The Way Malaysian Cities Breathes: A Planner’s Digression

Syuk Bash
Apr 23
5 min read

This is the first post on Distant Worlds.

Which is another way of saying I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing yet.

It’s a bit of a soft launch. A warm-up lap. A way to test if musings about climate, broken pavements, and spatial habits can live in the same place without tripping over each other. Mostly, it’s a way to give my thoughts a place to sit before they keep pacing around.

So no, this post isn’t polished. But it’s paced. It’s not rushed. It doesn’t try to teach. It’s just trying to pay attention. If it meanders, good. Streets meander too.

I walk through Ampang a lot.

Sometimes in the morning, when the light is soft and the roads are still damp from last night’s rain. Sometimes in the late afternoon, when everything feels heavy and slow and everyone is trying to get somewhere they’re already late for. But mostly, I walk because something about these places resists being seen all at once. Malaysian townscapes don’t reveal themselves from a distance. You have to let them come into focus. Slowly. At walking speed.

I’ve passed the same cucur udang stall near a leaning tree maybe a hundred times. The setup changes daily, sometimes a proper table, sometimes just a basket on a crate. The sambal used to be better. The pavement is broken. The drain’s clogged. And yet, every time I see it, I pause. Not out of nostalgia, but because it works. Not just in the functional sense, but in the deeper, lived-in sense. It exists because it belongs there. Because people return to it. Because someone once put a chair under that tree, and the town folded around it.

Once, I asked the makcik running it if the stall was always meant to be there. She looked up from her frying, squinted for a second, then just said, "Entah, lama dah..." and went back to flipping cucur like I’d asked about a dream she barely remembered. That felt like a planning principle in disguise. One tucked away in routine, grease, and things that somehow stay.

And that’s where the tension begins. Because I also studied urban planning. I know what a street "should" look like. I’ve drawn those diagrams, labelled those pavements, enforced those hierarchies. I believe in good design. I believe in legibility, in accessibility, in dignity through infrastructure.

But I also believe in things that aren’t so easily drawn.

And the more I walk through Malaysian towns and cities, the more I find myself standing between two truths.

On Building as an Extension of Self

Let me start with Dawkins.

Not a planner. Not an architect. But in The Extended Phenotype, Richard Dawkins argued that organisms express themselves not just through their bodies, but through what they create. A spider’s web. A beaver’s dam. These are not just tools, they are biological extensions. A reflection of instinct, adaptation, survival. Dawkins writes,

“An animal's behaviour tends to maximise the survival of the genes ‘for’ that behaviour, whether they are inside its body or in other bodies… or even in structures it has built.”

That idea struck me deeply when I started looking at how Malaysians build space. Not grand developments. But the small things. The awning that extends from a shopfront. The potted plants that form a fence. The chair under the fan beside the fridge selling ice cream that nobody ever restocks. These are not just add-ons. They’re expressions.

We build not just to live. We build to continue ourselves. To extend our comfort, our culture, our memory into the world.

I began to see the streets not as collections of buildings, but as collages of intention. Some of them planned. Most of them felt.

On Climate, Culture, and Our Spatial Reflexes

In the 1930s, Watsuji Tetsurō, a Japanese philosopher, introduced the idea of fūdo — a concept roughly translated as “climatic-geographical milieu.” It’s the idea that climate is not just a background condition, it’s a participant in culture. The heat, the humidity, the rhythm of the rain, these things shape how people move, how they gather, even how they think.

We don’t walk the same way under equatorial sun.

And because of that, we don’t build the same way either.

Malaysian townscapes respond to heat the way a tree leans toward light. We build shade before shelter. We prioritise air flow before insulation. We stretch into the spaces between things, because what matters is the ability to breathe. Five-foot ways. Louvered windows. Umbrellas tied to fences. These are not decorative. They are architectural negotiations with climate.

The environment doesn’t just influence form, it calls it forth.

And if you’ve ever sat in a warung during a storm and watched how everyone adjusts: the body language, the chairs, the plastic sheets, you'll know what Watsuji meant. That culture is not layered on top of climate. It emerges from it. As Watsuji observed,

“Human existence is essentially spatial… not simply in the sense of being in space, but in terms of climate, geography, and the everyday lived relationship with one’s surroundings.”

On Beauty, Familiarity, and Townscape

This brings me to Ashihara Yoshinobu.

An architect, and someone I’ve found to be refreshingly unpretentious in how he talks about cities. In The Aesthetic Townscape, Ashihara suggests that beauty in the urban environment isn’t about monuments or symmetry. It’s about comfort. Scale. Familiarity. He noticed that people naturally prefer cities that feel understandable, not necessarily by signage, but by rhythm.

That’s what I see across Malaysian townscapes. Not order, but rhythm.

It’s in the way a road narrows just before it turns. The way a kaki lima becomes a living room. The way light filters through the canopy of an oversized tree that no one dares to cut down. These things don’t follow codes. But they follow intuition.

Ashihara called this “aesthetic unity,” and while it’s not always obvious, I’ve come to believe it exists in these places, not through uniformity, but through cultural coherence. A feeling that this space was built by people who live here, not people who only came to measure it.

On Structure, Sympathy, and the Limits of Improvisation

Still, this isn’t a romantic defence of chaos. I’ve seen what happens when we confuse informality with resilience. When pavements vanish under car tyres. When drain maintenance becomes a myth. When kampung houses are replaced with high-rises that offer no shade, no walkways, and no community.

Improvised space can meet need. But poor infrastructure fails the most vulnerable.

So I still believe in planning. In rules. In anticipation. But maybe not as control. Maybe as choreography. Maybe the planner’s role is not to impose order, but to invite rhythm.

There is a difference between designing for people and designing with them in mind. That difference, however small, changes everything.

Folding, Not Forcing

I return to the cucur stall. The tree hasn’t moved. The pavement is still broken. But the stall is still there. Still needed. Still used.

It doesn’t fit into a masterplan. But it fits into the life of the street.

Maybe our cities aren’t broken. Maybe they’re just built according to a logic we haven’t fully learned how to listen to. A logic that folds space around behaviour. Around weather. Around memory.

And maybe that’s what I’ve been walking toward all this time.

Not a conclusion. Just a question:

What if good city design isn’t just about what we build, but about how much we understand why people build the way they do?

If you’re the kind of person who likes tracing thoughts back to the books they came from, here are a few I kept returning to while writing this: