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Indonesia expects to begin construction in the second quarter on apartments worth $2.7 billion for thousands of civil servants due to move to its new capital city on Borneo island, an official said late on Tuesday.
Authorities have already started building basic infrastructure in the area, with an aim to start relocating some government administration and civil servants in 2024.
— Reuters
The 450,000-acre starter city’s initial residential program will include 184 apartment towers for a total of 14,500 government employees. AECOM and Nikken Sekkei are leading the development of its master plan towards an expected inauguration date to coincide with the country’s Independence Day... View full entry
The Indonesian government is involving three international consulting firms in developing the masterplan of the country’s new capital city, which is to be located in East Kalimantan.
[...] American engineering company AECOM, consulting firm McKinsey & Company and Japanese architectural and engineering firm Nikken Sekkei would design the city, which is to feature the latest technology and be environmentally friendly at the same time.
— The Jakarta Post
In August 2019, Indonesian President Joko Widodo had announced the selection of a 450,000-acre site in East Kalimantan province on Borneo Island where the nation's new capital would be relocated to. Jakarta, the current capital on Java Island, is traffic-choked, increasingly prone to floods, and... View full entry
Citing overcrowded conditions in Bangkok, Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha has said moving the capital is a possibility. [...]
“There are two possible approaches to moving the capital,” Prayut said. “The first is finding a city that’s neither too far nor too expensive to move to. The second is to decentralise the urban area to outer Bangkok to reduce crowding.”
— The Nation Thailand
In August, another Southeast Asian nation, Indonesia, announced that it had picked a site for an as-yet-unnamed new capital — away from the sinking and increasingly congested current capital Jakarta. Egypt has also been working to move its capital out of the wildly sprawling 'old' Cairo. View full entry
President Joko Widodo announced Monday that officials had chosen an area in East Kalimantan province, on the island of Borneo, for the as-yet-unnamed capital. Construction on the 450,000-acre site would start next year, and people would move in beginning in 2024. [...] Critics of the plan have warned that the cost of moving the capital could be untenable. [...] What’s more, shifting civil servants and their families to a new city in Borneo will not stop Jakarta from sinking, they say. — Washington Post
With some areas of Jakarta sinking as much as 10 inches a year, caused by the digging of underground aquifers and worsened by climate change, the need to relocate the capital has become more pressing in recent years. The effort will cost an estimated $33 billion, President Widodo said during... View full entry
Soon after the news, an Indian architect posted an image of [Foster's] design juxtaposed next to a stainless-steel idli maker—the kind used to steam idlis for breakfast in countless households across southern India—on an architecture-focused Facebook group. While some made fun of the resemblance—”How on earth will they cook in this?”—others praised the design for not being derivative of colonial-era architecture. — Quartz
Foster + Partners was invited to design the state assembly building in Amaravati, the new capital of the Indian state Andhra Pradesh. Since it was released, Foster's proposed design has drawn mixed reactions from the public. Some people compared the building's spiked design to an idli maker... View full entry
Cairo is an unruly urban sprawl that has spun out of control. Now, officials want to build a new capital in the desert -- a potent symbol of President Sisi's regime. But will it ever happen? [...]
The old Cairo is an ugly city, an affront to the senses. [...] a city of contradictions, created from the bottom up, even though that had never been the intention. It has been growing wildly since the 1960s -- from 3.5 million back then to 18 million now -- against the will of the country's rulers.
— spiegel.de
Previously in the Archinect News: A New "Capital" for Cairo?Egypt's urban growth threatens Nile farmlandPhotographer documents Egypt's monumental housing developments in the desert View full entry
