Urban Discipline for Urban Policy: Forming a Modern Subject Under the Nusantara Capital City Development

This article aims to examine how urbanisation in Nusantara has been a project to impose modernity on the people, articulated through urban discipline and urban policy. Using an exploratory study, we interviewed individuals from Indigenous communities, conducted a focus group discussion, and analysed webinars and technical documents related to Nusantara through content analysis and a desk study. Our findings reveal that the development of Nusantara was motivated by the desire to improve the region through two discourses: sustainability and techno-urbanism, stemming from global environmental and digital disruption discourses. These discourses are then exercised as the basis of modernity efforts introduced to the Indigenous community of the Paser-Balik people. These efforts include spatial planning, land and forest management, job creation, and digital bureaucracy, which aim to reassemble the people as modern subjects. In response to these efforts, the communities made Adat-based land claims and leveraged their identity to express their ontology. The responses from local and Indigenous communities are a form of political ontology to assert their power through imaginative instruments. Such imaginative powers must be incorporated into urban policy to achieve inclusivity in Nusantara development. © 2025 Editorial Board, Urban Policy and Research.