Jakarta, Indonesia’s biggest city, has been free of Dutch rule for about 70 years — but the lasting effects of colonialism are far from over.
Case in point, the city is sinking into the surrounding Java Sea because many of the city’s 10 million people have no access to piped water and must rely on wells to suck up drinkable groundwater.
The flooding, pollution, sinking earth and congestion have gotten so catastrophic, in fact, that the country is switching capital cities altogether. Yes, seriously: the government is packing up and moving the country’s capital to the island of Borneo, according to the Associated Press.
But the move is unlikely to help poor residents who are still suffering from the chaos of environmental disaster, financial ruin, and the side effects of colonization ever since the Netherlands built a purposefully segregated city in the 1600s.
“The construction of the new capital city is not merely a physical move of government offices,” President Joko Widodo told AP. “The main goal is to build a smart new city, a new city that is competitive at the global level, to build a new locomotive for the transformation … toward an Indonesia based on innovation and technology based on a green economy.”