From Boo Jia Cher
Take a walk in Pudu. Along Jalan Changkat Thambi Dollah, the city feels chaotic but grounded and human-scaled. Follow the road towards the Jalan Barat flyover, however, and that feeling disappears. Suddenly, you are looking directly at the glass towers of the Tun Razak Exchange (TRX).
Barely 50 metres separate Pudu’s ageing shophouses from TRX’s gleaming financial district. Yet pedestrians trying to cross between them are forced to hike along the flyover with no pavement. Schoolchildren have been seen making the same dangerous journey.
This points to a larger problem in Kuala Lumpur: much of our infrastructure is designed to move people quickly across the city, while paying far less attention to those who actually live on the ground below.
Two cities, two approaches
Both KL and Singapore have historic, low-rise commercial neighbourhoods beside modern high-rise business districts. But the relationship between them is very different.
Singapore’s Chinatown and financial district are connected by the city’s street grid and public transport. In KL, the connection is broken by flyovers, wide roads and hostile pedestrian environments such as Jalan Barat.
Singapore has often dealt with density by stacking uses vertically. Public housing, hawker centres, markets and shops occupy the same developments, allowing a finance executive working nearby and an elderly public-housing resident to eat at the same hawker centre.
But Singapore’s model comes at a costs. When the state formalised Chinatown’s heritage in the 1980s, it preserved much of its physical fabric while clearing away some of its messier, organic life. Chinatown became cleaner and more orderly, but arguably lost much of its soul.
KL took a different path, but not because it is more committed to preservation. In places like Pudu and Imbi, older neighbourhoods have largely been left vulnerable to decline, speculation and redevelopment. They are treated as ageing areas awaiting transformation rather than communities worth actively protecting.
The result is a different form of displacement. As families moved to car-oriented suburbs such as Puchong and Subang, older residents were left with fewer family and community networks. Ageing apartments house migrant workers — the same people who clean, service and build the luxury developments nearby.
Gentrification is also changing these neighbourhoods, through hotpot restaurants and supermarkets serving tourists, expatriates and new residents, particularly from mainland China.
KL’s older neighbourhoods may feel more spontaneous and lived-in than Singapore’s carefully managed heritage districts. But they are also far more vulnerable to rising land values and speculative development.
The Jalan Barat flyover is a physical reminder of what happens when a city prioritises the movement of cars and capital over the movement of people.
A driver can travel quickly between different parts of KL. But someone trying to walk 50 metres from Pudu towards TRX can find the same journey difficult, unpleasant or dangerous.
If KL wants to stop becoming a collection of luxury enclaves surrounded by neglected inner-city neighborhoods, we need to rethink what good infrastructure means.
1. World-class infrastructure puts people first.
It cannot simply mean highways, huge interchanges and high-capacity rail lines. A world-class city must also make it safe and comfortable to move around without a car.
Reconnecting Pudu to TRX does not require another mega-project. It could begin with something simpler: wide, shaded and protected footpaths, safe crossings and properly designed intersections that make walking between the two areas feel normal.
2. Housing must be treated as public infrastructure.
Singapore also shows that keeping ordinary residents in the city centre requires active public policy. As deputy finance minister Liew Chin Tong has argued, KL must bring Malaysians back to the urban core.
We do not need to copy Singapore’s public housing system wholesale. But the Kuala Lumpur City Hall and GLCs should treat housing as a public purpose: funding affordable homes for young professionals and working-class Malaysians, within walking distance or a short transit ride to their workplaces.
This could include adaptively reusing underutilised shophouses and vacant office buildings as affordable rental or hybrid housing.
3. Renewal should not mean demolition.
Inner-city neighbourhoods should not have only two possible futures: decay or demolition.
Urban renewal does not have to mean handing an entire neighbourhood to a mega-developer. Sometimes it means fixing drains, repairing sidewalks, planting trees, improving lighting, upgrading public spaces and helping existing shop owners keep their businesses.
These may sound like small interventions, but they are often what keeps a neighbourhood alive. It is hoped that housing and local government minister Nga Kor Ming, who has championed the Urban Renewal Act despite opposition, will see renewal through this lens rather than primarily as a financial exercise.
KL can build a world-class financial district without turning the neighbourhoods beside it into neglected ghettos. It can build infrastructure without forgetting the people who move through it on foot.
A city that spends billions on a financial district while forcing pedestrians just 50 metres away onto a concrete ledge beside speeding traffic has lost sight of its priorities.
Until KL stops treating the inner city as a collection of separate real-estate projects and starts planning it as connected civic space, the view across the Jalan Barat flyover will remain a powerful symbol of the city’s inequality.
Boo Jia Cher is an FMT reader.
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.