Preserving Cultural Landscape: Malaysia’s East Coast traditional Malay settlement in change

Abstract

A traditional settlement is defined as an area with sound and a strong sense of traditional village character inhabited by a society that preserves their cultural and traditional practices. However, the society’s traditions and way of life have continuously been threatened as the country moves towards urbanisation. Thus, this paper aimed to identify the changes in the traditional settlement and identify the issues in deterioration of traditional Malay settlement. A mixed-method approach applied as the research methodology. The findings reveal the changes and impact include six underlying factors; natural disaster, lack of maintenance, modern development, destruction by irresponsible parties, lack of awareness and declining of traditional product in the market.Keywords: traditional settlements; issues; heritage sites; conservation of heritage siteseISSN 2398-4295 © 2019. The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA cE-Bs by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open-access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians) and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.21834/ajbes.v4i16.177