Terra Nullius
A Systemic Design Counter-Manifesto to the Digital Fictions of the Smart Capital
Melinda Melinda Kumala (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
M.G.H. Schoonderbeek – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
F. Geerts – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
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Abstract
Indonesia’s new capital city, Nusantara, is presented as a technologically
advanced, environmentally resilient, and socially inclusive solution to
Jakarta’s structural crises. While official narratives frame the relocation as
a rational response to flooding, land subsidence, congestion, and uneven
development, this thesis argues that data functions not merely as a planning
tool but as a mechanism of governance that renders land, ecology, and
populations legible to the state.
Rather than being built on empty land, Nusantara is constructed through the
production of emptiness itself. Data regimes abstract ecological complexity,
Indigenous occupation, and political conflict into measurable categories that
can be optimized and governed. Geological surveys, environmental metrics,
zoning classifications, and smart-city systems transform uncertainty into
administrative certainty, enabling territorial intervention while obscuring its
social and ecological consequences.
Drawing on political ecology, smart-city theory, posthumanism, object-oriented ontology, and systems thinking, the thesis demonstrates how
contemporary digital infrastructures reproduce colonial logics of abstraction
and extraction. Through environmental mapping, subsurface modelling,
and computational planning, data actively constructs territorial legitimacy,
making the city governable before it is materially or socially inhabited.
The thesis also examines the fragility of this data-driven legitimacy. Through
sentiment analysis and discursive mapping, it identifies growing tensions
between state narratives, public perception, and media representation,
raising the possibility that Nusantara’s infrastructural systems may be
completed before meaningful occupation occurs.
In response, the project proposes an alternative architectural framework
that designs for uncertainty, under-occupation, and infrastructural afterlife.
Rather than treating failure as an anomaly, it positions occupancy collapse
as a legitimate design condition. Ultimately, the thesis argues that urbanism
cannot rely solely on prediction and technocratic optimization; architecture
must remain capable of adapting when projected futures fail to materialize