Events

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Tim Bunnell, Asia Research Institute, and Department of Geography, National University of Singapore

PROGRAMME

ABSTRACT

The planning and construction of Indonesia’s new national capital, Nusantara, has drawn global attention to urban development in East Kalimantan and Borneo more widely. In line with conventional imaginings of urbanization, the bulk of recent media and academic attention has been on the site of the new city and its immediate vicinity. Yet the infrastructural investment needed to sustain and interconnect Nusantara invokes conceptions of urban development in more spatially extensive terms. Following work on extended urbanization it is possible to map Nusantara and directly associated infrastructure into even wider frames or scales of urban analysis. This discussion concerns possibilities for research taking Borneo as a frame of urban analysis. This involves not only the emergence (and impacts) of new cities and infrastructure in Brunei, East Malaysia and Kalimantan but also their interconnections or relational geographies. Any transnational collaboration on urbanization across Borneo will also have to address challenges associated with the historical partitioning of urban expertise within national frames of analysis.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Hasharina Hassan is Senior Assistant Professor in the Geography, Environment and Development Programme at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Universiti Brunei Darussalam. She obtained her MA and PhD in Geography from the University of Southampton specializing in Urban Economy and Culture. Her research began with a focus on sustainable urban development particularly looking at the financial regulations, urban consumption, and social sustainability of the urban dwellers in Brunei. She has subsequently expanded her urban sustainability research into social welfare including poverty and housing. Her latest work focuses on the resiliency of vulnerable urban communities, their adaptation capabilities, and their relationship with their environment. Her current research involvement includes: (a) understanding the future of urban landscapes/sites with changing policies and environments such as climate change, national and sustainable development plans, and (b) urbanization in Borneo. Hasharina is also a researcher and currently serves at the Institute of Asian Studies. She also serves as an editorial board member for the Asia in Transition Book Series (Springer) and as Associate Editor for Southeast Asia: A Multidisciplinary Journal. She was appointed as a visiting scholar at the East West Centre, Hawaii in 2014 and a visiting research fellow at King’s College London in 2015. Moving forward, her goal is to delve deeper into the intricacies of urbanization in Borneo and foster interdisciplinary research collaboration on urban sustainable development.

Walker DePuy is a postdoctoral fellow with the Asian Urbanisms and the Science, Technology, and Society clusters at Asia Research Institute (ARI). He is an environmental anthropologist whose research examines questions of environmental justice and conservation governance across the Global South. At ARI, he is furthering a research programme with partners from Cornell University, University of North Carolina, Mulawarman University, and local area communities to study Indonesia’s relocation of its national capital from Jakarta to East Kalimantan through multi-sited ethnography, collaborative science, and Indigenous soundscapes. For this work, Dr DePuy is also affiliated with Cornell University’s Department of Natural Resources and the Environment.

Bosman Batubara is a postdoctoral fellow at the Human Geography and Spatial Planning Department, Utrecht University (2022-2024), and will be joining the Asian Urbanism cluster at Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore (2025-2026). His research at ARI aims to open up the expansion of urban frontier beyond the city by examining the flows of labour, rock, and energy for the new Indonesia’s capital city of Nusantara. He defended his PhD thesis entitled “Floods in (post-) New Order Jakarta: A political ecology of urbanization” at Human Geography, Planning, and International Development Department, University of Amsterdam and Water Governance Department at IHE Delft Institute for Water Education. He holds a master’s degree in water resources engineering from Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and a bachelor’s degree in geological engineering from Gadjah Mada University, Indonesia. His research interests in general are uneven relations of capitalism (and urbanization) within and beyond the city, in horizontal and vertical directions, involving human and non-human, above and below ground.