The Metropolization Process of the Kuala Lumpur City Region: A Historical Perspective

Tai-Chee Wong

p. 147-160

Entrées d’index

Mots-clés : Kuala Lumpur, métropolisation, privatisation des terres, effets de l’agglomération, dépendance à l'égard de la voiture, indice de primauté

Keywords : Kuala Lumpur, metropolization, land privatization, agglomeration effects, car dependency, primacy index


Texte intégral

1Origins of cities are multiple, be it a market place, military garrison, administrative centre or simply crossroads sites of key transportation routes. Indeed, many large cities or mega-urban regions in the world have grown over a considerable period of time from small settlements into their present sizes. How they have evolved is nevertheless a historical process of urbanization strongly associated with their politico-economic, social and migratory movements that have followed thereafter.

2Key agents of urban change, in particular its growth, spatial and mobility patterns, are often those linked to agglomeration effects, sprawling residential system and transport distribution system. This paper examines the case of Kuala Lumpur which started as a mining settlement at the confluence of Sungai Klang and Sungai Gombak, the two major rivers near which rich tin ore deposits were found in abundance around the mid-19th century. Ever since, as Kuala Lumpur became the Selangor state and later Federal government’s administration centre since independence in 1957, the city has grown in size, and its economic role has risen rapidly when industrialization picked up from the mid-1970s (McGee, 1967; Wong, 1991; Gullick, 1990).

3As a rising urban region, Kuala Lumpur’s functionality and linkages should not be studied in isolation, given that its external economies are not restricted to a single urban core. These external economies are shared and linked to nearby cities along the Klang Valley effectively as an agglomerated city network. From the mid-19th century, Kuala Lumpur has developed into the commanding core of the mega-urban region of about eight million people, known as the Greater Kuala Lumpur which stretches over 40 km along Klang river from the east at Gombak to the west at Port Klang (fig. 1).

Fig. 1 The Klang Valley, Selangor state

Source : Hamid et al. 2017

4In 2012, the Greater Kuala Lumpur contributed about 263 billion Ringgit (US$ 84.8 billion) or over 37% of gross domestic product (GDP) of Malaysia, the most prosperous core and administrative axis of the country. By 2020, the Greater Kuala Lumpur shared 40% of the national GDP (Oxford Business Group, 2022).

5From a historical perspective, this paper begins with a brief account of how Britain expanded it colonial interests by introducing cash cropping and privatization of land which released the feudal land control, albeit one which legally was loosely bonded, from the local sultanate regime. This facilitated and secured henceforth investment of Western capitalist ventures. Two contrasting aspects of the Greater Kuala Lumpur’s growth are investigated in the process. First, we examine the impact of agglomeration effects generated by Malaysia’s close integration with the global capitalist economy, and the rise of primacy of the Kuala Lumpur metropolitan region characterized by influx of Western investment and local oil boom. Second, attention is turned to the adverse effect of agglomeration which are the diseconomies caused by an ineffective public transport system associated with a high car dependency in commuting in which the issue of sustainability is questioned.

Historical Growth of the Kuala Lumpur City Region

6As suggested earlier, from the mid-19th century, tin mining and other resource exploitation potential had motivated British colonizers to move from the ports of Penang and Singapore to the hinterland of Malay Peninsula following a new stage of industrialization in Britain in need of more raw materials. This started with the British intervention of the armed conflicts between two local Chinese factions in Perak that was concluded with the Treaty of Pangkor in 1874 whereby the Perak sultan accepted a British Resident as “political adviser”, setting the first “indirect rule” with the Malay sultanate in Malaya (Gullick, 1990; Zhang, 2007).

7In the early 1880s in Selangor state where lies Kuala Lumpur, Port Klang was founded for its proximity to the tin-rich Kuala Lumpur area, 30 km to its east. Similarly, the Selangor sultanate was coerced to accept the British residency system underlain by British trade interest to develop the economy of the state. It was under Bloomfield Douglas, the Selangor Resident (1876-1882), who paved a “political coalition” pathway to shift the administrative centre from Klang to Kuala Lumpur. In July 1878, Douglas also established a Mining Board to regulate the grant of mining leases (Gullick, 1990; Jackson, 1963).

8What came along with the British colonization was the privatization of land for capitalistic development which was seen as the most important agent of change. Land privatization had provided assurance to investors to take up longer term investments, be it in mining or plantation crops, and its potential to raise tax revenues was substantial, part of which was paid to the sultanate as a trade-off for their consent.

