Let S Give The Urban Renewal Act A Heritage Perspective

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From Anand Krishnan and Norman Fernandez
The proposed Urban Renewal Act (URA) has arrived at our doorstep, but at an awkward juncture; we are divided as to how to move our cities forward.
On one side are those that want everything flashy new, bright, tall and slick. And they — the Fastfood Gang — want it all now, not tomorrow.
On the other, we have those that prefer a more considered, more humanistic approach to city design. They are the Slow Food Gang.
If the former is all about tearing down the past, the old, the dilapidated and abandoned, the later proposes co-existence.
Most of our cities were first settled well over 150 years ago. For instance, Kuala Lumpur began life about 168 years ago as a small trading outpost of wooden shanties.
It is now a shining beacon of a modern metropolis. KL is, without a doubt, a beautiful city. But its growth has been incremental over the decades, slow and steady, enclave by enclave.
The URA
Not satisfied with the snail’s pace of development in the city or the piecemeal approach to urban design, the government has introduced the URA as a bold new tool to hasten this process and do things in a big and fast way.
It wants to take over multiple lots of land and transform them in one go, a new zeitgeist model for development.
So, the most obvious questions to ask in this context is do we really need a super-charged catalyst for our urbanity?
Are the existing tools and processes so inadequate that we need a prize-fighter of a legislation to come and bulldoze what the ring leaders see as old, dirty, dilapidated or abandoned buildings in large tracts of prime developable land (PDL)?
How it works
The red bull of this hard-hitting punch of a legislation is that it enables an interested party to buy PDLs “en bloc”, meaning it can quickly, after defining the boundaries of a PDL, buy it in one purchase. Just like that.
Previously, as a PDL consisted of a great many lots, the potential purchaser would have to painstakingly buy lot by lot and then amalgamate them.
This was time-consuming and layered with legalese. Multiple lots with multiple owners were the bane of developers.
The URA is a gift from the heavens for it solves this dilemma by giving the purchaser the legal right to buy every lot in the newly defined PDL. There is no need to wait till 100% of the owners agree to sell. Under the URA, anything from 51% to 80% is enough.
The URA will be a game-changer that saves a lot of time and will make a ton of money.
So yes, it changes the whole equation of how to determine urbanity.
Is this a good thing?
Yes and no. Yes, if a PDL can be clearly defined and makes good urban sense, then a brand new development utilising the best urban design strategies can produce a thriving new enclave.
Look at the Pavilion area in KL. It works really well on so many levels. It is well connected at all points and people can walk through anywhere and get different types of urban experiences.
On the other hand, do we miss the old Bukit Bintang Girls School (BBGS) colonial buildings that were on the site? Some of us do. We feel if the beautiful old colonial buildings were integrated with the new insertions, a richer urbanity could have been produced.
It was a real pity that the whole school was demolished without any attempt to see how it could have co-existed with new buildings.
Our built heritage was indeed compromised on that occasion but the city has moved on.
Heritage and the city
But we, as a city, can’t make cityscape blunders like this all the time. We have to balance new development with a surgical re-purposing of our existing built heritage.
Every time an old building of heritage value is demolished in the name of development, we lose another bit of our collective soul.
And if conservation is neglected, in a hundred years all we will have are stark icons of modernity everywhere, with ingrained sameness and hardly any vestige of how we got there.
Do we want that? Honestly? No.
Heritage has a purpose and that is about preserving the memories of growing up.
Every city grows up and if these memories disappear bit by bit and are replaced by the here and now, we just can’t get those memories back.
In this sense, heritage is not a static construct as many believe; it comes in many shades of time.
Right now we, as a society, can only see colonial buildings as heritage. Nothing else comes to mind. But in 100 years’ time, the good buildings of today will be the new heritage of that time.
So, we must endeavour to start saving some of these current buildings as well. They may look dirty, dilapidated, abandoned, forlorn, in dire need of a paint job, cluttered with signage of all shapes and sizes but beneath this visual cacophony of neglect, lies built form crying to be saved.
When the URA prize-fighter comes in chest-thumping and valiant, it will demolish everything in its path. We cannot make blunders like the BBGS again.
