Why Indonesia is Moving Their Capital City

[Music] this video is made possible by micro center get a free 128 gigabyte flash drive and 128 gigabyte micro sd card when you follow the link that's down in the description below the location of a country's capital city is one of the most important choices for any nation's leaders to make they contain important government facilities offices and headquarters and usually contain the primary residence of the nation's leadership the capital city is basically the brain of a country and choosing the location of where you want to place your brain is of course a highly strategic choice most often the best location for a capital city is somewhere that can be easily defended and from where you can exert control and project unity over the rest of the country capitals need to be seen as representative of the entire nation and be easily accessible to the largest number of people possible and for all those reasons capitals are most often built within the center of a country but sometimes the choice of an old location ends up eventually just not working out for example in 2005 myanmar moved their capital city away from old yangon the largest city in the country and towards napierda more than 300 kilometers to the north this was done because napierda is more centrally located within the country than yangon was and it was also a transportation hub located right next to three chronically turbulent and rebellious states and so it was felt that the presence of the capital and the military so nearby would help to improve the region's stability and further it was ruled that the old capital of yangon was simply more vulnerable to climate disasters since it was located directly on the coast as was showcased in 2008 when a cyclone smashed directly into it and destroyed three quarters of the city's infrastructure in a similar manner brazil also moved their capital city back in 1960 away from the historical but by then overcrowded rio de janeiro on the coast and towards a deeper and more centralized location within the brazilian interior that they ended up calling brasilia this decision was largely made in order to encourage inland growth away from the coasts and to make the capital city more regionally neutral and then of course there was the great showdown in australia back in 1927 when neither sydney nor melbourne could agree on which city should become the nation's capital and thus they ended up compromising by building canberra roughly in between them from scratch now in the year 2022 there are two very large modern countries who are actively in the process of relocating their capital cities for pretty familiar reasons egypt is relocating their capital away from cairo towards a newer planned city still under construction a bit over to the east while indonesia is relocating their capital city away from jakarta and moving it more than 1 000 kilometers away to a completely different island this is incredibly significant because indonesia itself is an incredibly significant country she has the fourth highest population of any country in the world lagging only behind china india and the united states and boasts more than 270 million people for such a large country however indonesia is rather unique because while china india and the united states are all major and generally contiguous continental powers indonesia is really about 17 000 totally separate islands all scattered apart from each other and these islands are not equal there's five big land areas that indonesia controls the entire islands of sumatra java and suloisi and half of the big islands of borneo and new guinea however four of these island territories are fairly sparsely populated while the thousands of smaller islands add little to the overall population as well by and large that leaves the island of java which alone is home to more than 60 percent of the entire indonesian population 145 million people this makes java by far the world's most populated island with even more people than russia a country that is 123 times larger and so it's pretty fair to say that this island is basically the center of indonesia's population and culture and so naturally the capital of indonesia has been located on java for a very long time and it's located right here jakarta jakarta has been a pretty major city for centuries but with little fanfare in the modern 21st century world the city's metropolitan population has skyrocketed to a population of around 35 million people which makes jakarta the second largest urban area in the entire world after only tokyo which as fate would have it is also located on another island besides serving as the capital of indonesia jakarta is also the diplomatic capital of asean or the association of southeast asian nations which is effectively southeast asia's version of the european union and so you can sort of think of jakarta's role here as being similar to brussels and europe jakarta is an enormously important and significant global city but it is not without problems that make it actually a not so favorable location for indonesia's capital city in the 21st century for one as i mentioned previously there is a lot of inequality within the country while java is home to sixty percent of indonesia's population the island only makes up seven percent of indonesia's land ultimately that means that the remaining 93 percent of the country's land mass over on the 17 000 other islands are pretty underrepresented both in terms of population and in economics while the economy in both jakarta and java has been growing tremendously over the past few decades the other islands have been more or less economically left behind and have remained fairly stagnant to illustrate to this point ever since 1971 java has gained 75 million people while sumatra has only gained 38 million kalimantan what the indonesian side of borneo is called only 11 million so luisi only about 10 million while western new guinea only gained 4 million and while these other islands may look close by on a map like this they really aren't if you place the islands of indonesia over europe with java placed roughly over northern italy you'd quickly see that kalimantan is as far away as northern germany and poland suluisi is over in belarus and ukraine while western new guinea is way over in kazakhstan a lot of these places are very far away from jakarta and are therefore isolated and remote from the center of power often across thousands of kilometers of ocean based exclusively on the centralization of power factor it would make the most sense from a geographic perspective to place indonesia's capital within either kalimantan in borneo or on suloisi but of course centralization alone is not usually a good enough reason to go through all of these moving pains the larger motivations are that jakarta itself has a lot of issues to start the city has experienced a tremendous amount of urban growth in the past few decades back in 1945 at the beginning of the second world war the city's population was only 600 000 people 25 years later by 1970 the city's population had increased by six-fold to more than four million and then 50 years later from then by 2020 it had more than doubled again to more than 10 and a half million within the boundaries of the city proper largely owing to massive internal migration from the rest of indonesia as a result of all this growth the city has been experiencing a substantial ecological breakdown accompanied by intensely gridlocked traffic and congestion nearly four and a half million cars and more than 13 million motorcycles are used on the city's streets while public transportation only accounts for a third of the city's commuters to exacerbate the pollutants from all these vehicles there are seven existing coal-fired power plants and five more planned plants all within a 100 kilometer radius of the city the emissions from those five planned plants alone will eventually be equal to adding 10 million additional cars to jakarta's already crowded streets given this air pollution and smog within the city is a serious issue and it generally ranks alongside cities like new delhi and beijing the air quality can get so bad here that just last year in 2021 172 days were considered too unhealthy to be outside which was more than half of the entire year and then of course there's the traffic itself jakarta has often been named the world's worst city for traffic on multiple occasions by multiple publications but here are some ways to put it all into perspective it's been estimated before that the average jakarta resident will spend 10 years of their lifetime there in traffic the largest satellite city of jakarta where many downtown office workers live is bogor 25 miles away from the jakarta corps under normal jakarta traffic conditions it usually takes two hours to drive across those 25 miles and when the conditions are considered bad it can take more like three hours it's gotten so bad that high ranking government officials have to regularly be escorted by police convoys through the city just to arrive at their meetings on time and to make matters even worse jakarta's population is still growing by 2030 it's projected that there will be more