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Free Malaysia Today
17-05-2025
- Politics
- Free Malaysia Today
Syerleena's take on urban renewal only touches the surface
From Anand Krishnan I am writing in response to YB Syerleena Abdul Rashid's opinion piece titled Urban Renewal isn't a threat – it's the help our cities desperately need, published by FMT recently. I found her opinions rather light and imprecise. They merely touched the surface of what cities have to deal with. It did not articulate the breadth and depth of factors that make up a city. I'll explain. We have structure plans that guide development in our cities; we have many existing laws like the Streets, Drainage and Building Act 1974, the Strata Titles Act 1985, the Town & Country Planning Act 1976, and the Uniform Building By Laws 1974, amongst others, that provide a framework for regulating development; and we have local authorities and other agencies to enforce these Acts. There are also other checks and balances to ensure all works well. If this existing framework of acts, plans, and local authorities, has been so bad, how come our cities have developed into what they are now? Our cities — if she looks at them more — are lovely and well regarded by any standard. Her opinion piece was essentially to support one act, the URA, but does she not realise that urban renewal is but just one mode in the entire matrix of development planning and economics? The way she writes suggests it is the only way forward for a city to grow. It is not, there are many other modes available to urban designers and planners. The real question that she failed to ask is do we really need another act to complement all the other Acts we already have? In its current form, I don't think so. 'Supporting the URA means choosing a Malaysia that works for everyone,' she writes. This is another example of her impreciseness. She doesn't articulate her notion of 'everyone'; it is highly questionable and glaringly vague. Just who is the 'everyone' she talks about? Clearly, the URA is not out to help everyone. When developers get hold of a large tract of urban land in an already urbanised city in Malaysia through the provisions of the URA, they are not going to build low-rise affordable multiracial housing, swathes of parks and lakes, community and institutional facilities or even aged-care facilities for 'everyone'. It doesn't make economic sense. It is just not going to happen. In such land, procured cheaply through the provisions of the URA, the type of development that will get the best returns on investment, would be expensive high-rise offices, high-rise condominiums, high-rise commercial blocks, high-rise hotels and high-rise malls. These buildings would be for a select group of 'someones', not everyone. If we are honest with ourselves, we should accept this reality. She talks about 'reversing the decline' of cities. Again, she is imprecise. If she really wants to reverse the decline, she should start with the suburbs. Build better buildings there. Make better development decisions now so that in 30 years we are not faced with demolishing our mistakes. She should push for developing existing vacant land for affordable housing in the suburbs, not in the downtowns of cities. She should get developers to rehabilitate existing buildings in the city that are old, dilapidated and neglected. Give them a new lease of life through innovative, adaptive reuses. Repurpose abandoned buildings into vibrant community facilities. Build new high rises in empty land in-between these old buildings. This is what urban renewal really means. It is not about displacing communities, bulldozing everything you see and building anew. It is about integrating the new with the old, Respect the old streets, old trees, and the old people. These old buildings will become the heritage buildings of the future. We owe it to ourselves to make the right choices today. Anand Krishnan is an architect, urban designer and more recently, a conservation advocate. He is also an FMT reader. The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.
Fast Company
09-05-2025
- General
- Fast Company
The local bus should be like a sidewalk with a motor
You don't wait for the sidewalk. You don't check an app to see if it's working. You don't wonder if it's meant for someone else. Sidewalks are just there—always available, always on. And when they're well designed, you barely notice them. They quietly support everything: commerce, mobility, safety, health, and freedom of movement. Sidewalks don't require instructions. They're intuitive. Step on, move forward. That's the framing we need for local bus service. A well-run bus system is an express sidewalk—a piece of infrastructure that dramatically expands the number of destinations within walking distance. Unfortunately, buses aren't thought of that way. In most American cities, public transit is treated like a last-resort service, a social program for people who can't afford cars, something to be endured rather than embraced. And so they're designed that way: infrequent, inconvenient, hard to use, and often stuck in traffic. The blueprint If a bus system is going to function as a seamless extension of the sidewalk, it has to operate on the same principles: ● Frequency. You don't plan your life around a sidewalk's availability. ● Convenience. Buses must go where people actually want to go, with direct routes that don't meander like a bureaucrat's fantasy map. ● Safety. Waiting at a stop should feel as safe and dignified as standing on a downtown corner. ● Reliability. If you can't trust it to arrive when it says it will, it's not infrastructure—it's a gamble. If general purpose car traffic dominates the curb, buses will never scale, and walking—the most ancient, equitable form of transport—remains functionally capped. Dedicated transit lanes are the asphalt equivalent of pouring a continuous slab of concrete for pedestrians. Bus-only lanes ensure that the people choosing high-efficiency transportation aren't punished for it. (As an added bonus, people can ride bikes in the bus lanes.) Treat the bus like a sidewalk, and people will use it like one Most Americans only experience a transit system that treats them like a priority when they travel overseas. 'It was amazing. We didn't even have to rent a car.' Here in the U.S., we've been conditioned to expect low-frequency bus service with few shelters, unpredictable arrivals, and a cultural subtext that transit is a charity case for those people. But we don't build sidewalks out of pity. We build them because they're essential infrastructure like plumbing or electricity. If we want to cut congestion, reduce emissions, boost economic access, and improve quality of life, we already have the most elegant, human-scaled delivery system imaginable: walking. But to expand the range of walkability, we need a mobility system that functions like walking at scale—intuitive, frequent, and always ready. That's what a local transit system could be. The moment we stop treating the bus as a social program and start treating it like an express sidewalk, we unlock a public good that meets people where they are and moves them forward. The bus can't be stuck in traffic If the local bus is going to function as an express sidewalk, I can't overstate the importance of high-frequency, reliable service. That means it can't be stuck in traffic jams. On multilane roads, the obvious answer is dedicated transit lanes. Transportation experts typically think of road reconfigurations as replacing general purpose lanes with bike lanes and a center bidirectional left-turn lane. But on a busy transit corridor, the road diet can just as easily be designed for express sidewalks. DIY street design You don't have to be a professional engineer or graphic artist to come up with renderings that illustrate before-and-after scenarios for a street in your community. Streetmix is a free web tool that's ridiculously easy to use. It's set up for drag-and-drop design so you can make a typical section that reflects your local conditions. Here's a short article with instructions to use Streetmix (free!) and Google Maps (free!) to design the future you want, instead of the one you've been told is inevitable. A bus isn't charity, it's concrete infrastructure that expands the reach of your feet. When we treat it like an express sidewalk—built for frequency, protected from gridlock, and trusted like any utility—it stops being a backup plan and starts being the backbone of a thriving city. We don't need to convince people to ride the bus. We just need to operate it like we mean it.
