Exporting (sub)urbanism: Kuala Lumpur and the communist world

[M II A II R II K]

Exporting (sub)urbanism: Kuala Lumpur and the communist world


By Stephen Smith



Read More: http://marketurbanism.com/2010/09/04...mmunist-world/

Adam Martin at William Easterly’s development blog Aid Watch has a post up warning about the tendency among developing nations to adopt Western styles wholesale, even if such styles are not even efficient in their countries of origin. He posits this as a sort of developmental Whiggishness, and cites education policy and intellectual property law as possible examples of the trend. We here at Market Urbanism, by virtue of language and location, tend to focus on urbanism in North America and Europe, but I thought this would be a good opportunity to discuss the state of urbanism in developing countries.

- The starkest example of misplaced developmental Whiggishness in planning I can think of is the city of Kuala Lumpur. The city was practically brand new when it was made capital of the Federal Malay States in 1895, and as a British protectorate, the Crown sent New Zealand planner Charles Reade to the Malaysian capital in 1921 to head its planning department. Schooled in the methods of the nascent Garden City movement in the UK, Reade made a name for himself by spreading the sprawling, proto-suburban style throughout Australia and New Zealand before his posting in British Malaya. Under Reade’s aegis, Kuala Lumpur became a test case for the movement’s applicability outside of the industrialized West.

- Kuala Lumpur offered an opportunity to build a metropolis from scratch as a Garden City. Charles Reade eagerly set to work building sprawling, low-density housing estates alongside wide roads which anticipated widespread private vehicle ownership.

- Beyond the British-style town planning of the 1920s and the hybrid American/Japanese industrial policy of the 1980s, Kuala Lumpur also began instituting American-style restrictions on density. Private minibuses were regulated out of existence and public bus service has not adapted to changing land use patterns. In addition to height and density limitations, developers are faced with sprawl-promoting minimum parking requirements to the point where Kuala Lumpur’s downtown has twice as many parking spaces as not only its middle-income Asian counterparts, but also wealthy Asian cities like Singapore and Tokyo.

- Kuala Lumpur may be the most blatant example of poorly-advised adoption of Western land use policy, but other cities around Asia exhibit similar anti-urban tendencies. Bangkok, Jakarta, and Manila are also “parking requirement enthusiasts,” and urban transportation scholar Paul Barter believes that similar dynamics may be at play in South Asian cities. The state of apartment buildings in Mumbai, 60% of which had controlled rents as late as 2006, makes the South Bronx look like the Upper East Side. The late Vietnamese Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach once said that artificially low rents were more destructive to Hanoi’s housing stock than American bombing.

- Outside of the immediate region, the communist world has adopted, to its detriment, many Western planning tendencies. Communist planners pursued the urban planning theories of Le Corbusier, the eminent Swiss architect and designer, with particular zeal, turning what to the West was a passing fad into the communist world’s sole planning style. While the French never seriously considered Le Corbusier’s plan to demolish most buildings within central Paris’ Right Bank and replace them with towers and parks with highways along the Seine, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu implemented his ideas quite faithfully in Bucharest, once known as the “Little Paris of the East” for its architecture.

- In some ways, pro-sprawl urban planning has done more damage to countries like Malaysia and Romania than to the West. Unlike the Anglosphere and Europe, which already had relatively dense and developed urban cores before sprawl set in, developing countries are still in the process of urbanizing, so their older, denser cores do not have the capacity to hold much of the population.

Housing estate in Malaysia






Bucharest, post-Ceaushima

[hammersklavier]

The title is a grammatical typo of Eats, Shoots and Leaves proportions. It leads quite naturally to the misreading of the title as implying that Kuala Lumpur (the capital of Malaysia) is in the Communist sphere of influence. (It never was.)

Other than that, the article doesn't seem to take into account the self-densifying nature of central cities throughout the world being the natural world's antidote to Corbusier's decidedly unnatural planning style. For example, in other colonial cities (like Nairobi) planners and politicians are often on the losing side of the battle between the planned Garden City built form and the self-densifying squatters' tenements (which probably will, in time, become among the most expensive neighborhoods in the city).