than 40 million people living within the metropolitan area more than the entire population of canada and causing it to surpass even tokyo to become the world's newest largest city but out of all of jakarta's many problems it's water that is the most severe as with many coastal cities across the world jakarta is not unique in dealing with the threat of rising sea levels but jakarta's specific situation is rather unique because on top of dealing with sea levels rising the city is simultaneously sinking jakarta's sinking problem is very similar to both mexico city and venice both of which i've made videos about in the past but this is the gist just like both of those cities jakarta was established within a swampy environment many centuries ago before the needs of modern cities were at all understood 13 rivers flow through the city which used to provide ample fresh water but now they're all wildly polluted and currently unusable for drinking water jakarta does have a series of water pipes but they only reach about 60 percent of the population and they're all highly concentrated in the more wealthy areas of south and central jakarta as for the millions of other people who don't have any excess ground pumping is basically the only means of obtaining any fresh water for themselves but of course as this water beneath the surface is removed the soil above will continue to compact and sink and it doesn't help that nowadays there are dozens of massive and heavy concrete and steel skyscrapers across the city surface adding even more weight and pressure pushing down onto the fragile soil below as a result of all these contributing factors the entirety of jakarta is now sinking into the ground by about one centimeter a year but there are some areas seeing as much as 25 centimeters of sinkage a year when you take rising sea levels into consideration it's easy to see why most of the city will very shortly be in grave danger and while floods are already a chronic problem that the city faces it's nothing compared to what might happen in the future the entire city rests within a flat basin and according to some estimates 40 of jakarta is already sitting beneath sea level while many others predict that by 2050 only 28 short years from now the entire city proper of more than 10.6 million people will be buried beneath the sea like a modern day atlantis assuming that nothing is actually done about it but of course there is a plan to do something about it and it's insane in 2014 the indonesian government revealed the plans for what they called giant seawall jakarta expected to be completed by 2025. the plan will eventually construct a titanically sized sea wall across the entirety of jakarta bay to protect the city from the ocean beyond the wall is planned to be constructed in the form of a garuda a giant legendary bird from the hindu and buddhist faiths that is also the national symbol of indonesia the whole structure is intended to be iconic and boost tourism and it draws heavy inspiration from nearby singapore sentosa island project after the massive bird guardian is constructed jakarta bay itself is intended to become a water reservoir enclosed inside that will eventually become a vast new source for fresh clean water in the city jakarta's 13 rivers that all flow into the bay today are all planned to be cleaned up and cleared of pollution in order to keep their currently polluted outflows from transforming the bay into a stagnant cesspool meanwhile the giant sea wall itself is intended to become a new center of jakarta's urban development complete with housing roads and railways that connect back to the mainland that should all be capable of hosting a new population of 2 million people the whole project is expected to carry a steep price tag of about 40 billion dollars and it hasn't come without controversies for one thing it would require the eviction of many nearby residents in the seizing of private lands along the coast something that many locals depend upon for their livelihoods further there are fears that if the wall were to ever fail because of something like a terrorist attack or some unforeseen black swan event that the subsequent flooding would be catastrophic and probably end up destroying the city anyway in the future when sea levels are higher this all means that the wall will end up being a critical security weak point that indonesia would have to defend at all costs and then there are many many environmental concerns about building the wall to just heap on top of everything else so with all of these negative factors going against jakarta and the obvious need to alleviate the growing population pressure and weight on the sinking city the current leader of indonesia president joko widodo made a bold announcement in 2019 to move the capital city away from jakarta for the first time and while the specifics of the exact location and plan are still in the stages of being figured out things are moving pretty quickly for one we know that the general area of the new capital will be nearly 1 000 kilometers away from the current day jakarta over on the island of borneo which happens to be the third largest island in the world and it means that indonesia's capital will be on an island shared with two other countries in the north malaysia and brunei borneo is largely covered by rainforest and is sparsely populated but it possesses several advantageous features for indonesia's new capital city first the indonesian government itself already owns a large part of the land over on their side of the border making it easy to build a brand new planned capital city compared with jakarta the risk of disasters here are rather minimal whether it be from floods earthquakes tsunamis or especially from volcanoes indonesia's geography is dominated by volcanoes and many of their eruptions in the past across the archipelago have been some of the most destructive disasters in all of human history the top two most powerful volcanic eruptions ever in recorded human history both took place in indonesia at krakatoa in 1883 and in mount tambora in 1815 both of which caused enormous destruction 74 000 years ago the toba super volcano erupted on sumatra and was so destructive that it caused a six year long global volcanic winter and may have almost led to the early extinction of the entire human species today there are at least 127 active volcanoes across the country and more than 5 million indonesians live within their danger zones but if you notice on this map there aren't any major active volcanoes on borneo which from a risk perspective makes it far safer for the country's brain to be located there than on either java or sumatra and finally borneo is geographically located nearly precisely in the center of the entire indonesian archipelago and there are several developing city areas nearby the proposed location that stand to grow immensely over time in total indonesia hopes to create a new capital territory on borneo that will cover nearly 700 square miles slightly larger than the city of london's area and more than twice the size of present-day jakarta it is also president widodo's hope that eventually this new capital will be home to 1.4 million government employees and their families potentially reaching upwards of a population of 7 million people all in all with several futuristic designs already picked out for the more important government buildings like the presidential palace and more all that's left is to fund the effort and begin construction the total estimated price tag for building the new capital here is around 34 billion dollars but with extensive delays in the project stemming from the coven 19 pandemic budget cuts and other mounting pressures president widodo certainly has his work cut out for him over the next several years as he oversees the remainder of his second term as president since he hopes to begin moving at least some government offices over to borneo in 2024 he only has two short years remaining to accomplish it while he's still in office and as for jakarta even though the city is definitely facing some pretty serious hurdles over the coming decades widodo's hope is that encouraging millions of people to leave the city for the new capital over on borneo will be enough to relieve at least some of the pressure and allow jakarta precious time to recover and thrive once again so a lot of people have asked me for years now how i make videos on youtube like this one and how i got started honestly it all began with just saving up enough money for my side job while i was in college to build my own beefy editing computer that could handle all of the animations and the footage that i wanted to 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for you but best of all micro center is offering up a ridiculous deal when you follow the link that's down in the description or click the button that's on screen right now new customers will receive a completely free 128 gigabyte flash drive and a 128 gigabyte micro sd card you don't even need to purchase anything it's totally 100 free with no catch and you just have to go to one of micro center's 25 stores in the country to claim it and as always thank you so much for watching

