
However, questions about Suharso’s buzzwords of 6.0, 7.0 or city-in-metaverse have remained unanswered. To show how advanced the new capital city would be, he claimed that SpaceX had asked Indonesia for a launchpad at the IKN for airplanes with extraordinary speeds so that it would take only 1.5-2 hours to travel from Indonesia to the United States.
The website for the IKN, www.ikn.go.id, is full of jargon, with the tagline "locally integrated, globally connected, universally inspired." The IKN is said to be a national government center, an economic superhub, a center for green innovation, six economic clusters from green technology to farming, from chemistry to ecotourism. It will be the 21st-century education cluster and a center for smart cities and Industry 4.0. The government wants to put all hip things in the new city shopping basket. Moreover, it sounds like a love child of Shenzhen and Dubai.
In 2021, some tools were ready to fulfill the dream: Indonesia’s sovereign wealth fund and a land bank institution with Rp 1 trillion (US$70 million) in start-up capital. The government said the land needed to build the capital was settled, including 6,000 hectares for the central area, which was part of tycoon Sukanto Tanoto’s company's concession.
A few months ago, Real Estate Indonesia and 99 Group, a real estate technology company from Singapore, launched an integrated and informative website on the IKN, gradually including the best property listing options in East Kalimantan and the surrounding area. Bappenas supports this initiative.
The master plan is still under discussion following a national competition, while the new palace has been designed by a famous sculptor despite protests from the architect association. So now, all that is left is who will pay for such a long shopping list of demands, especially since the government has promised not to spend money from the state budget.
