Geographies of Nusantara Planning Documents

People circulate documents too. All architectural and urban planning projects have references to—existing objects, cities, landscapes, and places in different geographies. Architects and designers travel, visit, feel, and immerse in these materialities; record them in notes, sketches, and photographs. Fragments of such materialities are collected and inscribed into coherent documents/books through which ideas circulate beyond their origin. This article links various geographies inscribed and ‘flattened’ in Indonesia's new capital city (IKN) Nusantara planning documents. How do the elites and experts use Nusantara planning documents to refer to places for imagining a new capital city? The research analysed the content of three artefacts of Nusantara planning documents: legal instruments (Academic Script and Capital City Law), master plan scheme (the design of the capital city core area), and promotional document (the Handbook of Capital City). Various relevant works on the role of documents in capital cities said little about the places referred to within the documents. This chapter contributed to the discussion of inter-referencing within documents and demonstrated how referencing places, limits the site of interest, constructs rationales for the capital city project, and assembles the capital city materialities; and argued that the conceptual form of a city is an assemblage of multiple knowledge—vernacular or modern, local or global—that is stabilised and flattened in its planning documents.