“Build it and they will come”? A critical examination of utopian planning practices and their socio-spatial impacts in Malaysia's “intelligent city”

Abstract

Cyberjaya was heralded in the mid-1990s as the Multimedia Super Corridor's (MSC) flagship “intelligent city” and designed to prepare Malaysia and its citizens for a giant leap forward into an imagined new “information age.” The urban mega-project constituted a state led response to the much hyped “siliconization of Asia” and was planned to fast-track national development through investment in information and communications technologies (ICTs). The creation of an “intelligent city” replete with science parks, technology districts, green campuses for high-tech companies and a manicured environment for their employees was envisaged to attract investment from multinational companies (MNCs), enabling the country to leapfrog up the development chain and become a global “knowledge economy” hub. Ten years on from the excessive high-tech utopianism and urban boosterism that accompanied the city's launch, the paper promotes qualitative methodologies to addresses the uneven socio-spatial consequences of Cyberjaya's utopian project. The paper argues explores how the “intelligent city” manifested itself as a sensorially impoverished, disconnected business park clone with limited innovative capacity and benefits for wider economic and social development.