How infrastructure engineers inequality in KL

From Boo Jia CherTake a walk in Pudu. Along Jalan Changkat Thambi Dollah, the city feels chaotic but grounded and human-scaled. Follow the road towards the Jalan Barat flyover, however, and that feeling disappears.

Suddenly, you are looking directly at the glass towers of the Tun Razak Exchange (TRX).Barely 50 metres separate Pudu’s ageing shophouses from TRX’s gleaming financial district. Yet pedestrians trying to cross between them are forced to hike along the flyover with no pavement. Schoolchildren have been seen making the same dangerous journey.This points to a larger problem in Kuala Lumpur: much of our infrastructure is designed to move people quickly across the city, while paying far less attention to those who actually live on the ground below.Two cities, two approachesBoth KL and Singapore have historic, low-rise commercial neighbourhoods beside modern high-rise business districts.

But the relationship between them is very different.Singapore’s Chinatown and financial district are connected by the city’s street grid and public transport. In KL, the connection is broken by flyovers, wide roads and hostile pedestrian environments such as Jalan Barat.Singapore has often dealt with density by stacking uses vertically. Public housing, hawker centres, markets and shops occupy the same developments, allowing a finance executive working nearby and an elderly public-housing resident to eat at the same hawker centre.But Singapore’s model comes at a costs.

When the state formalised Chinatown’s heritage in the 1980s, it preserved much of its physical fabric while clearing away some of its messier, organic life. Chinatown became cleaner and more orderly, but arguably lost much of its soul.KL took a different path, but not because it is more committed to preservation. In places like Pudu and Imbi, older neighbourhoods have largely been left vulnerable to decline, speculation and redevelopment.

They are treated as ageing areas awaiting transformation rather than communities worth actively protecting.The result is a different form of displacement. As families moved to car-oriented suburbs such as Puchong and Subang, older residents were left with fewer family and community networks. Ageing apartments house migrant workers — the same people who clean, service and build the luxury developments nearby.Gentrification is also changing these neighbourhoods, through ho…