The URA meets a PDL
Let us look at a potential PDL: Kampung Baru, adjacent to the KLCC precinct. (see Fig 1).
Fig 1: KLCC and Kampung Baru (Source: Internet)Its name is an irony. It is not a new village; it has been around for the last 168 years. It is a Malay agricultural settlement originally consisting of seven kampungs.
It once had padi fields and lots of kampung houses and was rural Kuala Lumpur at the time. While areas around it developed rapidly, it preferred growing at a slower, gentler pace.
Today, it is an urban anomaly, a low-density green enclave surrounded by high and very high-density commercial towers.
It has resisted urban encroachment as much as possible but the pressures of development bears upon its green soul in every conceivable way, every day.
If the URA comes knocking on its door, it is game over. Its land, at 10.8 million sqf, is 2.5 times bigger than the KLCC precinct (4.4 million sqf).
We now know what can be placed within the KLCC precinct: there is the convention centre, a large park, condominiums, hotels, office towers, a shopping mall and two really tall towers.
Expand this 2.5 times and place it all on Kampung Baru; that is the picture. It will be the mother of all PDLs, the highest level on a proverbial multi-tiered urban renewal cake.
It is a gold mine. If the URA was conceived for urban renewal for all cities in the nation, this one prize could very well retire the prize-fighter for good.
There would be no need for urban renewal anywhere else. That is how much of a victory this heavyweight prize fight would be.
Imagine having the massive clout of Parliament to wrest away a historic piece of land belonging to a particular group of people for a steal, for high density development to achieve nothing more than expand the downtown of KL.
It is not so much urban renewal as it is land reclamation and it promises unimaginable riches to everyone connected with it, though possibly not its current inhabitants.
And the real icing on the cake? Well, Kampung Baru will be redeveloped, regeneration-ised and revitalised in double quick time.
The Fastfood Gang may even rename it KLCC North.
How about the heritage houses there? They go. How about the people who live there? They go. How about the historic streets? What historic streets? BBGS was tame compared to this.
Given this scenario, can we allow this heavyweight prize fight to even take place? Hell no! KL can have a green lung in its heart. New York has Central Park. With good urban design, Kampung Baru can be repurposed to a beautiful and vibrant green enclave within a city.
The economics of making it successful does not have to be an obstacle, rather it can be a means to a desired end.
In 100 years, when the Fastfood Gang are long gone, KL will be proud it took this decision. Kampung Baru is a gem waiting to shine.
One way the URA can be used
Given the massive power of the URA, we must use it sparingly. What if we employ a Donut Strategy to urban renewal?
We create donut rings around the city, rings that demarcate where urban renewal can take place but balanced with conservation (see Fig 2).
Fig 2: The proposed five rings (Source: Internet)The first ring is around KLCC, the core of this narrative. Each ring is about 5km wide; we have five rings, starting from around Puchong.
We allow the URA to begin operations from the fifth ring, then the fourth ring right up to the second ring. The first ring is preserved in perpetuity: no urban renewal, redevelopment, regeneration or revitalisation of the magnitude of the URA, will be allowed here.
Individual lots can of course be renewed but not as en blocs.
Conclusion
Development or even fast development is not a bad word but irresponsible development is. We cannot just throw the old out because they are old, and replace them with a trophy partner; it just doesn’t work that way.
Malaysia, as a nation, must eradicate bad development habits like always erecting low-cost buildings and then letting them deteriorate with little or no maintenance.
Instead, we must get into the right habit of doing something well at the start so we do not need to demolish buildings in a couple of decades.
More than a paradigm shift, we need good urban design leadership, maybe even the political will, in all this.
The URA is clearly a single-mindedly powerful tool but it is a reactive model; it has been created to react to poor development decisions made at the onset.
From a heritage perspective, it cannot be passed in its current iteration; it needs more work and more finesse.
Right now, it is disappointingly short-sighted. What will happen next? This is the awkward juncture we find ourselves in right now. - FMT
Anand Krishnan is an architect, urban designer and more recently, a conservation advocate. Norman Fernandez is a lawyer and political commentator.
The views expressed are those of the writers and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.

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