YESTERDAY, Kuala Lumpur celebrated its 45th birthday as a federal territory. But there should have been more candles on its anniversary cake as the city is about 160 years old.
The city includes what is called Greater Kuala Lumpur or Klang Valley, a large urban cluster with about 7.7 million people (2019 estimate).
Understandably, the city hosts both new and aged infrastructure. The mix, however, doesn’t mingle well at places.
Blame it on a deficit in urban planning. The city does have the appearance of prosperity, but is it touching everyone? Not quite. Home is anything from one-room cubicles to costly condos.
Kuala Lumpur is a hard-to-mix picture of B40, M40 and T20. This has caused an ungainly urban sprawl with not enough facilities to tone the body and soothe the soul. Granted, a city is many parts put together to make a wholesome whole.
Kuala Lumpur, it must be said, is missing some edifying parts. Put another way, the city suffers from a want, an undersupply of a city’s soul.
We must, perforce, add these missing edifying parts to make Kuala Lumpur a work hard, play hard and live well city.
Malaysians are not the only ones living in cities. Some 3.6 billion — that is 50 per cent of the world’s population — live in cities. A McKinsey & Company study estimates that by 2030, 60 per cent or five billion people will be city dwellers.
So it is not a peculiarly Malaysian trend. What is a Malaysian malaise is that Kuala Lumpur doesn’t quite nourish the souls of its dwellers as some of the top European cities do. In a 2019 listing of top 100 cities in the world by UK consultancy firm Resonance, Kuala Lumpur was nowhere to be seen.
Even desert-rich Dubai made it to No. 9. London, which topped the list, seamlessly merges the natural and built environments. More importantly, the English city is over 40 per cent parkland.
New York — the No 2 — is cultural virility, day and night. And so is Paris, ranked third. These prize winners reveal a simple truth: a city is an aesthetically crafted space. And our self is shaped by what surrounds it.
Kuala Lumpur needs to do what these European cities are doing if it wants to be a soul provider. The task is formidable, no doubt, but it must be embraced to make the city liveable.
For what is a city without people? Kuala Lumpur’s urban sprawl is now becoming a suburban sprawl, but the dispersal is not happening fast enough to absorb the rural-to-urban migration.
According to Khazanah Research Institute’s The State of Households 2018 study, 5.5 million households or 22 million people live in urban areas as opposed to 1.5 million households or six million people in rural areas.
In Kuala Lumpur alone, there were 416,600 households with an average of four per household. This can only get worse as people leave the rural areas for the cities looking for jobs and other edifying things.