Channel: RealLifeLore

Views: 3,319,257

Keywords: real life lore, real life lore maps, real life lore geography, real life maps, world map, world map is wrong, world map with countries, world map real size, map of the world, world geography, geography, geography (field of study), facts you didn’t know, indonesia, jakarta, new capital, capital

Id: t9p1bS1ThwY

Length: 18min 27sec (1107 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 22 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/akunsementara]

Mereka manggil papua sebagai "new guinea" ckckck

[u/PuckyMaxx]

5:50 in video : Kalimantan is far away as northern Germany and Poland 😲❗

[u/SaltedCaffeine]

I never knew that Greater Jakarta will be the biggest city in the world in 2030. Crazy.

PS: I just checked the numbers on the internet and it seems to be correct.

[u/treedee_]

Baru sadar, new capital berbatasan langsung dgn Malaysia. Ada Brunei jg di satu pulau.

[u/PerfectSambal]

A year ago I'm laughing on how the only international media who covering literally one of the most important news about new capital city is from neighboring Singapore and it's actually the state-controlled media who reported it because of course Singapore govt invest heavily in Indonesia meaning they have interest. It need more than a year to gain actual international atention.

[u/supercabul]

pindah pindah ...

[u/Underhanded-Blitz]

hutang 😃

[u/ghost_arcd]

W ga suka comment sectionnya