Bad Urban Design: Center Point of Indonesia, a missed opportunity to put Makassar on the map

Center Point of Indonesia is a megaproject being built off the coast of Makassar. City planners had an opportunity to make an iconic global city. Instead, they have opted for suburbia in the sea. They are making the same urban planning mistakes that are being made in every other Indonesian city.

This is a review of my visit to Center Point of Indonesia in May 2024.

About Center Point of Indonesia

Center Point of Indonesia (CPI) is a new urban area being built on reclaimed land in Makassar, South Sulawesi. The project is opposite the waterfront area of the city centre.

The most distinguishing feature of the project is the Garuda-shaped land, though only birds are able to appreciate the shape.

I first found out about this project when I visited Makassar in 2015. There has barely been any mention of the project in the English-language news sites of Indonesia, so I have put together a fact sheet of the project. Read about Center Point of Indonesia first if you are unfamiliar.

The fact sheet includes links to environmental reports regarding dredging sand, building on top of the coastal ecosystem, and other environmental issues. My report is covering urban planning issues.

Center Point of Indonesia as viewed from Losari Beach

I returned to Makassar in 2024 to review the first section of the Trans-Sulawesi Railway. This trip also gave me the opportunity to review Center Point of Indonesia.

CPI is opposite Losari Beach, which is the city waterfront promenade and not an actual beach. This was all open sea when I last visited, so I was surprised to see a stunning new landmark mosque that has been built on the reclaimed area. This is Masjid Kubah 99 Asmaul Husna (99 Domes Mosque).

[99 Domes Mosque viewed from Losari Beach in Makassar.]

Building an iconic landmark is a good start, but something didn’t feel quite right the longer I looked at it. I was soon to discover why, but we’ll get to that.

Also visible from the old city waterfront is the “Vertical Hospital” that is being built on the Garuda head. This section wasn’t open so I didn’t go over there. 40% of the reclaimed land is being used for government use, such as the hospital and administrative buildings. The patients will have a good view, but I wondered about the wisdom of putting the hospital in the least accessible part of the islands.

[Vertical Hospital in Center Point of Indonesia.]

There is one main entry point to the island group, and it’s a bit of an obstacle course for pedestrians to get there.

Here are the main areas of Center Point Indonesia that I visited.

CPI Twin Tower

My first walking target was to the CPI Twin Tower, which is located in the middle of the circle of the Garuda body.

[Road to CPI Twin Tower.]

I discover early on in this walk the lack of thought for sidewalk construction. Everything here is new, so there is no excuse for no sidewalks. A sensible plan would be that any road that is built has sidewalks on either side of it. Instead, we get nonsense like this.

[A crossing to nowhere in CPI.]

When this project was first conceived in 2008, this circle was going to be Equilibrium Centerpoint Park. This was meant to represent the centre of Indonesia. That factoid didn’t seem right to me so I had to work it out for myself. Makassar is the closest big city to the centre point of Indonesia

The location of Nusantara (the new capital of Indonesia) was partly chosen due to its location close to the centre point of Indonesia. I have plotted the extreme points of Indonesia and the estimated geographic centre of Indonesia on a map. As you can see, the geographic centre is somewhere between Makassar and Nusantara.

The design of the towers looks good, and I like how the ring joins the towers. They will have a height of 162m, so they are not high enough to be a bold landmark.

Work had begun an the towers, but it had stalled due to legal issues.

99 Domes Mosque

After visiting CPI Twin Tower I walked to the 99 Domes Mosque. The lack of planned sidewalks was starting to become a theme,

The 99 Domes Mosque is on the wing facing the old city area. I love the colour of the domes and how they are arranged.

There was something about the red bricks that didn’t seem quite right. Up close I could see that the bricks are printed on a metal cladding.

[Fake bricks of 99 Domes Mosque.]

It looks fake, thus it looks cheap. A better solution would have been to leave the exterior as bare concrete and then slowly tile the exterior.

Business Park

The section called Business Park was the first area I visited that was fully functional.

