Jakarta
Indonesia's capital and a sinking megacity
Jakarta is the throbbing center of the world's fourth most populous nation, a vast lowland metropolis whose greater region, Jabodetabek, holds well over thirty million people. Sprawling, traffic-choked, and intensely commercial, it mixes glass towers and luxury malls with dense kampung neighborhoods and street-food carts. It is also a city in slow-motion crisis, sinking into the swampy ground beneath it even as Indonesia builds a new capital hundreds of kilometers away.
The city sits on a flat alluvial plain on the northwest coast of Java, where thirteen rivers drain from the volcanic highlands to the Java Sea. Much of northern Jakarta now lies below sea level, and excessive groundwater extraction has caused some districts to subside by tens of centimeters a year, making tidal flooding a chronic threat. That vulnerability prompted the government to designate a new capital, Nusantara, on the island of Borneo.
The Sundanese port of Sunda Kelapa here was seized in 1527 and later became Batavia, the fortified headquarters of the Dutch East India Company and the hub of its spice empire for over three centuries. Renamed Jakarta during the Japanese occupation, it became capital of independent Indonesia in 1945 and exploded in size as migrants arrived from across the archipelago. Today it remains the political and economic heart of the country, though its formal role as capital is being gradually transferred to Nusantara.