Urban Renewal Without Displacement: a chance to create a new Malaysian model of social harmony & compromise (like all things Malaysian).

When the Urban Renewal Act (URA) was first mooted, public debate rightly centred on the risk of forced land acquisitions, gentrification, and displacement. But these flashpoints obscure a deeper issue: Malaysia’s development model remains caught between a capitalist speculative machine and popular opposition to “development”.

If we are to seize the moment offered by the URA, we must push the debate beyond compensation thresholds or building heights — and toward an ethical and institutional realignment of urbanism itself.

Profit and Its Discontents

It is entirely legitimate for developers to pursue profit — that is their organisational purpose. Denying that is unhelpful to the discussion. But allowing that logic to wholly shape urban renewal, unchecked by public interest mechanisms, has left the public with a vision of cities with stark inequality, traffic-bound dysfunction, and ecological precarity.

Unchecked and unrestrained development based on pure profit echoes a settler-colonial logic — not unlike that which we criticise in places like Israel — where the dispossession of the vulnerable is masked by the language of development. Land is treated not as habitat or heritage, but as extractive commodity. Communities are not seen as stewards, but as friction.

This is not to romanticise stasis. Cities must change. But what kind of change, and for whom?

Urban Form, Not Just Floor Space

One popular myth is that more towers mean more density. In fact, many inner-city high-rise zones in Kuala Lumpur have lower population densities than traditional mid-rise neighbourhoods. Barcelona, despite its relative lack of skyscrapers, achieves greater density than many tower-heavy Asian cities — not by building higher, but by building smarter.

We need to abandon the obsession with “super-towers” that maximise Gross Floor Area (GFA) on isolated parcels. The real opportunity lies in what urbanists call “smart density”: carefully calibrated infill, adaptive reuse, and middle housing typologies that collectively increase density without erasing the street-level complexity of urban life.

Typology Justice: Expand the Social Impact Assessment

The best tool we already have is the Social Impact Assessment (SIA). Rather than invent new frameworks, the URA should expand the SIA into a Justice Audit module tailored to urban renewal projects. This would evaluate not only relocation plans and social cohesion risks, but also typological justice: does the new building type suit the demographic and climatic realities of the area? Does it retain space for multi-generational life, small-scale commerce, or vernacular forms of community? Perhaps the metrics should be crafted by historians, sociologists, architects, urban planners and presented to Parliament or other democratic institutions for review.

This proposal aligns with positions taken by Pertubuhan Akitek Malaysia (PAM), which has called for architects to be more involved at the upstream stages of Urban Renewal planning. There are many existing tools in 21st century planning innovations, for example - design charettes that embed public values into project typologies.

Participation Must Be Designed, Not Outsourced

Too often, “public participation” is treated as a bureaucratic hoop — a townhall held after decisions are made, a survey designed to confirm the inevitable. Real participation must be designed with rigour, dignity, and temporal integrity. That means initiating community charettes at the schematic design stage, before submission to the planning authority.

The National House Buyers Association (HBA) has consistently argued that owners, not developers, should drive renewal. It has raised alarms about the weakening of constitutional property rights and emphasised the need for genuine owner-led processes, especially in stratified developments where consent dynamics are complex. The Consumers Association of Penang (CAP) has gone further, calling for a Housing Development Board to safeguard vulnerable residents, guarantee re-housing rights, and prevent predatory buyouts.

These are not calls for obstruction. They are calls for legitimacy.

As a professional practicing in the development process, I support the spirit of the idea from civil society but I must raise concern on adding more and more bureaucratic red tape and harming our city’s position in ease of doing business. But their concerns can be addressed not through creation of more hoops but to integrate it into existing planning mechanism and regulatory framework which achieves the desired outcome that they wished for without lengthening the planning process.

Formalise Participation, Empower Professionals

To operationalise this new ethic of renewal, several mechanisms must be put in place:

1. Strengthen the Social Impact Assessment by embedding a Justice Audit as a mandatory section for all URA-triggered developments.

   
   
   
   

2. Empanel Certified Urban Charette Facilitators from architecture and planning backgrounds (e.g. those trained in New Urbanism or participatory design) to oversee engagements.

   
   
   
   

3. Establish an Independent Urban Renewal Authority with planning, legal, social, and financial units — not merely a land-acquisition agency.

   
   
   
   

4. Use Special Area Plans (SAPs) to pre-zone and pre-consult localities designated for renewal. This enables planning certainty and pre-empts future conflict.

   
   
   
   

5. Integrate Urban Renewal into the One-Stop Centre (OSC) System, Malaysia’s existing multi-agency approval mechanism. Doing so maintains the country’s longstanding “ease of doing business” reputation. Some stakeholders have proposed a fast-track renewal lane, though this is only feasible if participation and justice audits occur early. If the charette process begins at schematic planning — not post-submission — the OSC timeline need not suffer delays.

   
   
   
   

A Different Future Is Still Possible

This is not a fantasy of nostalgia or anti-modernity. It is a wager that urban renewal can be just, not just efficient; collaborative, not extractive; locally specific, not top-down generic. Developers will still have their profit — but they will earn it through alignment with public good, not its circumvention.

KLCC is not the ideal neighbourhood everyone wants.

Another world is possible.