DURING the two-week period between Merdeka Day and Malaysia Day, we often revisited questions of colonialism, independence and what it meant to decolonise. These conversations tended to focus on what was most visible: old colonial buildings, railway stations, street names et cetera. While important, they could also make colonialism seem like something that belonged to the past, something that could be preserved as heritage or removed through renaming. Yet colonialism shaped our cities in ways that are much less visible, changing how we understand land, property, public space and planning. Many of those ideas did not disappear when the colonial government did.
Take land. In the early development of Kuala Lumpur, the colonial state sought to create secure property rights that would encourage capital and settlement. Land that had previously been governed through communal, customary or more flexible arrangements could be surveyed, registered and converted into private property. This made land legible to the state, as a commodity that could be owned, taxed, bought and sold.
This was not simply a technical change. It connected the city to a wider capitalist economy. Secure property titles gave investors greater certainty, while land taxes gave the state a predictable source of revenue. Urban land became not only somewhere to live or work, but an asset. This raises a question that remains relevant today: when did we begin to think of the city primarily as a financial asset rather than as a place to live?
Colonial urbanisation also helped produce a new urban property-owning elite. Figures such as Loke Yew, whose wealth was initially associated with tin mining, invested heavily in land and shophouses. Urban property offered a different kind of security and opportunity where wealth could be accumulated through owning the city itself.
This was one of the lasting consequences of colonial urban development. Land ownership became a way of concentrating wealth, and the city was not simply divided between coloniser and colonised, but also organised through increasingly entrenched class and property relations. Some of those relations survived the end of colonial rule, shaping who has been able to accumulate land and wealth, and who has remained excluded from the most valuable parts of the city.
The same can be said about public space. Colonial cities were full of spaces that were formally public but socially exclusive. The same logic shaped planning more broadly. When colonial officials proposed cutting new back lanes through dense Asian shophouses, they explicitly invoked the ‘bold’ plans of Haussmann’s Paris. The planner’s blue pencil could redraw the city, widening streets, demolishing buildings and reorganising land in the name of health, fire prevention, order and modernisation.
That question remains relevant today.
The proposed Urban Renewal Act has renewed debate over how ageing urban areas should be redeveloped, and what happens to the communities already living there. There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting a city to be safer, healthier or more accessible. The question is who gets to define what those things mean, and who bears the cost of achieving them.
The context is obviously very different from colonial Kuala Lumpur, but the underlying question is familiar: when a city is declared in need of renewal, who gets to decide what replaces what is already there, and who gets to stay? This is perhaps the most enduring lesson of colonial urbanism. Planning is never simply technical, it is also a form of power. And this is where independence becomes complicated.
Merdeka indeed changed who governed Kuala Lumpur, from colonial masters to local hands. It changed the political meaning of the city and allowed spaces once associated with colonial authority to be reclaimed as national symbols. The Selangor Club Padang, once associated with British colonial society, became Dataran Merdeka, for example.
But symbolic reclamation is not the same as structural transformation. The postcolonial Malaysian state inherited many of the institutions and instruments of colonial urban governance. The names changed, the political objectives changed, and the state acquired its own developmental ambitions. But the basic capacity to acquire land, regulate property, clear settlements and impose master plans remained. The colonial state’s concern with protecting capital and population, collecting revenue and producing an orderly city did not simply vanish. It was incorporated into a new national development project.
Today, we might see echoes of the old colonial city in very different places: gated communities, luxury condominiums, shopping malls and privately managed developments alongside low-cost flats, informal settlements and communities threatened with displacement.
The old European enclave and native quarter have obviously not survived unchanged. But some of the spatial logics behind them have, such as the separation of populations by wealth, the creation of exclusive enclaves, and the idea that some parts of the city should be protected and improved while others can be regulated, cleared or displaced in the name of development.
The underlying question – who gets access to the best parts of the city, and who gets pushed elsewhere – has not disappeared.
So what would it mean to decolonise Kuala Lumpur?
It cannot simply mean a change of hands, reclaiming colonial monuments, or renaming streets.
Perhaps we need to begin with land. If colonial urbanism helped establish land as a commodity and an instrument for accumulating wealth, then decolonising the city requires us to question the idea that land should primarily be treated as a financial asset.
Community land trusts, stronger protection of customary and public land, and forms of housing that separate shelter from speculation are some ways of imagining a different relationship to land.
It also means reclaiming the commons.
If colonial public spaces were designed around the needs and privileges of a particular group, decolonising the city means asking whether public space today is genuinely public. Parks, squares and other civic spaces should be places where people can gather, rest and spend time without being excluded by wealth, status or other forms of privilege. The question is not simply how much public space a city has, but who feels entitled to use it, and who feels that it belongs to them.
And perhaps most importantly, it means questioning the "blue pencil".
Cities are full of ways of living that planners did not design: street vendors, night markets, kampungs, informal gathering places, pedestrian shortcuts and communities that have adapted spaces over generations. Too often, these are treated as problems to be fixed rather than forms of urban knowledge.
Decolonising planning would mean listening before drawing. It would mean participatory planning, community mapping and giving residents a meaningful role in decisions about the places they inhabit. The very unfortunate decision not to pursue the revival of mayoral elections is a step in the opposite direction, keeping urban governance further removed from the people who live in the city.
Colonialism may have ended as a political system, but some of its ideas about land, property, order and who has the right to shape urban space continue to influence the cities we build.
To decolonise Kuala Lumpur, then, may require more than asking what we should preserve, rename or demolish. It requires us to ask a more difficult question: who gets to own, use, govern and imagine the city – and what would Kuala Lumpur look like if that answer were different?
Badrul Hisham Ismail is an independent researcher and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity (AFSEE). He is also a co-founder of IMAN Research, a think tank studying society, religion and politics. The views expressed here are solely the writer’s own.
