Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya

Abstract

Ross King’s Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya: Negotiating Urban Space inMalaysia provides a provocative interpretation of urban landscapes inKuala Lumpur and Putrajaya, a recently built government administrativecenter. He attempts to explicate meanings of the built urban environment aswell as its history, ideology, and contemporary possibilities.Consisting of a preface, five chapters, and an afterword, the book ishighly illustrated with pictures, sketches, maps, and architectural plans. Inthe preface, King introduces the dilemma of Malaysian nationalism, imagininga multicultural nation with a politically dominant Malay Muslimmajority, through the specter of the fiftieth anniversary of independence.He informs us that its two venues – Kuala Lumpur’s jumbled, multi-communityspaces and Putrajaya’s purely Malay pan-Islamic spaces – indicatesan ambivalent identity: Kuala Lumpur, “historically a Chinese town … istoday the capital of a nation that privileges the Malays” (p. xxiii). He immediatelymoves to selectively deconstruct Malay identity, stating that it is “inthe main a construction of the colonial era” during which people of diverseorigins from insular Southeast Asia migrated to the Peninsula (ibid). Thisoft-repeated assertion, which is a hotly contested topic in Malaysian discourse,indicates a slant toward the widespread Chinese Malaysian perspectivethat Malays are not the country’s true “natives.” King also states thathis focus will be to “read” the messages of architecture in terms of thingsobserved, imagined, forgotten, and potentially reconciled along with somehistorical background ...