I have worked at business parks in Australia and the UK, which are copies of the business park model that evolved in the US. They are usually office blocks built on cheap land in the far outer reaches of the city. There is of course no public transport, so office workers need a car and the office blocks are surrounded by car parks.

Business parks are boring soulless places that should be phased out of existence.

[Business Park surrounded by car parking.]

Sunset Quay

The sunset Quay section wasn’t finished, but I could get a sense of what it was going to become. Following up on the American business park model, here we have strip mall retail area. Note the amount of space for car parking.

This section is also built for cars, with pedestrians once again being an afterthought.

[What is the point of laying tactile paving if you do this. Slow clap 👏.]

At least the seaside section of Sunset Quay is a more pedestrian-friendly environment.

[Seaside promenade at Sunset Quay.]

Cookie-cutter housing and gated communities

I knew I was going to be disappointed with CPI when I saw the rows of cookie-cutter houses on the planning map. That still didn’t prepare me from being disappointed when I saw the rows of cookie-cutter houses.

Along with cookie-cutter housing, another thing that bothers me about these projects are gated communities. If a developer is going to build a gated community, it should be somewhere secluded and not in a space that is supposed to be a new city centre.

Bad traffic and why we shouldn’t build islands that look like things

One of the design flaws of CPI is the two bridges that converge on the traffic roundabout. The design didn’t look right on the map, but I didn’t think about it during the day when there was no traffic.

I went back in the afternoon when everyone goes to watch the sunset. When I walked back to the old city I encountered a traffic jam at the main roundabout.

I was on the side of the road opposite Losari Beach, and there was no safe place to cross the road as a pedestrian. I had to wait until the traffic was jammed to a stop, and then cross the road.

One of the roads that leads to this traffic circle from hell forms the bottom outline of the left wing of the Garuda. If you were drawing up a plan for a new urban area, you wouldn’t draw a road layout that looks like this. The designers appear to have been boxed in by the wing shape.

After the problems that Dubai has had with The World project, it’s amazing that developers are still persisting with islands shaped like things. Malaysia might be next with its eagle-shaped island group. I don’t understand why developers don’t just recreate Manhattan by placing a grid on a rectangular island.

How to improve Center Point of Indonesia

There are some good aspects of CPI that offered a glimpse of what it might look like if it was more thoughtfully planned. I walked along this stretch of road that had a wide tree-lined sidewalk. This should be the baseline minimum for any road that is built.

There was a completed waterfront apartment block that looks good, though note the driveway cutting off the sidewalk.

CPI would have looked more like a city if they had divided up blocks and have unique buildings on each block. Makassar has paid an enormous economic and environmental price to reclaim all of this land, only to build low-density housing stock that is usually associated with outer suburban development.

Blocks with individual buildings is what a normal city looks like, but it is not how developers who are building an entire new urban area work. It’s in the developers interest to mass produce the same housing types so they can lower their costs. It’s up to the city to not let them do this. I have written about not allowing a single developer to build an entire city in my article about building better cities in Southeast Asia.

An example of a new coastal area that is flourishing is the An Thuong area in Da Nang. The streets were gridded out by the government, and individual developers have been building on each block over the last two decades.

Another problem that isn’t addressed is the future traffic situation. What will it look like when it is fully built and there is more traffic trying to enter the limited road space?

There is a proposed MRT system for Makassar, so why wasn’t there a plan to include the transit system at CPI. It would have been simple enough to reserve land in the middle of the main roads for an elevated railway.

Indonesia needs global cities

CPI should have been built as a grand city centre to attract visitors and new investment. It should have been the financial capital of East Indonesia, but instead it’s copying the car-centric American suburbia.

I will be writing more about problems of cities in Indonesia, so subscribe to the Future Southeast Asia newsletter for updates.

This article is part of a series about bad urban design in Southeast Asia. See my previous article about the bad urban design of Cyberjaya: Malaysia’s ‘failed Silicon Valley’.