Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo (Jokowi) announced the plan to move the national capital city from Jakarta, on the island of Java, to the province of East Kalimantan, in Borneo. The plan is a very ambitious project, which, in our view, poses more threats and challenges than giving opportunities to the country.

In this paper, we argue that the difficulties implied in moving the Indonesian capital city from Jakarta to a city that needs to be built from scratch are not simply of a technical nature; they are ontological. While many urban planners would like to design cities as if they could be works of art, with a top-down process, without the guidance provided by market prices and the recognition of the complex network of evolutionary human relationships constituting a city, costly utopias rather than beautiful dreams would emerge.