Is Sinking City Jakarta a Valid Reason to Move Indonesia’s Capital City?

Is Sinking City Jakarta a Valid Reason to Move Indonesia’s Capital City?

Sinta Isfandiary Ainsyah, Master of Urban and Regional Planning 

Published August 22, 2025 

Therefore, instead of building a new city, it is urgently required to focus local and national budgets on ensuring 100% coverage of the piped water supply in the severely subsided areas to completely stop groundwater extraction. Additionally, policies to restrict groundwater extraction should be strengthened, and tools to monitor illegal groundwater extraction should be reinforced.

Aside from limited water sources, North Jakarta also suffers from limited open spaces that can act as water absorption areas, which also causes yearly floods. Currently, according to the JakartaSatu Land Use Map, the overcrowded North Jakarta has less than 10% of open green spaces. This condition hinders efforts to solve land subsidence because one of the solutions for land subsidence is to recharge the groundwater. This can be done by naturally absorbing excess runoff water or through artificially injecting water. However, the latter can be expensive. Thus, adding open spaces in North Jakarta is a better option. Unfortunately, empty land is scarce in the overcrowded North Jakarta.

In this regard, decentralization and relocating residents to the new capital city, Nusantara, might help increase open spaces in North Jakarta. However, only ministry or national-level government officials and their families are eligible to move to Nusantara, as it will be an administrative-focused city. In 2019, Statistics Indonesia recorded only 7,047 government officials living in North Jakarta, including both local and national levels. This means fewer than 7,000 national government employees will move to Nusantara, representing less than 1% of North Jakarta's population in 2019. Additionally, if we calculate the number of employees with the average house size in North Jakarta, moving approximately 7,000 people to Nusantara and transforming their houses into green spaces will only increase the total green space by 0.3% of the total area of North Jakarta.

Another solution to provide more open spaces in North Jakarta is through redevelopment. The Jakarta MRT Phase 2B Plan aims to address land subsidence issues while improving public transport access in North Jakarta. This plan involves converting unproductive government land, such as ex-factories and empty landbanks, into open spaces. The plan also includes creating a polder system, an artificial hydrological system with dikes and pumps. However, successful implementation requires intense collaboration between government bodies at all levels and Jakarta MRT, which is challenging due to Indonesia's complex government system and bureaucracy.

Many efforts and plans show little to no progress due to numerous ambitious plans but limited financing capacity. For example, there has been a back-and-forth plan since 2010 to build a 32-kilometer-long and 24.4-meter-high giant seawall to prevent floods caused by rising sea levels and land subsidence. Indonesia’s current President, Prabowo, estimated this project to cost about $60 billion, nearly twice the cost of the Nusantara project. This extreme cost is partly due to the additional plan to create reclamation islands, facilitating global economic activities with a harbor and an international airport to attract investors. Yet, the project has struggled to attract investor interest, halting its realization. On top of that, the development of Nusantara adds to the burden on the Indonesian government and diverts their focus from realizing it.

All in all, instead of having ambitious plans such as moving the capital city, the Indonesian government should focus more on providing accessible basic infrastructure for all groups of people, especially access to water and public amenities. Ensuring 100% piped water service coverage and accelerating the realization of the Jakarta MRT Plan must become the main focus of the Indonesian government to solve land subsidence.

Picture 2. Slum Area Distribution in Jakarta (Source: KOTAKU)