Fwd: Liberating our cities

The Taman Tun Dr Ismail market fiasco is yet another symptom of lack of planning which constricts and chokes our cities and towns.

I FIRST remember going to the Taman Tun Dr Ismail wet market in the eighties. It was everything a wet market should be – to start with, it was not wet, meaning you did not have to wear wellingtons when you wanted to buy fish.

That was quite a contrast to the Petaling Jaya Old Town market which I was more used to then where you had to often wade through half an inch of slimy water with fish and chicken entrails contributing to the gooey mess.

And that despite a new market being built in the eighties.

Unfortunately, it merely replicated the previous mess in newer premises. Children, I have been told, were inclined to puke when they first visited the so-called Old Town market.

For many, therefore, the Taman Tun Dr Ismail wet market was the epitome of what a wet market should be – all the produce arranged in neat rows behind well-ordered counters with none of the yuck you find at other markets on the floor threatening to crawl up through your open slippers and up your legs.

They even had a nice food market one floor up significantly away from the mess and smells that pervade any market so that you could enjoy the food in relative ease and comfort while you wait for your fishmonger to clean your fish, crabs and prawns.

You could get attached to a market like that even though after 25 years it is run down quite a bit because of lack of proper maintenance – a typical Malaysian malady which causes regular havoc to our so-called first-world infrastructure wherever that may be.

And Taman Tun Dr Ismail was a better place too 25 years ago simply because it was a beautiful suburb – it still is, but its character as a suburb is changing for the worse and like many of our once prime suburbs, it's become something sinisterly in between urban and suburban.

That's because of uncontrolled and unreasonable development which has made Taman Tun, as it is commonly referred to, much more crowded than it was before.

In a few years, it will become even more so as condominiums take root and spread like so much lalang along with office buildings.

In fact, the Taman Tun market stallholders protested a move, ostensibly by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall to take over their market and hand it over to someone else for condominium development.

However, both the Federal Terri tory Minister and Kuala Lumpur Mayor denied that there was such a move, saying that the Govern ment had only asked City Hall to look at a proposal that a developer had submitted.

The Taman Tun market and the problems besetting Taman Tun itself is a manifestation of a bigger problem we face today, which has so far proved to be intractable although the solution to it is quite simple really.

The problem is unplanned development, allowing all kinds of buildings to come up willy-nilly with no thought whatsoever of plot ratios, population density, traffic, green spaces and such which are so essential to orderly and thoughtful development.

This is serious, especially in the Kuala Lumpur-Klang Valley area, where population growth is the most rapid in Malaysia at around 7% a year.

The easy way out for land-approving authorities – the two in this region are City Hall and the Selangor government – was to give in to developers' demands and inducements for higher density which basically brought overcrowding to previously well-planned living spaces such as Petaling Jaya (PJ) and Taman Tun.

For many years, the PJ town council put a limit on the number of storeys a building could have at four with the then Hotel Jayapuri (now Hilton) the only building commanding the skyline.

But when that went out the window, so did the last semblances of planning in PJ and PJ, much like the other KL suburbs, is in shambles with its skyscrapers, traffic jam and crowds.

Even Damansara Heights, without doubt one of the most posh housing areas in the country, was not spared.

You can't get parking space at Pusat Bandar Damansara or at a number of town and commercial centres with tall buildings which have sprouted out around the area.

Shophouses which should have been limited to two floors, given the low population density in the area, had four floors instead and be came thede facto office space, crowding the area and bringing in workers who did not live there.

The same has happened to su burbs all around Kuala Lumpur which have become crowded urban centres in their own right with people commuting into them from other areas to work, adding to the already problematic traffic woes in KL.

Proper planning to keep density reasonable, ensure adequate parking, proper traffic flow, good ventilation and maintain adequate green spaces were ignored, and structure plans were effectively confined to dustbins in the greedy quest to maximise space and profits at the ex pense of planned expansive spaces.

Any urban planner worth his salt will be able to come up with a comprehensive layout for Kuala Lumpur/Klang Valley which will prescribe appropriate densities, permissible level of building, plot ratios, green areas and the many little details involved in town planning.

But the strong nexus between our town planners and politicians on one side and developers on the other, instead of with residents, means developers can coolly ignore the interests of residents.

Yes, there has to be development but surely it can be planned and done in a manner which does not ruin the attractiveness of the places we already have to improve the attractiveness of others. That's what planning should be about.

Planning liberates our cities and gives them space to breathe and live. If we don't plan and require all development to be made accordingly, we are going to choke our cities and eventually ourselves. The frightening thing is we are already halfway there.

Let's start liberating our cities and towns – now before it's too late.