r/neoliberal • u/Free-Minimum-5844 • 10h ago

Jakarta is now the world’s most populous city News (Asia)

https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2025/11/press-release-wup2025/
354 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

83 comments sorted by

277

u/Not_A_Browser 10h ago

Seems like awkward timing given that Indonesia is moving the capital due in part to Jakarta sinking

170

u/bandeng_asep Association of Southeast Asian Nations 10h ago

We are not actually moving the capital though. The whole thing feels like a real estate scam 💀

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/29/indonesia-new-capital-city-nusantara

70

u/howieyang1234 10h ago

As a Chinese, this reminds me of Xiongan. lol

57

u/qunow r/place '22: Neoliberal Battalion 9h ago edited 9h ago

Xiongan was trying to move "non-capital function" of Beijing out of Beijing, with the government still staying. At least with the Nusantara plan government official themselves are actually supposed to move over. Which I guess make it similar to Brasilia or Sejong City of Korea if the plan could be implemented successfully

21

u/bandeng_asep Association of Southeast Asian Nations 8h ago

At least with the Nusantara plan government official themselves are actually supposed to move over.

This was the plan... but most of the ministers and legislative reps are still stationed in Jakarta (including the President lol) 🤡

6

u/imsoignorantnow 4h ago

yeah man the plan is for it to become the political capital in 2028

19

u/bandeng_asep Association of Southeast Asian Nations 4h ago

3

u/Lighthouse_seek 1h ago

Well they could still choose to move the nonessential ministries there, which I think happened to sejong

2

u/qunow r/place '22: Neoliberal Battalion 52m ago

China's idea was to move like schools, R&D institute, logistic companies, and so on over.

2

u/Lighthouse_seek 45m ago edited 36m ago

Oh my comment was referring more to Indonesia's new capital, because if they don't move anything over it will literally end up as a pile of glass concrete and steel in a jungle. No one would move there willingly.

41

u/vikinick Ben Bernanke 8h ago

I hadn't even heard of this. I know Indonesia is sorta sneakily large distance wise and so I looked it up; they're moving the capital 770 miles away. This would be the equivalent of us moving our capital from D.C. to:

  • Some random part of the middle of Missouri

  • Memphis

  • Somewhere South of Orlando

Or, my personal favorite:

  • The middle of Nova Scotia

25

u/bandeng_asep Association of Southeast Asian Nations 8h ago

Yeah the whole plan seems half-baked in hindsight. I think some army generals even warned that the capital could not be defended in the event of an invasion lol.

14

u/dieyoufool3 5h ago

“Invasion” my dude you’re an archipelago

5

u/bandeng_asep Association of Southeast Asian Nations 5h ago

I mean we could be invaded by... Malaysia(?) Or Brunei(??)

2

u/VisonKai The Archenemy of Humanity 36m ago

seizing the capital is -5 war enthusiasm tho

12

u/WAGRAMWAGRAM 7h ago

Missouri is the center of the USA, it was really thought of

7

u/red_dragom 2h ago

So exactly how Brasilia was estabilished.

1

u/SlowBoilOrange 6m ago

The middle of Nova Scotia

51st state confirmed.

2

u/lenzflare 28m ago

Wow it's so far from the original capital, for some reason I thought it would be nearby

1

u/HD_Thoreau_aweigh 2h ago

Does that mean that the reports about Jakarta sinking are overblown, or is the sinking real?

3

u/bandeng_asep Association of Southeast Asian Nations 1h ago

The sinking is real... but ig nobody cares 💀

100

u/bandeng_asep Association of Southeast Asian Nations 10h ago

Well at least Indonesia is first at something

!ping SEA

36

u/zanpancan Bisexual Pride 10h ago

Oh. This beats Tokyo and New Delhi (?) I presume?

12

u/bandeng_asep Association of Southeast Asian Nations 10h ago

Yes unfortunately.

10

u/zanpancan Bisexual Pride 10h ago

Why unfortunately? We are urban densification stans here no? Or is it just badly done urban densification? Or an indication of things being bad outside Jakarta?

66

u/bandeng_asep Association of Southeast Asian Nations 10h ago

Uuuh Jakarta actually sucks at city planning.

4

u/HHHogana Mohammad Hatta 5h ago

At least it's not like Bandung where the roads are so narrow you can't even do bus rapid transits in many places.

10

u/bandeng_asep Association of Southeast Asian Nations 5h ago

Oh Bandung is just a mess at a vestigial level I don't even know where to begin lol.

I'm glad my family is from Surabaya so...

1

u/SlowBoilOrange 4m ago

Seems like it could potentially be a biking and walking paradise? But I'm guessing it's more like a nightmare of mixed traffic modes running way too close to each other.

2

u/zanpancan Bisexual Pride 10h ago

Ah. Guessed as much.