Land Privatization and Ownership Formalization

9In traditional Malay structure, state land under the control of the sultanate was nominally owned by the sultan who granted parts of it to his close relatives and aids. All his subjects were entitled to use such land for cropping or buildings with verbal or written permissions from the nominated land possessors or their representatives. A nominal fee was chargeable for built structures, and in the case of farmland, a tax normally in kind was imposed on farmers based on their harvest, loosely set at 10% (see Aiken and Leigh, 2011).

10The first British measure to systematize land ownership was undertaken in Singapore, adopted in August 1875, which granted all Malay claimable lands a lease of 999 years (Barlow, 1995; Zhang, 2007). When Frank Swettenham replaced Douglas as Resident of Selangor in 1882, he quickly pushed through a land code in the Selangor Council chaired by him, known as “General Land Regulations” as he stated in the 1883 Selangor Annual Report:

[Land] regulations enacting that all lands must be held by registered title derived from the Government were introduced. I will not say without trouble, but without anything like serious opposition, and with a minimum of inconvenience to occupiers of land. (Zhang, 2007: 64)

11Official issuance of land titles had earned for the state coffer a 12-fold increase in land taxation in 1883 as it provided great incentives to land claimants to come up and have their plots registered in exchange for a safeguarded ownership. This registration effort started with Swettenham with the Torrens System taken from Australia which provided land deeds consolidated with surveyed measurements on paper, thus avoiding potential overlapping land claims and ownership conflicts.

12Swettenham’s successor William Maxwell who with wide experience across many British colonies further developed the Torrens System. Maxwell in 1891 adopted the Mukim mechanism (districts) by dividing Kuala Lumpur into four mukims, each of which was further subdivided into 71 land plots, thus simplifying the land tax computation method (Zhang, 2007: 66-67). The Mukim system has remained valid till today, and it has effectively transferred the nominal land ownership of the sultanate into a privatized commodity, making subsequent land transactions and alienations practical and easy. By the 1890s, another industrial crop, rubber, had emerged, apart from tin, as a key, privatized but predominantly corporatized land user all around Kuala Lumpur and elsewhere in the Malay Peninsula, as car industry began to bring in great profits across the United States and Europe.

Rubber estates and urban transformation

13During the late 1880s, prior to rubber planting, lands much to the north of the Sungai Klang and Sungai Gombak confluence in the north of present-day Kuala Lumpur were zoned and planted sporadically with commercial crops such as gambia, coffee, tapioca. By the end of the 19th century, all such crops were gradually replaced by the lucrative rubber which witnessed a massive destruction of fertile tropical forest in favour of rubber cropping in and around Kuala Lumpur. Subsequently, rise in world demand of rubber and its surging prices attracted strong interest of European firms to Malaya whose company numbers rose from 76 in 1910 to an estimated number of 2,500 in 1940. By 1940, rubber plantations of at least 100 acres stood at 2,113,000 acres while smaller holdings totalled 1,351,000 acres (Kinney, 1975: 61-63; Zhang, 2007: 68).

14For European rubber plantations1, their extensive growth was characterized by formal applications to various state land office. Land grants were generously issued on freehold status, which was highly profitable when land was converted in later stages from agriculture to housing or industries when urbanization expanded from Kuala Lumpur. Smaller plots of land were however opened up by local villagers, both Malay and Chinese communities. Medium-sized holdings were largely owned by non-Malays and would have been situated around the towns. In many cases, forest lands were first cleared by cultivators who subsequently made claims and earned title deeds (Kinney, 1975). Much of small Malay holdings were sold to Chinese and Indians until in 1913 the Malay Reservation Act2 was enacted to protect Malay ownership.

15Throughout the first three-quarters of the 21st century, rubber became the most important cash crop of Malaysia following the upsurge of automobile industry and demand of rubber-related products, making the country the largest world producer for almost a century until the early 1980s. Much of the urban service sector was also in many ways linked to rubber and tin industries in the country until the industrial take-off in the mid-1970s which saw the expansion of the higher level industrial and tertiary sectors.

