Bandung
Where 54% of the world's population declared non-alignment in 1955 — now Indonesia's #2 startup hub, connected to Jakarta by high-speed rail, built on a century-old textile base.
In April 1955, representatives of 29 nations comprising 54% of the world's population gathered in Bandung to declare that the decolonising world would not be forced to choose sides in the Cold War — a conference that seeded the Non-Aligned Movement, the Group of 77, and the conceptual framework of the 'Third World' itself. Seven decades later, Bandung's economy runs on textiles and tech startups, and the conference is a heritage site. Indonesia's third-largest city with 2.
8 million people sits 129 kilometres from Jakarta in the West Java highlands, at an elevation that makes it cooler and more liveable than the humid capital. The Bandung metropolitan area exceeds 11 million, making it Indonesia's second-largest metro. Beyond its role as a cultural and educational centre, Bandung is better understood as an economy built on two manufacturing layers separated by a century.
The Bandung metropolitan area exceeds 11 million, making it Indonesia's second-largest metro.
The textile industry, established when the Dutch colonial government founded the Bandung Textile Institute in 1922, now encompasses roughly 2,000 industrial facilities in the Citarum River basin, absorbing over 700,000 workers and valued at $5 million in Bandung Regency alone. The Citarum has become one of the world's most polluted rivers as a consequence — the environmental cost of the jobs the industry provides. The second layer is digital: Bandung ranks second domestically in the Global Startup Ecosystem Index 2025 and produced eFishery, the first unicorn company based outside Jakarta.
Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB), Indonesia's MIT equivalent, supplies the engineering talent. The Whoosh high-speed rail connecting Bandung to Jakarta in 40 minutes (opened 2023) transformed the city's competitive position overnight, making it viable for tech workers to live in Bandung's cheaper, cooler environment while maintaining Jakarta access. The biological parallel is adaptive radiation: a single lineage (Bandung's geographic and institutional base) diversifying rapidly into different economic niches — colonial-era textiles, postcolonial diplomacy, and now digital startups — as new environmental conditions (independence, globalisation, high-speed rail) open new opportunities.