The Other Kuala Lumpur is an academic equivalent of a ‘sampler’, consisting of nine chapters by Malaysian, and non-Malaysian, social scientists most of whom summarise or report on larger research projects published elsewhere. It will be useful for those with an interest in the contestation of urban space in an era of neoliberal globalisation, as well as others wanting to get a sense of the kinds of urban research being carried out in and on Malaysia by mostly mid-career, critical, and secular scholars in the post-Mahathir era.
The chapters are loosely unified by the theme of the conflicts over urban spaces for dwelling, earning one's living, schooling, and worshipping in Malaysia's capital territory to which modern urbanisation has given rise. And while all are of interest in their own right, there is a certain lack of comprehensiveness of coverage as well as of an interpretative framework that might have tied the somewhat diverse contributions more tightly together.
In the final chapter, S. Nagarajan and Andrew Wilford describe the “long struggle” of labourers on former rubber plantations situated within the boundaries of Kuala Lumpur to save their homes, schools, and temples from real estate developers who, with the support of Federal and local government officials, are bent on turning the plantations into sites for new businesses as well as housing estates and recreational zones for Malaysia's new middle and upper classes. In other chapters, Josh Lepawsky and Rodney Jubilado describe the impact of policies designed to preserve, while at the same time “cleaning up” and regulating, the activities of small-scale traders and hawkers in and around Petaling Street (Chinatown) and Jalan Masjid India, in order to cater mainly to foreign tourists; Richard Baxstrom documents the effects of the development of KL Sentral (Station) and the KL Monorail on the lives of workers, small business owners and residents in the neighbourhood of Brickfields; Alice Nah looks at the problems faced by the surprisingly large number of refugees and asylum seekers concentrated in and around Jalan Bukit Bintang; and Vineeta Sinha investigates the struggles of minority Hindus to retain spaces for deity worship in Malaysia and Singapore.
As Baxstrom, along with several other contributors, point out, the dynamic of urban development/exclusion and the resulting contest for urban space in contemporary Malaysia is more complex than is suggested by the somewhat simplistic “domination resistance theme” that characterises so much critical work on neoliberal urbanism in places like Malaysia (p. 60). These are not just struggles over material and physical resources. As Nagarajan and Wilford put it, they are also “cultural and historiographic” (p. 192). As their informants told them, what really irked was that, as the backbone of a rubber industry that had contributed so much to Malay(si)an development in the past, they are now being treated as ‘squatters’ and ‘outsiders’ standing in the way of progress. Similarly, the residents of Baxstrom's Brickfields were mostly supportive of efforts to modernise the area. What bothered them as much as the threat to their livelihood was that they were almost completely ignored by planners and developers. In other words, the failure of the Malaysian state in particular to recognise the ‘Malaysian-ness’ of large numbers of Kuala Lumpur's residents – members of ethnic (non-Malay), religious (non-Muslim) and sexual (non-heterosexual) minorities, and non-citizen immigrants – is a major source of discontent.
Many readers will know something of the reasons for this state of affairs, namely the combination of economic development based on an influx of foreign-owned business, capital, and labour with an interventionist state pursuing projects of national “uplift” that have consistently favoured the Malays, the (supposedly) “indigenous” inhabitants of the peninsula (see Kahn Reference Kahn2006). This distinctive pattern of modernisation was given added impetus by the implementation of the so-called New Economic Policy in the 1970s, which resulted, among other things, in a significant growth in the numbers of middle class Malay urbanites, and subsequently the race for developed nation status under the authoritarian regime of Mahathir Mohamad.
This explains the importance of both Fischer's chapter on one of the many, predominantly middle class, Malay housing estates (and the shopping facilities that cater to them) that have sprouted up all across Kuala Lumpur, and Lee's discussion of the transformation of urban space associated with the building of one of Mahathir's numerous “big projects” (the Twin Towers). It is precisely these new spaces of Malay-Islamic consumption and national display that are overwhelming the “other Kuala Lumpur” that many of the book's contributors document (see also Bunnell Reference Bunnell2004).
However, there have been other developments in recent decades which, if not overturning the system of racial ordering and resistance that is the book's main focus, further complicate the situation. First, as Fischer reminds us, the growing division between self-consciously pious religious subjects on the one hand, and those whose spiritual orientation leaves them open to the charge of a lack of piety on the other, has been layered on top of the Malay/non-Malay divide. This is the result of a wave of modern religious reform, not just among Muslims but in all religious communities. Although her focus is Hinduism rather than Islam, Sinha's chapter clearly illustrates the way in which this kind of religious reformism is driving a wedge within as well as between religious communities. The consequences for the relations between state and society, males and females, Muslims and non-Muslims, mainstream and ‘dissident’ sexualities are significant and more consideration might have been given to them (see Stauth Reference Stauth2002).
Secondly, alongside this ‘protestantisation’ of Malaysia's religious life, with its new dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, there has been a growth of so-called civil society movements promoting electoral reform along with the rights of women, immigrants and refugees, and ethnic, religious and sexual minorities. No more, or less, universalistic in aspiration than the promoters of religious reform, members of these movements often find themselves at loggerheads, not just with the state apparatus, but also with the religious reformers, particularly the agents of so-called Islamisation (see Weiss Reference Weiss2006). Several chapters make reference to these movements – indeed most if not all of the contributors are clearly sympathetic to their aims – but they are not analysed systematically.
Finally, mention needs to be made of the growing number of people who reside in Kuala Lumpur either legally (as semi-indentured contract workers, domestics and the like) or ‘illegally’, without whom Malaysia's economic ‘successes’ and the lifestyles enjoyed by its middle and upper classes would be impossible. Some sense of the ‘other Kuala Lumpur’ of these non-citizens can be gained from reading Alice Nah's chapter on refugees. But refugees, one suspect, constitute only a small proportion of this growing class of ‘other Malaysians’, and one would have hoped for greater recognition of their plight here.