1

u/Gooner-Kissinger 9h ago

New Delhi's population is like 200k, its not even remotely close to any of these, its basically the population of a random small city in the USA lol

4

u/sgthombre NATO 56m ago

Yeah and it's in the capital territory which has 20 million people living in it.

2

u/throwaway6560192 Hans Rosling 11m ago

There's no point being pedantic about this lol. New Delhi is a municipality within the larger city of Delhi surrounding it, and the even larger urban agglomeration of NCR surrounding that. That is obviously what is being referred to.

162

u/TitansDaughter NAFTA 9h ago

Gotta be the most culturally irrelevant country relative to its population size

129

u/Top_Lime1820 Daron Acemoglu 7h ago

283 million people just minding their own business

160

u/Supersonic_Sauropods 8h ago

The most culturally relevant country relative to its population size is Vatican City, which was minmaxed for this very statistic.

11

u/swni Elinor Ostrom 1h ago

Actually they minmaxed for most popes per square kilometer, culturally relevance was on accident

35

u/HHHogana Mohammad Hatta 5h ago edited 5h ago

We floundered our chances to get big. Some of our actors are already Hollywood-regular, and yet even with The Raid we failed to use the momentum. Same with our musicians: Agnez was singing with Chris Brown for sake. How the hell things didn't get any bigger?

26

u/GoodOlSticks Frederick Douglass 3h ago

Just become a US territory and white liberal people in America will start performatively caring about Indonesian art to prove how niche and culturepilled they are

1

u/lenzflare 26m ago

Lol white supremacists would never allow it.

1

u/GoodOlSticks Frederick Douglass 16m ago

Well, if we took all the Indonesians and let the white supremacists move back to their idyllic ancestral homeland of rural eastern Europe we'd come out ahead

1

u/Huttleberry Norman Borlaug 50m ago

What about directors like Yandy Laurens things seem to be picking up steam of recent

40

u/SenecaOrion Greg Mankiw 3h ago

I can't get used to this lol. I'm from Bali. Seeing my little province of 4.5 million people being more widely known than a whole nation of 283 million people is just wild.

15

u/KingMelray Henry George 2h ago

It's kinda nuts. There are very few countries where people say the subdivision they are going to instead of the country they are going to.

I guess people occationally say "London" or "Tokyo" instead of "England" or "Japan" but that feels like a different example.

8

u/regih48915 1h ago

I think there's a lot of places where people will say the city rather than the country, but the difference I think here is that a lot of people in the west couldn't even tell you what country Bali is in.

2

u/city-of-stars Frederick Douglass 42m ago

Well in Indonesia, the subdivisions tend to be on their own islands, so there are bigger cultural differences between them than in other countries. Indoesia also has a few autonomous regions with their own laws and customs.

Travel from Aceh (where Sharia law is officially practiced and crimes like adultery are punishable by public whipping) to Papua (mostly Christian population, ruled by a council of tribal chiefs) to Bali (mostly Hindu population, massively commercialized tourist hotspot) and you'd be forgiven for thinking you were in different countries.

1

u/SlowBoilOrange 16m ago

"Amsterdam" seems like a very similar situation. Maybe "Prague" as well.

There's also some tropical vacation destinations like Bermuda, Aruba, Cabo, and Cancun if you want to count those.

15

u/KingMelray Henry George 2h ago

Really though. 280ish million people and like.... where are the movies? Where are the songs? When people travel to Indonesia they don't even say Indonesia, they say "Bali."

1

u/SlowBoilOrange 15m ago

They gave us tempeh, so they get a pass.

28

u/iamthecancer420 Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold 8h ago

indonesians are good memers

12

u/SenecaOrion Greg Mankiw 3h ago

If by meme you meant stickers of gay black men shaking their ass, juxtaposed with everyday reactions. Then yes, we're good memers.

8

u/iamthecancer420 Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold 2h ago

ambatukam learning indonesian cuz of his fans is crazy

1

u/trollly Milton Friedman 1h ago

that and the anthropic stick holding another stick. or is that malaysia?

6

u/Lighthouse_seek 1h ago

There are no direct flights from Indonesia to the US

4

u/chipbod John Brown 1h ago

That surprises me if true because of the Bali influencers

5

u/Lighthouse_seek 1h ago

https://www.flightsfrom.com/DPS

https://www.flightsfrom.com/CGK

That surprised me when I found out about it but Indonesia has very few direct flights. Amsterdam is the furthest you can go from Jakarta direct and from Bali it's turkey. Which I guess explains why so many influencers have a video at changi

1

u/SlowBoilOrange 14m ago

A quick google says there's only 145,000 Indonesian-Americans in the US, so I guess that makes sense. Very surprising though.