16From the mid-1970s, as a result of the industrial global shift in the aftermath of the oil crisis 1973-1974 (Dicken, 2007), Malaysia was one of the key choice destinations to benefit from the shift with its comparative advantages. Coupled with the discovery of oil and gas reserves in offshore Terengganu state, and Sarawak, Malaysia’s enriched treasury and the rise of middle classes have bolstered the expansion of the Kuala Lumpur urban region enormously in housing and industrial developments. The most rapidly growing urban centres in the Klang Valley were the industrial residential centres of Petaling Jaya during the 1950s-1960s, and together with Shah Alam from the 1970s (Aiken and Leigh, 1975; Wong, 2018).

17This economic injection had set the precondition of the metropolizing take-off in the Greater Kuala Lumpur region in which Kuala Lumpur is the agglomeration core (fig. 1). Most significant of all, it was the relatively easy land use conversion from rubber plantations and ex-tin mines in and around Kuala Lumpur towards housing and industrial developments when rapid urbanization picked up its pace. Conversion was easy in the sense that the ruling party coalition led by United Malays National Organization (UMNO), especially after the oil boom from the mid-1970s sought to promote house ownership offering low bank interest loans to a much larger cohort of eligible households. Taking this opportunity of higher demand and credit readily available from banks, established and new developers bought up large tracts of rubber and other farmlands to prepare for the take-off. In actual practice, application for land use conversion to respective land offices was largely executed with approval via an “official business collusion” to speed up the process. Construction and business boom had expedited the operations of agglomeration effects, leading to the formation of the Kuala Lumpur city region.

Agglomeration Effects and Metropolization of the Greater Kuala Lumpur

18Apart from agglomeration effects, there was another political factor which was key to assist growth of the Greater Kuala Lumpur. This was the launch of the New Economic Policy by the race-led ruling party UMNO from 1971 with objective to promote Malay urbanization to balance the overwhelming dominance of the ethnic Chinese in major Malaysian cities. For Kuala Lumpur, the national capital, this promotion was supported by substantial revenues derived from Malaysia’s oil and industrial boom from the mid-1970s (Bunnell and Nah, 2004; Bunnell, 2002).

19Rise in public revenues and the Malay-led urbanization policy had bolstered tremendous change in Kuala Lumpur as the national administrative centre. First, it was the expansion of the public sector, manufacturing sector and enlarged tertiary education intake through which large numbers of Malays were employed or recruited. These measures saw the gradual but effectively massive shift of rural Malays to the cities. Secondly, economic prosperity in the cities had also acted as a “pull factor” to hollow out to a great extent Chinese New Villages3 and Indian rubber estate workers, expedited by the replacement of rubber plantations with oil palm which is much less labour-intensive4. Together with the rural Malays, both the new village ethnic Chinese and the estate Indians have been bound for the cities, where higher paid jobs are more readily available and better education facilities for their children can be found. Presently, filling up the hollowed-out plantations are hundreds of thousands of Indonesian and Bangladeshi migrant workers.

20The economic take-off from the mid-1970s had indeed seen the rise in land demand for industrial and housing expansion as well as physical infrastructure. This was accompanied by amalgamation of smaller edge towns or settlements with larger cities along the Klang Valley, as well as rapid conversion of estates or ex-tin mining lands into urbanized zones (Wong, 2006a). If we were to compare the low labour productivity and an over-supply of unskilled labour scenario in Kuala Lumpur, as described by Sendut (1966) in the early 1960s, the old phenomenon has disappeared and is replaced by largely better skilled professionals and semi-skilled workforce. A better qualified workforce has inevitably initiated the emergence of middle classes whose stronger purchase power has typically reflected in their demand for better quality housing (Goldblum, 2017).

21Throughout Malaysia, identical feature had taken place during the period 1980-2010, and the number of towns had increased from 72 to 2285. The trend nevertheless has been increasingly from small and medium-sized towns to large metropolitan agglomerations in recent years where agglomeration effects reinforce the interactive and collaborative outcome between firms while undergoing competition in business, yet reinforcing their joint international marketing capacity (Mazlan, 2014; Toh, 2012). What then are the agglomeration effects which have led to formation of the Greater Kuala Lumpur?

Agglomeration effects

22Agglomeration effects or economies of agglomeration are known to have occurred when large proportions of the population are clustered in close proximity to one another and where cost savings and shared specialized services can take place. Also, agglomeration facilitates circulation of capital, commodities and labour. Such phenomenon of cost savings is similar to economies of scale whereby the extent of savings and benefits corresponds with the city size, until diseconomies of scale such as serious traffic congestion may occur (see Johnston et al., 2000).

