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COPYRIGHT 2001 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS)
"Shanty towns", "spontaneous dwellings", and "squatter colonies" are established topics in the literature on "Third World" cities and urbanization. Until recently, these discussions were customarily framed within two contending theoretical schools. Proponents of the "modernization" thesis view the emergence of "modern" cities as an improvement over "ancient" indigenous cities. Thus, the dramatic demographic growth and urban problems characteristic of many "Third World" cities are evaluated as a kind of "pseudo-urbanization" arising from an imperfect replication of the tertiarization of the industrial "First World". In contrast, adherents of the "dependency" school depict "Third World" urbanization as integrally linked to the transnational expansion and logic of modern capitalism. The ills of urban poverty and the lack of decent, affordable public housing are thus manifestations of the uneven and inequitable distribution of resources and surplus accumulation; a phenomena, moreover, not just confined to the "Third World" but also endemic in the most affluent of "First World" cities (Armstrong and McGee 1985; Gilbert and Gugler 1992).
Amongst others, Henri Lefebvre's complex and monumental work, The Production of Space (1991) is centrally pertinent to the purposes of this paper. In brief, Lefebvre contends that the "city", as both a built environment and lived space, cannot be conceived merely as a neutral and empty container of social, economic, and political activities. Instead, the "city" should be viewed as the domain where episodes of the hegemonic expansion and capitalist drama are being played out (see also Harvey 1989; Jacobs 1996; King 1990). More specifically, he argues that capitalism has survived largely because it is the spatialization of modernity and the strategic planning of everyday life that has allowed its essential relations of production to be reproduced. In the organization of the built environment then, space is commodified. In other words, space becomes a social and political product.(1)
In this paper, I follow in part the trajectory of this thesis in the ethnographic context of Kuala Lumpur, the capital city of Malaysia. In juxtaposing current energetic efforts at erasing "squatter colonies" with an equally energetic push to construct a recognizable post-colonial city on the global landscape, I suggest that both occupy historically contingent positions, and that they aptly index the nature of changes that are engendered in the wake of globalized capitalism. To further appreciate the significance of the interplay between local and supralocal cultural processes, I also draw from Ulf Hannerz's formulation of "creolization" which, in essence, theoretically takes a position in between the two contending poles introduced at the beginning of this paper. Whilst contemporary asymmetrical capital and cultural flows between the metropolitan "centre" and the "periphery" index the historical legacy of an extractive colonialism and cultural imperialism, they are also not monolithic nor one-sided. Thus, the contemporary concerns of city management in Kuala Lumpur bear the marks of a hybridized cultural exchange. They depict a variation of what Richard O'Connor has argued elsewhere as the distinguishing trope of indigenous urbanism where emerging nation-states succumb to urban interests by remaining heavily mortgaged to urban forms (O'Connor 1995, p. 39). Or, to put it another way, in the current milieu "squatter colonies" are rendered as "heterotopias of deviation" -- sites where behaviour and meaning are deemed deviant in relation to a mean or norm (Foucault 1986).
Redefining Land and Landscapes
The contemporary dominant notion of land as a commodity that can be owned, transferred, mortgaged, and sold is essentially a colonialist construct. In British Malaya, as elsewhere in other European colonies, the cultural category of property was constituted by a combination of intertwining practices. The "opening up of an empty country" for large-scale commercialized cultivation and mining activities was not at cross purposes with the demands of "gentlemanly capitalism"(2) and a Christian-infused civilizing culture. With the introduction of the notion of private ownership, land registration documents, and the aid of scientific cadastral mapping, the belief that there was ownership before occupation or tilling of the land dislodged indigenous practices and the local economy. From the 1870s onwards when the British administration consolidated its hold first in the Straits Settlements and then progressively over the whole of the peninsula, the relationship between land and settlers became more entangled and problematic.
In the pre-colonial period, the peninsula was populated mainly by a variety of peoples with varied notions of land tenure and cultivation. With the advent of the colonial period, the cross-cultural encounters between foreign powers and the local dikes engendered over time the "invention of tradition" (Hobsbawn and Ranger 1983) through a skewed portrayal of customs and customary law. For instance, William Maxwell, who was instrumental in drawing up regulations for another kind of land tenure as well as the judiciary system, made use of Malay legal texts (for example, the Malacca Code) in stating these principles, and evolving a land legislation that attempted to create a class of settled peasant cultivators. He observed:
Land is abundant, but the population is sparse; there is no restriction upon the selection and appropriation of forest land, and a proprietary right is created by the clearing of the land followed by continuous occupation. Forest land and land which, though once cleared, has been abandoned and bears no tract of appropriation (such as fruit trees still existing) are said technically to be tanah mati, or "dead land". He who, by clearing or cultivation, or by building a house, causes that to live which was dead (menghidopkan bumi), acquires a proprietary right in the land, which now becomes tanah hidop ("live land") in contradistinction to tanah mati. His right to the land is absolute as long as occupation continues, or as long as the land bears signs of appropriation. (Maxwell 1884, pp. 77ff; emphasis original)
The manner of land acquisition was termed meneroka or membuka tanah (literally, "to open up land"), or if done on a larger scale, membuat negeri ("to open up a state") or berbuat negeri ("to create a state").(3) At various points of Maxwell's translations of various classical Malay legal texts -- as well as Winstedt's, another colonial administrator that came after him -- there is exhibited a tendency to impose English notions of land ownership over native land practices. This was largely so, according to Paul Kratoska, because whereas
in Europe [where] man-land relations were the determining feature of the economy, a situation made possible because all land was owned, either by the state or privately, and ownership gave exclusive rights to land ... in the indigenous Malay economy, human labour was the form of capital that underlay economic relations. (Kratoska 1985, p. 19)
No formal nor centralized legal machinery existed to enforce these "proprietary rights" over the land and it was thus desirable that these pioneers consolidated labour in order to sustain food production over a period of time.
Thus, at an early stage, British administrators had chosen to reject indigenous notions of land tenure mainly on the grounds that the nature of the Malay legal codes was unsuitable for...
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