Designing a nation's capital is a rare commission in urbanism. Sofian Sibarani, founder of the Jakarta practice URBAN+, holds primary responsibility for doing so in Indonesia, the world's fourth-most populous nation. His master plan for Nusantara, the new capital, relieves Jakarta — a megacity faltering under a changing climate. We sat down with Sibarani at the Holcim Foundation's Forum in Venice to discuss how the nation's new seat of government is designed to avoid the same fate.

Where does the design for a new capital city begin?

In many cases, architects come first, and the landscape and infrastructure people come later. To me, it is the other way around. We need the ecologists to come in and tell us where to build and where not to build — where the animal crossings are and where the water needs to flow. We are the ones with the first stroke of the line, but we need to be informed, and that information is precious. 

Why was this site chosen — and what did it demand of the design?

We wanted to minimize disturbance to the natural system, so we searched for the area with the lowest environmental sensitivity. The location given to us was actually a heavily disturbed landscape — this part of Kalimantan was cut back in the '90s, and hundreds of thousands of hectares were converted into eucalyptus and acacia paper plantations. For us, that is a golden opportunity to reforest it. And rather than flattening the undulating terrain — we call it ironing, getting all the wrinkles out — we chose to follow it, reducing the cutting and the filling, so every road is unique to the place where it sits.

For those interested in city-making, where does the real opportunity lie?

There is a layer of urban design that connects urban planning and architecture — and this is where the opportunity lies. The city plan's policy documents, written by planners, are often mistranslated by architects, who tend to think at the scale of their individual plots. We need more designers working at the intermediate scale: the complex of buildings that holds a park, a school, and an amenity. We need urban designers because a lot of urbanization is happening: Indonesia has more than 500 cities and regencies, and fewer than 20 percent have a document outlining how they envision the city.

Our Future Tides film series arrives in Hamburg — a port city at the estuary of the River Elbe, where a new district has risen directly in the flood zone.

Rather than hiding behind dikes, HafenCity — Europe's largest inner-city development project — raised its streets by roughly 8 meters above sea level, expanding Hamburg's inner city by 40 percent. 

This third film in the Future Tides series features three voices shaping how the city builds with water: Reiner Nagel, Chairman of the Baukultur Federal Foundation; Andreas Kleinau, CEO of HafenCity Hamburg GmbH; and Evelyn Pasdzierny, Director at gmp Architekten's Hamburg Rainvilleterrasse office. Together, they explore how Hamburg turned flood protection into productive urbanism by bringing smart enterprise and creative thinking together in the process.

Barcelona hosted the UIA World Congress of Architects late last month, and within it, "The Architect's Blues," a C40 Cities session on the profession's crisis of economic uncertainty, decarbonization, and housing shortages.

On a stage shared with leading city architects, designers and top urban thinkers, our Executive Director, Laura Viscovich, sat down with Jacob Meyers, a Holcim Foundation Fellow and Emerging ChangeMaker, for the view from the next generation.

Meyers believes the cure for the architect's blues might mean returning to the public sector where many European architects once worked, as well as treating communication as the profession's great, unrecognized asset. Explore the conversation between Viscovich and Meyers below.