23Nevertheless, not all cities in the developing world have benefited from positive agglomeration effects in their global market-led urbanization processes. In Southeast Asia for instance, only some cities, notably Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, have benefited for being more strongly integrated with the capitalist metropoles during the colonial period. They became already more Western-like cities after the post-World War Two era. Many others, such as Jakarta, Manila or Hanoi, being more traditional, were much less integrated with the global economy characterized by strong market competition (Dick and Rimmer, 1998). Over the last three decades, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur’s trend has even intensified due to globalizing and integrating force, thus widening the gap between more developed and less developed cities in the region.

24First of all, agglomeration effects have begun to operate in the Greater Kuala Lumpur by the conversion of rubber or ex-tin mining lands for urban use. In the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur during the early 1980s, four major rubber estates (Bukit Jalil, Bukit Kiara, Batu and Segambut) were acquired under the Land Acquisition Act 1960 in the pretext of national interest by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall (DBKL) for urban expansion (Nagarajan and Willford, 2014: 191-193; Bunnell and Nah, 2004).

25Other land acquisitions went through a series of ways. One was through acquisition from “squatters” and customary land possessions of Orang Asli6 who held no formal land titles and their rights had eroded with modern interpretations (Bunnell and Nah, 2004). Jungle areas in the city fringes considered to be no man’s land, tin mining concessions whose lease had expired or continued exploitation had proved to be unprofitable, were a real politicized game of business interest allocations. In practice from the 1970s, Malay businesses with strong political links would normally get formal titles released from the land office, and project development works would start with their Chinese business collaborators (Gomez, 2002; 2013).

26Having land and capital resources to facilitate physical expansion, the agglomeration forces exerting from the Kuala Lumpur capital city has acted as a magnetic pole to amalgamate smaller adjoining settlements all along the Klang Valley from the 1980s. These agglomeration externalities are shared by the geographically proximate smaller cities with the capital city to form an urban region in which they are subordinated to the capital core. Taking advantage of such externalities, smaller adjacent cities help their workforce gain higher incomes, which would not have been possible if they stay small and self-contained. As smaller cities have started to grow on their own, one would have witnessed a ‘fusion’ of previously relatively independent settlements into a large metropolitan area, which could also be called a “regionalized urban entity”. In such an urban region, its spatial structure is characterized by a series of settlements which are physically separate or virtually inseparable but “functionally networked clustered around one or more larger cities” (see Meijers and Burger, 2010: 1383).

27In the case of the Kuala Lumpur city region, it has established itself by merging with those having strong industrial and higher labour productivity outputs and hence becoming newly formed urban centres, such as Klang, Shah Alam, Petaling Jaya, Rawang and Kajang. Together they have built up a polycentric relationship with the capital city. In this evolutionary process, the old post-war relationship between Kuala Lumpur as a core city surrounded by a basically rural hinterland has virtually vanished.

28The power of agglomeration effects of an urban region is not a matter of size but rather about the functionality capacity and its performance within the urban region itself and its integration and connected network with the leading globalized economic powerhouse (Saksen, 2002; McGee, 1995). This explains why Manila, Jakarta and Bangkok are ranked lower than Singapore and Kuala Lumpur in the global city positioning, despite their larger physical and population sizes.

29Having examined the agglomeration effects that have contributed to the rapid growth of the Greater Kuala Lumpur, we now move on to investigate the adverse impact of the sprawling pattern of the Kuala Lumpur metropolitan region, which has resulted in diseconomies characterized by a high automobile dependency and congestion.

Diseconomies: Urban sprawl and commuting pattern

30Rapid urban expansion and amalgamation of smaller settlements nearby to form an greater agglomerated city region have commonly contributed to transport-related environmental costs, time consuming commuting patterns, pollution and higher crime rates. These externalities which are negative in city growth “may erode or even overrule agglomeration economies in the city” (Verhoef and Nijkamp, 2008: 929). Sprawling growth coupled with low-density land use tend to increase the need to commute longer distance to centralized centres where jobs and services are more abundantly available. For example, from 2000 to 2005, the number of commuters entering Beijing’s city centre during rush hours increased by 46.2%. As a result, by the late 2000s, transport-related air pollution made up 23% of the total greenhouse gases in Beijing, higher than those from its industrial sector. The situation of air pollution levels tends to deteriorate when sand storms sweep through the city from Mongolia in the north during winter (Zhao et al., 2010; Wong and Liu, 2018).

