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  • A New Capital City for Indonesia (Maybe), SunZia’s Wind Plus Transmission Mega Project, World’s First Drive Through Mall, NYC Congestion Pricing Assessment

A New Capital City for Indonesia (Maybe), SunZia’s Wind Plus Transmission Mega Project, World’s First Drive Through Mall, NYC Congestion Pricing Assessment

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Editorial Staff
December 15, 2025

 

Here's our latest round-up of news and insights about the future of cities and urban development.

You Should Know

  • Global EV sales rose 21%, but fell 1% in N. America year-to-date, Benchmark Mineral Intelligence reports. China led with 11.6M sales versus 1.7M in N. America. The U.S. decline stems from policy shifts, new tariffs, and the end of the $7,500 tax credit.

  • 22 nations pledged to triple nuclear generation capacity by 2050. The pledge was signed at the UN's Climate Change Conference in Dubai. US, Canada, Japan, France, the UK were among the signees.

  • A federal judge struck down President Trump’s wind-project ban as “arbitrary and capricious.” The ban halted all new permits and leases for offshore and onshore wind power projects in the U.S. The decision is a major win for the wind industry and the 17 states that challenged the ban.

Worth Watching

Top Stories

Indonesia’s Plan for a Bold, New Capital City Faces a Reality Check

Jakarta, Indonesia’s current capital, is the world’s most populous city, home to an estimated 42 million people—and an equally vast set of challenges that threaten its future, including overcrowding, pollution, traffic gridlock, and land subsidence.

Seeking a fresh start, Indonesia announced a plan in 2019 to build a new political and economic capital on the island of Borneo. Named Nusantara, the new capital was envisioned as a “smart forest city,” with nearly all of its energy generated from renewable sources. A government decree set 2028 as the official target for the relocation of the political capital.

Projected to cover an area of 2,560 square kilometers—four times the size of Jakarta—Nusantara will be developed in multiple phases through 2045, aligning with Indonesia’s 100th anniversary.

The project was budgeted at roughly US$35 billion, with the state intending to fund only a minority of the cost and the remainder expected to come from domestic and foreign investors.

Construction began in 2022 with land clearing, followed by Phase 1 of the Main Governmental Area. By October 2024, key symbols of statehood—including the presidential palace, ministry offices, housing for civil servants, monuments, and public parks—were reported to be complete, alongside privately funded hotels, hospitals, and a national football training center. Nusantara International Airport was inaugurated in late 2024.

Despite the progress, Nusantara is facing serious challenges across funding, governance, population uptake, construction momentum, and local impact.

The clearest signal is the formal downgrade of Nusantara’s national status. Under President Prabowo Subianto, the project was reclassified in May 2025 from Indonesia’s future national capital to a “political capital,” a change only disclosed publicly in September.

Funding reductions reinforce that assessment. State funding fell sharply from about $2.5 billion in 2024 to roughly $375 million allocated for 2026. Private investment has also missed targets by more than $1.3 billion.

Population shortfalls further underline the challenge. Three years into development, Nusantara is home to about 2,000 civil servants and 8,000 construction workers, far below the 2030 target of 1.2 million residents. Without a significant influx of permanent residents, the city risks becoming a “ghost town.”

On the ground, construction has progressed unevenly, leading local businesses to describe a boom-and-bust pattern as work slowed and workers departed.

Together, these tensions underline Nusantara’s central dilemma: too big and politically embedded to abandon, yet too underfunded, contested, and conceptually muddled to easily realize its original promise.

America’s Largest Renewable Energy Infrastructure Project Tackles the Grid Bottleneck

In many parts of the world, the best renewable resources—especially wind—are located far from where electricity is consumed. The issue isn’t generating enough renewable energy, but how to move it. Wind energy cannot reach many markets because the transmission grid is insufficient or poorly located.

In the U.S. Southwest, the SunZia project directly tackles this constraint by pairing massive wind generation with a purpose-built, long-distance, high-voltage transmission line. Instead of waiting for grid upgrades that may take decades, the project integrates generation and delivery into a single system. The result is the largest renewable energy infrastructure project in U.S. history.

At full build-out, SunZia will efficiently deliver more than 3.5 gigawatts of wind generation, a capacity that rivals major hydroelectric facilities and places it among the largest wind projects globally. The wind facilities span Torrance, Lincoln, and San Miguel Counties in New Mexico and include more than 900 wind turbines spread across high-wind regions of the state.

The SunZia project also includes a 550-mile high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission line engineered specifically to carry electricity over long distances with minimal losses. The ±525 kV HVDC system is designed to transport up to 3,000 MW of power from central New Mexico to south-central Arizona, where it connects to the regional grid and makes the energy available to markets across the broader Southwest.

In financial terms, SunZia is a true megaproject. Total investment is estimated at more than $8 billion, with some project estimates reaching approximately $11 billion. Of that, roughly $1 billion is expected to flow directly to governments, schools, communities, and landowners through taxes, land leases, and other payments, providing long-term revenue in rural areas.

