Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya

Abstract

Ross King’s Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya: Negotiating Urban Space in Malaysia provides a provocative interpretation of urban landscapes in Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya, a recently built government administrative center. He attempts to explicate meanings of the built urban environment as well as its history, ideology, and contemporary possibilities. Consisting of a preface, five chapters, and an afterword, the book is highly illustrated with pictures, sketches, maps, and architectural plans. In the preface, King introduces the dilemma of Malaysian nationalism, imagining a multicultural nation with a politically dominant Malay Muslim majority, through the specter of the fiftieth anniversary of independence. He informs us that its two venues – Kuala Lumpur’s jumbled, multi-community spaces and Putrajaya’s purely Malay pan-Islamic spaces – indicates an ambivalent identity: Kuala Lumpur, “historically a Chinese town … is today the capital of a nation that privileges the Malays” (p. xxiii). He immediately moves to selectively deconstruct Malay identity, stating that it is “in the main a construction of the colonial era” during which people of diverse origins from insular Southeast Asia migrated to the Peninsula (ibid). This oft-repeated assertion, which is a hotly contested topic in Malaysian discourse, indicates a slant toward the widespread Chinese Malaysian perspective that Malays are not the country’s true “natives.” King also states that his focus will be to “read” the messages of architecture in terms of things observed, imagined, forgotten, and potentially reconciled along with some historical background ...