Deep in the rainforest of Indonesia's Borneo island, construction crews are building an entirely new capital city called Nusantara, a project driven by a problem the current capital simply cannot outrun, the ground beneath Jakarta is sinking. Jakarta, now the world's most populous city with more than forty million people in its wider metropolitan area, has spent decades battling chronic flooding, worsening traffic and rapidly subsiding land. Rather than trying to fix Jakarta in place, Indonesia's government has instead chosen to start over, relocating the seat of government roughly a thousand kilometres away to a stretch of East Kalimantan forest, betting that a purpose built, forest integrated city can succeed where retrofitting an existing megacity could not.
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