31Low density sprawl in an ever-expanding city region suggests an inevitable outcome which is excess commuting in both distance and time as well as automobile dependency if public transport is not effectively provided (Horner, 2002). Attention is now focused on factors that have led to the present stage of high car dependency in the Kuala Lumpur city region.

Origins of the poor public transport in Greater Kuala Lumpur

32For decades from the 1960s, the continued adoption of a linear development corridor pattern along the traffic lines following the Klang River with low-rise residential and business districts in response to urban expansion of Kuala Lumpur has led to a sprawl. As early as the mid-1970s, Aiken and Leigh (1975) had already observed and expected an imminent traffic congestion in the Klang Valley, especially in the older districts of the Kuala Lumpur capital city where narrow streets were left untouched even though car ownership began to rise rapidly. Outside the capital city, expansion of residential-based Petaling Jaya, Sungai Way-Subang and as far as Port Klang had also been accompanied by a significant growth of daily commuters who were increasingly dependent on privately owned vehicles. Residential estates consist typically of single or double-storey terrace houses which are widespread and is symbolic of middle-class living style in the Klang Valley and beyond.

33During the early 1980s, there were intensive public discussions on the need to improve public transport in Kuala Lumpur. However, under the Mahathir administration who led the Malaysian government for 23 years (1981-2004) with a strong control of federal budget under his prime minister’s office, the government adopted an option more towards the construction of highways and major roads, instead of public transport. By analysis, his rationale was backed up by three key factors which served more political-cum-election-based objectives (Gomez, 2013).

34The first was the need to support the national car industry, Proton Saga, launched by Mahathir himself based on the argument of economies of scale that car sales had to be substantial enough to justify economic return and heavy investment. Second, in the largely widely scattered low-density housing estates, public transport provision was likely a public-financed subsidized program, as private capital would have no interest to engage itself in non-profit business. On the contrary, public infrastructure projects such as highway construction including traffic interchanges, involved huge public expenses and could be used by the ruling party to rally political supporting companies through closed door negotiations without necessarily calling public tenders (Gomez and Tong, 2017; Wong, 2006b). Consequently, intensive networks of highways have been built in the Klang Valley as a political modus operandi which continued after Mahathir’s retirement from politics in 2004. Ultimately, political ends have been used overwhelmingly to overrule rational planning goals of an environmentally friendly transit system which has good potential to serve responsibly and seemingly better the masses (Faludi, 1973).

35By April 2017, there were 57 expressways and highways of different lengths in existence across the whole Klang Valley. Massive highway networks with under-provisioned public transit have deepened automobile dependence. Consequently, rise in car ownership was dramatic. From 2000 to 2020, for example, while the Klang Valley population rose from 4.5 million to 7.5 million, the number of households with cars increased from 0.84 million to 1.4 million respectively. During the same period, the number of cars rose from 1.2 million in 2000 to 2.1 million in 2020, indicating the car-people ratio being 1 to 3.57, which is an extremely high level by Southeast Asian standards. From the same token, the modal share of public transport during the period 1995-2005 decreased from 34.3% to 19.7%. High demand in road network had resulted in severe congestion and deterioration of travel comfort, especially during peak hours (Selangor State Government, 2005).

Rise in primacy of the Kuala Lumpur metropolitan region

36Despite traffic congestions, the high concentration of budget allocations, thanks to the petro-dollars, and private capital investments, both international and local, have bolstered the rise in urban primacy of the Greater Kuala Lumpur. Indeed, as a more developed of the developing economies, Malaysia’s post-war urbanization rate has been higher than the world’s average rate. From 1950 to 2018, for example, while the world’s urban population rose from 30% to 55%, Malaysia experienced a spectacular rise from 20% to 76% during the same period (United Nations, 2019), where demographic growth of Kuala Lumpur city’s surrounding areas and fringes was exceptionally high as a persistent peri-urbanization process (Brookfield et al., 1991), especially as urban sprawl continued in the Klang valley but also towards the south of the city center, were the new administrative capital city of Putrajaya, the ITC hub Cyberjaya and the new international airport have been built in the years 2000.

37Across Petaling Jaya to Shah Alam, vast industrial premises were constructed as a result of the global shift mentioned above, a linear conurbation morphology has taken shape from the 1980s through the physical expansion from Kuala Lumpur as the core. This process has brought about environmental problems such as floods and pollution to the eco-systems (Yap, 2019; Wong, 2006b).

