This paper is an early exploration of the development of the new international airport (NIA) in Kulon Progo District, Yogyakarta as one of the prioritized massive presidential infrastructural projects. One of the promises offered by this project, aside from boosting national economy, is to improve local welfare through the rhythms of investment.

On the one hand, as an infrastructural object, NIA is projected to be a new national symbol of global connectivity and progress. But on the other hand, NIA could no longer appear to reflect the promises it offers. Instead, the future airport represents an example of how local people become disconnected from their collective memory on social relations and environment as well as their living resources. To this day, the project has been embroiled by controversies, related to state-initiated land-grabbing and eviction of local-residents that creates the uncertainty, which led to different forms of resistance.

In this regard, it only becomes natural to inquire about how Indonesia’s government massive infrastructural projects shape not only on political and social life, but also to restructure the citizen rights and sovereignty (Ong 2005). By examining contemporary ‘internal colonialism’ (Scott 2009:13) by the state to its citizens and transformations of the social and material infrastructures (Simone 2004; Larkin 2013), this paper attempts to understand how Kulon Progo district is being (re-)imagined as the new Yogyakarta’s edge (Harms 2011), and what are the values beneath this peri-urbanscape development processes could result in vanishing ruralscape.