Building the smart capital: Nusantara and the promise and peril of smart-city engineering in Indonesia

Indonesia is undertaking one of the most ambitious urban experiments of the century: the construction of a new national capital, Nusantara or Ibu Kota Negara ( IKN ), in East Kalimantan, conceived simultaneously as a forest, sponge, and smart city. This commentary situates Nusantara within Indonesia’s broader smart-urban trajectory, from the 2017 “Movement Towards 100 Smart Cities” to the digital twin frameworks now proposed for the new capital, and asks a deliberately critical question: under what conditions can smart-city engineering deliver genuinely better urban life rather than an expensive technological spectacle? Drawing on the smart-city literature and the documented experience of greenfield techno-cities such as Songdo, Masdar, and NEOM, I argue that the decisive risks are not technical but socio-technical—digital exclusion, data governance and surveillance, technocratic top-down planning, environmental impact in a biodiversity hotspot, and funding realism. I contend that the engineering community should treat the “smart” layer of Nusantara as an instrument subordinate to human and ecological ends, not as an end in itself, and that Indonesia’s own smart-city research offers resources for a more inclusive, sustainable, and accountable model. I conclude with a design agenda oriented toward people and places.