38Fig. 2 clearly shows that the demographic expansion of the metropolitan region of Kuala Lumpur where a sharp climb after the mid-1970s with the oil boom and industrial growth is noticeable. This trend of annual growth of between seven and eight percent was exceptionally significant as it continued till the Asian Economic Crisis which hit hard the country’s economy during 1997-1998 as a result of financial abuses and mismanagement (Gomez, 2002; 2013). Interestingly, the economic slowdown from the year 2000 began to see the decline in the Kuala Lumpur metropolitan region’s growth rate which began to stabilize to a more acceptable pace (Rimmer and Dick, 2009). By 2023, the Kuala Lumpur metropolitan region experienced an annual growth rate of only 2.64 percent. In terms of agglomerated urban growth, nevertheless, the region had grown significantly by 25 times over a time span of 63 years from 1960 to 2023.

Fig. 2. Population of Kuala Lumpur Metropolitan Region, 1950-2023

Year Population

Annual Growth Rate

(%)

Year Population

Annual Growth Rate

(%)

1950 262,000 -- 1990 2,098,000 8.03
1955 300,000 2.74 1995 2,975,000 7.01
1960 344,000 2.99 2000 4,176,000 7.02
1965 394,000 2.87 2005 4,927,000 3.36
1970 451,000 2.73 2010 5,810,000 3.36
1975 661,000 8.01 2015 6,851,000 3.35
1980 971,000 8.01 2020 7,997,000 2.79
1985 1,427,000 7.94 2023 8,622,000 2.64

Sources: a) United Nations, 2019, World Population Prospects 2019, New York. b) Macrotrends, 2024, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Metro Area Population 1950-2024, https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/206411/kuala-lumpur/population Note: This Metropolitan Area is also known as The Klang Valley, stretching from Gombak to the east of Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur to Port Klang to the west. The figures for 2020 and 2023 are based on an estimate. Annual growth rate indicates the rate of increase over the previous year.

Fig. 3. Rise of Primacy Index of Kuala Lumpur Metropolitan Region over Johor Bahru Urban Region, 1950-2020

Year Pop. of Kuala Lumpur Metropolitan Region (a) Pop. of Johor Bahru Urban Region (b) (Second largest) No. of Times (a) is Greater Than (b)
1950* 262,000 46,800 5.6
1960 344,000 86,000 4.0
1970 451,000 135,800 3.3
1980 971,000 247,100 3.9
1990 1,427,000 416,600 3.4
2000 4,176,000 630,300 6.6
2010 5,810,000 807,000 7.2
2020 7,997,000 1,045,000 7.7

39Agglomeration effects and diverse sources of capital investments have contributed towards the rise in urban primacy index of the metropolitan region against the other smaller city regions in Malaysia (Goldblum and Wong, 2018). Fig. 3 shows the widening size gap between Kuala Lumpur and the presently second ranking city of Johor Bahru during the post-World War II period. Their size difference had remained around four times until the late 1990s when Malaysia’s successful participation in the globalized economy received an important impact. Consequently, from 2000, Kuala Lumpur’s size gap began to widen to over 6 times, reaching 7.7 times in 2020. According to the United Nations projection, the gap is expected to rise to 8 times from 2025 to 2035 (United Nations, 2021). Similar rise in primacy has also occurred in other Southeast Asian capital cities such as Jakarta, Manila and Bangkok. Those having higher primacy rates are countries enjoying better performance in export-led industrialization strategies (Douglass and Jones, 2008: 28-29).

40The size gap between Malaysia’s first ranking city region and the second ranking city region, Johor Bahru, would have been even larger has there not been the spill-over effect from Singapore which, apart from injecting investment and routine spending in Johor, has been attracting over 80,000 commuting workers daily from Johor Bahru. Johor Bahru has in turn drawn in large numbers of migrants from other less prosperous states such as Perak, Pahang, and rural regions north of Johor state itself.

41In the globalized exchange of goods and services, land scarce Singapore has generated greater effect to its adjoining city Johor Bahru than Kuala Lumpur. Functionally, Johor Bahru has served as a lower end supplier of labour and skill to Singapore which is the regional hub of Southeast Asia in the flow of goods, capital and knowledge information. With the agglomeration economic effects coming from Singapore, this is executed very effectively in the context of international division of work.

