CityMakers Voices No.4 — Sofian Sibarani

Sibarani is the latest guest of CityMakers Voices, a conversation series from the Holcim Foundation gathering the people whose decisions shape the cities we live in — mayors and architects, planners and patrons, financiers and engineers — for open discussion on the work of building better urban environments.

This conversation took place at the Holcim Foundation's 2025 Forum in Venice. In it, Sibarani reflects on the vernacular wisdom Indonesia built long before flood-prevention technology, and identifies where he sees the field's great opening: the intermediate scale of urban design, connecting planning and architecture. He starts by explaining why a nation of 17,000 islands is moving its capital at all — and why Kalimantan, safe from volcanic activity and sitting at Indonesia's geographic center, was the optimum spot to initiate the ambitious project.

URBAN+ is best known for winning the competition to design Indonesia’s new capital. Where does a project like that begin?

We are mostly known for our role in winning the competition for the new capital city of Indonesia, back in 2019. It is an unprecedented mega-project for Indonesia — a new town, in a new area. Jakarta is in a perilous situation, threatened by many challenges, and the country wanted to mitigate that by moving the capital somewhere else.

Let’s look at the site. Why was it chosen, and what were the key elements you were thinking about?

We were working at the national level. Kalimantan is one of Indonesia’s 17,000 islands, and it is perceived to be safer — there is no volcanic activity there. Geopolitically, it sits right in the middle of Indonesia. I think our government wanted to send a message about fairness, about more even development between the islands, because 56 percent of Indonesians live on one island, Java — which is shocking when you have 16,000 islands that are not Java.

Zooming into the site itself, we looked at multiple factors. The first was land controlled by the government — you can have a good project and a strategic site, but if the land is hard to acquire, it will not happen as you thought. The second was minimizing 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 the terrain is undulating — unlike Jakarta, unlike many Indonesian cities, which are flat. That presents something we need to respond to: how nature presents itself, and how we want to interact with it.

So you’ve worked with the government to identify the site, and you’re standing at the edge of a brownfield-greenfield situation. What happens next?

Our role at that time was as winner of the master plan — somewhere at the scale of 50,000 hectares, the size of Singapore or Jakarta. That is the macro scale you have to think about. We were also tasked with a 6,000-hectare town within it for 300,000 people — in Indonesia, think of a satellite town like Bumi Serpong Damai; in Singapore, maybe Tampines.

There are technical ways to divide those numbers into neighborhoods and clusters, and our role was to provide those road maps. But we really needed to set up the principles first. 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. The geologists need to tell us which areas are stable. Yes, we, the architects, are the ones with the first stroke of the line, but we need to be informed, and that information is precious. Be patient before you go straight to your triangles, your boxes, all the crazy architectural shapes you want to do — wait until you have the clearance of what is possible and what is allowable. I was inspired by the fact that when I listened to the environment more, my city started to look like clusters — blobs, islands of development. Hence our design is called Nagara Rimba Nusa: a city of forest and archipelago.

You created the plots in a way that shuns cookie-cutter development — the site demands a response specific to itself. How did that work?

There is always a temptation to use a template that works. I love New York’s blocks — so walkable — and I love Portland. But it works in New York; it works in Portland; it may not work elsewhere. In our case, the terrain rises from 30 meters above sea level to 70 within a spread of a few kilometers. So the question becomes: do you want to flatten it first — we call it ironing, getting all the wrinkles out — and destroy the environment, or do you want to follow it? If you follow it, there is no way to make it rectangular, a grid like New York. Every road you draw becomes unique to the place where it sits.

The principle was to reduce the cutting and the filling — partly practicality, because the government gave us about three and a half years from planning to the first building, the palace, and if you cut too much or fill too much, you lose time and money. We ended up with a city whose shape is very organic. Nature actually inspires you, if you are willing to work hard for it — because you cannot copy-paste. Since SimCity, the easiest way to draw a city is copy, copy, copy, and the buildings mushroom out of it. In this one, you need to attend to it — like a child: you need to know its personality, its character, and feed it the right nutrition.

Indonesia is culturally so rich, and people were living intelligently with this land long before today’s technology. How much did that wisdom inform the design?

In many interviews, I am asked which city became my model — do you look to Singapore, to Washington, to Canberra, to Putrajaya? I was stunned to say that I didn’t need to look far. I don’t look out; I look inside. Indonesia has a wonderful wisdom in its vernacular architecture that is no longer with us — we stopped, influenced by the industrial and modernist architecture we imported from the Western model. In the past, we built houses on stilts, and we think of that as the old style, where your great-grandfathers lived. But there is wisdom in it: living not embedded in the land, because you don’t want to ruin it. Water can flow, the flood can come, and they are still safe — the ancestors told them to build higher, because floods come and go. That was a time with no flood-prevention technology, no drainage systems. They had to live with nature, and within that limitation comes a wisdom about how to minimally impact the environment.

There is also a belief system — call it cosmology. Things that overwhelmed us, things that were high, became divine: the mountain. You cannot stop a mountain from erupting, so we live around it and respect it. Yogyakarta has its axis toward Mount Merapi. Bali has Mount Agung; Bandung has Tangkuban Perahu. Why were we worshipping mountains? It is our response — how we respect nature.

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

I would consider two types of city development. One is greenfield — a clean slate, like Nusantara: little context, an area with almost no population around us. The other is urban redevelopment, where there is more complexity — a history layer, a preservation layer, social and economic layers, the interaction of different levels of society. To me, that is the more advanced level of city design, and it is wide open now.

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 — in a structured, logical way that is also aesthetically acceptable.

So young, would-be architects should really be studying urban design first.

At least take a minor, an elective, an interest — and do an internship in an urban design office, so you can handle something beyond a building.

This interview is part of CityMakers Voices, a conversation series from the Holcim Foundation that gathers the thinkers, designers, and decision-makers whose work shapes the cities we live in. They form part of CityMakers, a new resource focused on the people, places, and programs revitalizing the urban realm.