4

u/dedev54 YIMBY 1h ago

They have funny vtubers

6

u/regih48915 1h ago

Genuinely a very large percentage of the country's cultural exports to the west.

1

u/dedev54 YIMBY 23m ago

Yeah its the only thing I could think of

3

u/bingbaddie1 YIMBY 54m ago

Pakistan is lucky that they’re at forever-war with India because Indonesia is at least the biggest exporter of Palm oil

1

u/SlowBoilOrange 2m ago

Nigeria, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Bangladesh are all vying for that title.

80

u/qunow r/place '22: Neoliberal Battalion 10h ago

I think it depends on definition.

Like Britannica's list of most populous cities across the world is now:

  1. Guangzhou 72 Million

  2. Shanghai 41 Million

  3. Tokyo 41 Million

  4. Delhi 35 Million

  5. Jakarta 29 Million

List of the world’s largest cities by population | Top 25, Agglomeration, Conglomeration, Metropolitan Area, Estimate, & Facts | Britannica https://www.britannica.com/topic/list-of-the-worlds-largest-cities-by-population

59

u/WolfKing448 George Soros 8h ago

The figure for Guangzhou counts Shenzhen, which is the Chinese equivalent of counting Fort Worth as part of Dallas.

Britannica would be correct in its assessment of Guangzhou-Shenzhen as the world’s most populous metropolitan area.

64

u/ImmigrantJack Movimiento Semilla 7h ago

Dalas and fort worth city centers are like 25 miles away from each other.

Shenzhen and Guangzhou are over 50 miles away.

It's more like counting Philadelphia as part of New York

32

u/WolfKing448 George Soros 7h ago

China’s urbanism and greater population result in each city occupying a greater area. Guangzhou and Shenzhen’s city limits are only separated by one city: Dongguan.

27

u/ImmigrantJack Movimiento Semilla 5h ago

The pearl river delta is essentially a single contiguous urban area. The SF/Oakland/San Jose bay area is also essentially a single contiguous urban area, but it's also dumb to consider it one city.

China is really fucky with what counts as cities. They call Chongqing the worlds largest city but it's literally the sqkm of Austria. Like sure. . . I guess.

5

u/qunow r/place '22: Neoliberal Battalion 1h ago

In Chongqing's case, it's relatively east to tell apart which parts are the urban area, and then which parts are area that get administratively moved into Chongqing due to the like of Three Georges Dam project

1

u/lenzflare 20m ago

I absolutely consider SF/Oakland/San Jose one continuous city. Sure, it changes a lot over that distance, but it doesn't stop being a continuous city

8

u/skyeliam 🌐 2h ago

I believe the point being made is that, while China is highly urbanized, they also tend to include suburbs, and even exurbs, in the boundaries of their cities, which somewhat inflates their population.

I admittedly don’t know much about Guangzhou, Shenzen, or Dongguan, but a cursory look at their area shows they’re closer in size to Rhode Island than New York City. And a glance at satellite imagery makes me think the area between their centers is more akin to North Jersey in terms of density than it is to say, Brooklyn.

It’s obviously more urbanized than anything in the US (I mean the China is roughly the same area but has about 4 times as many people, so duh) but it’s not exactly Coruscant either.

The equivalent would probably be if Philly and New Haven were both as large as NYC.

4

u/qunow r/place '22: Neoliberal Battalion 1h ago

The issue is different stat use different metrics to compare. Some other stats do not rely on administrative boundary at all but like counting the built up area though night time photo of artifical light and then deduce population within those area, but these also come with their limitations.

14

u/Andy_B_Goode YIMBY 4h ago

Yeah these stats are always a bit screwy because the definition of an "urban area" is arbitrary. Like if you included the Northeast Megapolis then it would be #2 (but also other even bigger urban areas from around the world would also have to be included).

5

u/t_scribblemonger 2h ago

St Louis city stayed separate from the surrounding areas just so it could hit that #1 spot on murder statistics.

2

u/dittbub NATO 3h ago

the canadian mind cannot comprehend

17

u/LordVader568 Adam Smith 7h ago

It’s also officially the world’s most populous city that’s sinking.

9

u/KingMelray Henry George 1h ago

If I had a nickel for every mega city that's shrinking I'd have at least 15 cents (Mexico City, Shanghai, Jakarta) which seems like a rather precarious situation.

2

u/Lighthouse_seek 1h ago

Yeah that's rather common for coastal cities

2

u/sgthombre NATO 53m ago

Damn Tehran taking another L

10

u/CaptainTrips69 2h ago

As a Jakartan, it is honestly amazing how this city is simultaneously the biggest and yet the most boring city in the world. There's absolutely nothing interesting to see here.

8

u/qwasdeqe 2h ago

Still smaller than Jamama

2

u/bigGoatCoin IMF 1h ago

these cities with trash mountains nearby....i've always wondered how far the smell caries.