Urban Form and Planning in Development

Goh Ban Lee (from The Sun Daily today)

IN THE last three decades or so, cities have been called "engines of growth". They are centres of finance, industry, trade, education, healthcare and entertainment.
As such, municipal councils and national leaders have been trying to make their cities not only liveable for their own citizens, but also attractive to foreign entrepreneurs, professionals and tourists.
But liveable towns and cities do not happen naturally. Among the important tools to bring about liveable cities are town planning and development control.
Malaysia has a rather long history in this regard. Officially, town planning began in 1921 when the government of the Federated States of Malaya invited Charles Reade from South Australia to be the Town Planning Adviser in Kuala Lumpur.
He not only drew up legislations to allow the government the power to make plans, but also to enforce development control. Reade stayed in Kuala Lumpur until 1930 when he moved to North Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). He died in South Africa in 1933.
Since then the law governing town planning and development control has been amended several times.
The current law is the Town and Country Planning Act of 1976. Anyone who wants to build a house or building must obtain permission from the local authority.
Development control has been largely focused on two aspects of development – type of land use and intensity of use.
There has been very little attention on urban form. In other words, those in charge of regulating development projects do not pay attention on how new projects affect the form of the cities.
More specifically, there has been little control on the heights or shapes of new buildings in relation to the landscapes of the surrounding areas. As Malaysian cities begin to experience scarcity of development land, developers began to build taller buildings.
The advancement made in building technology also plays an important part.
The indiscriminate development of high-rise buildings is bad enough. Making things worse are the development of tall slab-blocks along or perpendicular to the roads, blocking the view of surrounding houses at the ground level.
No matter how well the buildings are maintained, the townscapes are destroyed. The indiscriminate building of high-rise structures has done much damage to the development of attractive urban form.
There are good examples of attractive urban forms. Generally, the centres of European cities have uniform heights of low-rise buildings.
The tallest man-made structures are usually the steeples of intricately-designed churches. Besides churches, iconic buildings include municipal and state legislative buildings, libraries, museums or even the parliaments.
Examples of such cities are Cologne or Bonn in Germany, Vienna, the capital of Austria and Amsterdam in Holland. Tall buildings are only allowed at the outskirts of the cities.
The urban forms in some American cities are different. In New York and Los Angeles, skyscrapers are located in the city centres.
Besides strict development control, internationally recognised liveable cities have facilities for pedestrians and cyclists.There are proper walkways for pedestrians. Drivers of motor vehicles stop for pedestrians at zebra crossings even without traffic lights.
Then there are adequate parks and monuments that make walking very interesting and rewarding.
It may be of interests to know that urban form was already an important agenda in "modern" town planning when Kelvin Lynch wrote a book entitled "The Image of the City" in 1959. Since then, much has been written about the importance of urban form and urban design.
For those who are interested in urban form and design but not very keen to read academic books, there is a feature-length documentary film entitled Urbanised produced by Gary Hustwit, an independent filmmaker based in New York and London.
The film is about the designs of cities all over the world, including Mumbai, Brasilia, Bogota and Copenhagen and how they affect housing, mobility, public space, civic engagement and the environment.
Malaysia has experienced rather rapid urbanisation in the last three decades. As a result, there is pressure to build high-rise structures. So far, there seems to be no control of urban form. High-rise buildings seem to be sprouting here and there haphazardly, including residential areas.
So far, only the Unesco heritage sites of George Town and Malacca City have height control to ensure that the heritage buildings are not dwarfed by new buildings. It is time for the town planners and those who are involved in building cities to think seriously about urban form in the towns and cities in Malaysia.
Datuk Dr Goh Ban Lee is interested in urban governance, housing and urban planning. Comments: letters@thesundaily.com