SunZia’s scale is matched by the length of its development timeline. First proposed in 2006, the project navigated nearly two decades of permitting, regulatory reviews, redesigns, and legal challenges before construction finally began in 2023.

Today, SunZia is well into construction. Major portions of the transmission line are complete, while the wind farms are largely built. Commercial operations are targeted for 2025–2026, with full completion expected in 2026, marking the arrival of a landmark project that will reshape access to large-scale renewable energy in the U.S.

Dubai Unveils the World’s First Drive-Through “Indoor” Shopping District

It’s hard to shop in Dubai when summer temperatures routinely exceed 40°C (104°F). Less ambitious cities turn to air-conditioned malls as a solution—but Dubai is not most cities. Instead of building a bigger mall, why not place an entire shopping district inside a fully climate-controlled structure that you can literally drive through?

That ambition underpins Emaar Properties’ announcement of Dubai Square, the world’s first drive-through mall and an “indoor city” nearly three times the size of Downtown Dubai. The scale is extraordinary: a 2.6-million-square-meter development where automotive mobility, retail, hospitality, and urban design are integrated under one roof.

Dubai Square will anchor Emaar’s wider Dubai Creek Harbour development—an 11-million-square-metre waterfront district with a total development cost of approximately $49 billion.

Within this larger master plan, Dubai Square is a unique urban development model that reframes mobility as part of the shopping experience. Interior driving lanes, structured navigation zones, and multiple access points allow visitors to enter, circulate, and park within different sections of the mall.

Surrounding the mall, Dubai Creek Harbour includes 7.4 million square meters of residential space and 500,000 square meters of landscaped greenery. This integration ensures that Dubai Square functions not only as a commercial anchor but also as a social hub woven into walkable streets, waterfront attractions, and connected leisure districts. Skylights, glazed roofs, LED installations, and expansive glass surfaces enhance the project’s immersive and open atmosphere.

Dubai Square is also engineered from the ground up for electric mobility. Unlike malls retrofitted with charging points, this development embeds EV infrastructure into its layout—dedicated charging zones, EV-compatible internal routes, and sustainable transport systems designed for a next-generation visitor experience.

AI further shapes both the architecture and operations. Emaar describes it as a “new science in design,” with Dubai Square among the first malls to integrate AI at its core—anticipating visitor flows, predicting retailer needs, and optimizing daily operations as well as long-term planning. While typical malls apply technology at the tenant level, Dubai Square incorporates it into the building’s foundational logic.

Expected to open in three years, Dubai Square is poised to become a major global tourism landmark—an unprecedented blend of mobility, sustainability, and mega-scale design.

One Year In, Is NYC Congestion Pricing Actually Working?

Hard to believe, but New York City is already approaching the one-year mark since it launched its congestion pricing program. Since January 5, 2025, most drivers entering Manhattan’s Congestion Relief Zone—local streets at or below 60th Street—have faced a $9 peak-period charge. NYC’s initiative is notable because it is the first cordon-style congestion pricing program in the U.S.

So what do the one-year results show? For now, proponents are largely shaping the narrative, supported by a growing body of data that highlights the program’s positive outcomes.

On the core question of traffic volumes and speeds, the early signals are consistent. City officials reported 17.6 million fewer vehicles entering Manhattan in 2025, roughly a 12% decline compared with baseline expectations. The National Bureau of Economic Research found that average speeds within the congestion zone rose by about 15%.

These traffic changes appear to be translating into safety benefits. According to figures reported by Reuters, crashes within the zone fell by 14% in 2025, while traffic-related injuries declined by 15%, based on data from state and MTA officials.

Evidence on air quality is beginning to firm up. A Cornell-led study published in npj Clean Air estimated that fine particulate pollution (PM2.5) fell by 22% inside the congestion zone during the program’s first six months, with additional declines observed across the broader metropolitan area.

Transit ridership has risen alongside these street-level shifts. Subway ridership increased by 9% and bus ridership by 13% in 2025, according to Reuters, reflecting both a shift away from driving and improved surface travel times for buses.

Congestion pricing has also become a meaningful revenue source. The New York Times reported $45 million in net revenue in March alone, putting the program on pace to generate roughly $500 million in its first year for transit investment.

At the same time, concerns remain. Parking spillover and traffic redistribution continue to worry critics, particularly the possibility that congestion is shifting to streets just outside the zone. Early data suggest uneven, corridor-specific effects rather than uniform spillover, but the evidence base is still evolving.

Academic and modeling work also suggests there can be welfare losses for specific segments, such as certain neighborhoods or commuters with limited transit options.

One year in, litigation remains an unresolved variable. Lawsuits challenging federal approvals are still pending, though courts have so far allowed congestion pricing to remain in effect.

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