‘Main bits of Nusantara complete’ but is this a capital move by Indonesia?
The main infrastructure in Nusantara, Indonesia’s new capital, is complete, the head of its Infrastructure Development Implementation Task Force announced on Sept 6, just weeks after the country unveiled the city to the world. Excerpts from This Week, Those Books on why countries change the seat of government and does it work? Sign up at https://thisweekthosebooks.substack.com/ and get the post and podcast the day it drops
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The Big Story:
There’s a new capital on the world map as Indonesia formally inaugurates Nusantara to replace crowded, traffic-clogged Jakarta, which is sinking faster than any other city on the planet.
But can moving capitals really solve a country’s problems? Or do the troubles simply migrate, with the office supplies, to the new seat of government, as Egypt, Myanmar and Nigeria have found?
- The name Nusantara, Javanese for archipelago, was chosen to reflect President Joko Widodo’s “Indonesia-centric” push to rebalance development to the geographic centre of the country of 13,000 islands.
- Brazil did something similar in 1960…
This Week, Those Books:
- Throughout history, capital cities have served as a giant political theatre.
- Fairy tales and other delights from the wider Nusantara region.
- And a bonus pick — about a lost city.
The Backstory:
- Nusantara city is being built in East Kalimantan province, some 1,200 km from Jakarta, which is in Java. Construction delays have affected…
- Experts say Nusantara is “perhaps the biggest undertaking — both technocratically and politically — in Indonesian history”…
- Egypt’s grand “New Administrative Capital”, some 50 km from Cairo…
- Myanmar’s purpose-built capital Naypyidaw…
This Week’s Books:
Political Landscapes of Capital Cities
Edited by: Jessica Joyce Christie, Jelena Bogdanović and Eulogio Guzmán
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Year: 2016
My rating: Insightful
Ten case studies of capitals — both ancient and modern — in Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the Americas examine the canny use of architecture and urban design to consolidate political (and/or religious) authority…
The editors say the essays confirm the argument advanced by Cornell University anthropologist Adam T Smith that “the creation and preservation of political authority is a profoundly spatial problem” and that capital cities really do serve as “political landscapes”.
Choice quotes:
“…over the more than two decades of Fascist rule, the urban landscape of the capital [Rome] became a canvas upon which the regime sought to express its revolutionary roots…”
Nusantara: A Sea of Tales
By: Heidi Shamsuddin
Publisher: Penguin Random House SEA
Year: 2021
My rating: Enchanting
Malaysia-born Heidi Shamsuddin’s5 magical collection of 61 fairy tales and fables are drawn, she says, from “the whole of the Nusantara”. She writes that Nusantara encompasses “the ancient sea routes of Southeast Asia” and loosely includes countries that share “the Austronesian language”…Shamsuddin documents the many avatars of each story featured in the book. The Youngest Fairy Princess of Kayangan, for instance, comes from Malaysia, but this tale of deception and eventual female empowerment is also found in Indonesia…
Bonus Pick: The Call of Cthulhu
By: H P Lovecraft
Published in American pulp magazine Weird Tales
Year: 1928
My rating: Gripping
This short story,6 intimating the demise of civilisation, is seen as H P Lovecraft’s most influential…Relevant in the context of sinking Jakarta’s replacement as Indonesia’s capital because the story features R’lyeh, which “had sunk beneath the waves”…
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Originally published at This Week, Those Books
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