Rahul Goswami :
The urban centres of Southeast Asia look more like one another – and also more like urban centres anywhere else in the world – than what their names might suggest. A century earlier, in the time of our great-grandparents, the countries of what the Western world called the Orient and Cathay and the East Indies did indeed look the way they were portrayed in travellers’ sketches. Those images were romanticised, and many attempted to preserve in a physical form these images, the habitats, the lush verdure of the archipelagic tropics.
When economic nationalism came to the region, whose political and social leaders wanted to prove their countries’ capacities to be more than Third World, more than developing, that is when the preservation and celebration of these images and forms came to be called nostalgia, not without some derision. During the confusing trek from Third World to First (in the words of one of the better known votaries of the techno-financial future) the countries and their peoples urbanised, the comfortable routines of their everyday lives altered, old patterns of settlement were replaced by vast new suburban grids and highways and industrial townships, the social fabrics became frayed and then were indiscriminately rent apart.
And this is why Asian urban development and architecture between the 1970s and the 1990s has been described, with some ruefulness, as the Manhattan transfer, as government officials and a Western-trained crop of urban planners, architects and designers sought to replicate the skyline of the cities of America, for they were taught that such were the symbols of an economically successful and modern society. How irredeemably wrong they were. The ugly results are there to see in every single capital and major city of the Asean member countries – stupefyingly generic and quite placeless, dominated by steel, glass and concrete, completely disconnected from anything that represents a local culture and aesthetic.
In Malaysia, the replacement of the pleasing ‘attap’ roofs by zinc and asbestos sheets created acutely uncomfortable interiors, unbearably hot when the winds are still, noisy and foetid when it rains. The standardised new dwellings are hard to maintain and are easily damaged by water (of which there is no lack in the tropics). Their traditional roofs protected homes raised on short stilts and surrounded by wide, shaded galleries that ensured adequate ventilation even during the muggy tropical summers.
The ‘nipah’ palms (Nypa fruticans) grew profusely along calm river banks, near mangroves and in calm estuaries – and still do, provided their habitats are not molested by environmentally illiterate government officials, by ecocidal industrialists, and by corrupt politicians greedy for their next illicit million.
The leaf can grow to more than five metres long and when skilfully stitched around a flexible bamboo splint, can be joined together to make the traditional thatched roof, or attap. The architecture that relies on attap – as it relies on so many local materials and techniques – is a local knowledge that fuses raw material available within the village boundaries with the good sense of what is the scale of the family and community.
But as is common all over Southeast Asia today, standard Westernised materials are used instead of bamboo and rattan, cane and attap. Architectural education is an education in alienation, one that teaches three-dimensional modelling skills, but not how to learn through observing the needs of local society, of culture and the immediate environment. The effect is that while pandering to the outrageous and vulgar tastes of the rich and politically powerful, the architects and building engineers when they design for the government produce housing units that are uninhabitable, quickly disintegrating into squalid slums.
In his critical essay, ‘The ecological wisdom of the traditional Malay house’, Lim Jee Yuan (of the Consumers’ Association of Penang) called such houses “ovens for the Malaysians to live in”. Studies by researchers in two institutions – Universiti Putra Malaysia and the Malaysian Agricultural Research and Development Institute – showed over a decade ago that some two million concrete homes in Malaysia were overheated and their inhabitants suffered three times more thermal discomfort than if they were outdoors! Hence the indispensability of air-conditioners, and hence the increasing feedback of even more heated exhaust and pollutants into local atmospheres denuded of tree canopies that provide shade and which filter and cool the air. And so the urban spiral that contributes to climate change was established.
(The author is an expert on intangible cultural heritage with Unesco)