* * *

42From an historical perspective, the study has traced the formation of a tiny tin mining settlement over a century and a half ago which has grown into a mega-sized Kuala Lumpur metropolitan region or better known as the Klang Valley. However, further expansion has to face physical barriers by mountains to its immediate east and the Straits of Melaka 30 km to the west (Wong, 2006a). Endogenously, it is the far-reaching rural-urban cum small-medium sized town migration to the most privileged capital city region as a result of improved education and the gain of agglomeration economies that have provided advantages in better qualified jobs and investments.

43The process of land use transformation in the Kuala Lumpur metropolitan region from the 1970s, has witnessed the removal of rubber plantations, reclamation of ex-mining lands, and the merger of small settlements with farms and workshops. Notably, the state-sponsored Malay urbanization campaign through which substantial scale of public service jobs were created with the support of petro-dollars derived from local oil and gas wells as well as industrial shift from the Western capitalist world seeking lower cost of production. This global shift after the mid-1970s has witnessed an extensive expansion of urban-industrial premises, a massive network of highways and low-density landed housing estates along the Klang Valley to serve the rising middle classes of all three major ethnic groups (Malays, Chinese and Indians). Higher demand for industrial and housing developments has pushed up land values substantially.

44Rapid development of the Kuala Lumpur metropolitan region is attributable to its agglomeration effects which provide mutual support to enterprises congregated in the region. However, the diseconomies have emerged as a result of an inadequate and ineffective public transport system in the city region which is massively built with highways. Two key factors have been identified in this phenomenon. One is the political-based cronyistic practice of corruption where highway construction is a rent seeking exercise where tenders were offered without transparency to politically close allies to support ruling party unity and general reelections. The other attribute was the promotion of national car under the former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed which he required good sale volumes to sustain its operations. Consequently, highways have been built in the city region much more than needed yet they have generated a car dependency syndrome and traffic congestion as commuters have little option but to use a car in the sprawling city region. Public transport is largely neglected as it does not provide “surplus revenues” but requires instead public subsidies.

45After much government sponsorship, Kuala Lumpur’s Malay population has now exceeded that of the ethnic Chinese by over two percentage points, a drastic change from lower than 25% in 1970 against the 60% of the ethnic Chinese half a century ago. Growth of the capital city as well as the whole Klang Valley has witnessed ever since a high concentration of not only key public administrative functions but also an impressive financial and economic expansion. Yet, this mega-urban region has retained its stratified ethnic-based housing estates.

46Kuala Lumpur metropolitan region is expected to grow even further. As a remedial measure, the priority issue is the serious re-examination of a comprehensive public transport network linked effectively across the Klang Valley. Following this, there will be a need to be cautious in planning future highways. Highways unless necessary in absolute terms must not be considered as they not only involve large land-take, but they also encourage use of cars which has a strong tendency to contribute to congestion and a worsening environmental pollution.

Notes de bas de page

1To cite a few larger ones, these were Dunlop Rubber Plantation, Société Financière des Caoutchoucs, Malayan American Plantations, Malacca Rubber Plantations, and East Asiatic Rubber Company. Many estates were managed through agency firms such as Harrisons, Crosfield and Company, Sime Darby, Guthrie, Boustead etc (Kinney, 1975: 61-63).

2The Malay Reserve Land Law was first introduced in 1913 in the Federated Malay States of Perak, Selangor, Negeri Sembilan, and Pahang, which forbids the disposal of Malay-owned lands to non-Malays. It was extended to Non-Federated Malay States (Kedah, Terengganu, Kelantan, Perlis, Johor) in the 1930s. The three Straits Settlements (Penang, Malacca, Singapore) were not affected by this law.

3During the “Emergency period” 1948-1960 where the British colonial government fought the Communist insurgents, over half-a million ethnic Chinese residents who lived at the rural fringes were resettled in 400 “New Villages” with security provided to prevent them from supporting the Communist guerillas (Aiken and Leigh, 1975).

4As of today, the great majority of oil palm workers are Indonesian migrant workers.

5The increase in number was primarily attributable to large scale rural-urban migration to urban areas classified as towns, and the redrawing of town boundaries to cover extended built-up areas.

6Original people who are one of the earliest settlers in Peninsular Malaysia, where in 2010 their number was estimated at 170,000. A small percentage of them who still lead traditional livelihood by hunting and slash-and-burn farming live in isolated mountainous areas.


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