KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA Forting Utopia

In recent years, KL’s resurgence as a real-estate engine has resulted in a boom in integrated mixed-use developments that are unlike other similarly developing cities. However, what sets the city apart is its unusual organization into large districts that are bounded by major arterial roads or highways. The decentralization of real estate from the city core coincided with an ongoing expansion of road infrastructure and has resulted in a proliferation of large-scaled developments in the order of at least 100,000m2. The litany of such projects increasingly defines the city’s morphology, becoming subdistricts whose peripheral roads and connective networks are also, ironically, physical and psychological barriers that coincide with local sub-districts, historical demarcations, natural topography, and recently the basis for the city’s metro rail network. We explore the historical and cultural basis for this highly localized urban form, where utopia is defined by the blockade against undesirable elements beyond its boundaries. It disentangles itself from textbook understandings of what cities ought to be, and instead re-examines the juxtaposition of the ideas of connectivity and disjunction as a natural outcome of an automobile city.