Analysis of Sustainable and Green Urbanism Discourses: Cases study of New Smart-forest City Kalimantan Indonesia

Abstract

The green and sustainable urbanism discussion has become more crucial due to many new cities constructed. Moreover, “green” and “sustainable” cities have been promoted by many governments, developers, and intergovernmental organizations, including UN-Habitat, through New Urban Agenda and SDGs (Dryzek, 2005; de Vries, 2011; Rapoport, 2014; Koh et al.,2021). Previous studies found this term used to cover up the complexity problems to attract international investment, people, nation building, and many other reasons, and some studies also found a contradiction between the “green” branding such as eco-city, forest city, smart-city, and sustainable city terminologies (Chang and Sheppard, 2013; Caprotti, 2014; Cugurullo, 2017, Van Noorloos, 2017). Therefore, this research focuses on capital city relocation in Nusantara, East Kalimantan, Indonesia, built because of climate change in the previous capital city Jakarta. Moreover, the central government constructed this new city as a smart-forest city. This research aims to understand the power relation between new city development and green and sustainable discourses. This research was conducted in the early stage of development because the announcement of this new city was in 2019, and the Indonesian government expects the first phase of relocation will be in 2024. This research conducted critical discourse analysis by reviewing policy documents, interviews with stakeholders, and visual analysis. The participants of the interviews are representative of the stakeholder, such as central, provincial, and local governments, environmental organizations, indigenous community organizations, and the house of representatives who participate in policy making. Thus, this research captured the main discourse at the macro and local levels. The research finding shows the domination of smart-forest city and economic growth discourse produced by the central government. Furthermore, this research argues that the central government power comes from long periods of territorialization and governmentalism regimes. This is proven by the strategies to mainstream their discourse, such as legitimation from the rule of law and politics, experts, and recalling the history of capital city relocation as nation building. Besides, some challenging discourses include damaged ecosystems and the long period of marginalization. Also, there are accommodator discourses that try to include local people and environmental rehabilitation in new city development.