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From Timothy Ong
The heated arguments surrounding the development of a gazetted area of Bukit Kiara into a visitor centre recently reflects an ongoing planning crisis plaguing mature townships in the Klang Valley.
The project, to be undertaken by the national landscape department, will see an area of the Bukit Kiara Federal Park adjacent to the Jalan Abang Haji Openg neighbourhood in Taman Tun Dr Ismail (TTDI) cleared of trees for conversion into a parking lot.
The squabble over parking, public transport, and traffic is to be expected. Six acres of forested land will be cleared for roads and parking space and, at its fringe, the visitor centre.
By design, the department has placed greater importance on visitors who arrive by car than preserving space for trees, for now or in the future.
Why would the landscape department, whose mandate is to preserve our green heritage, choose to do this?
The underlying rationale to build for car usage is systemic and widespread.
Designers, planners, and developers as well as the landscape department are unable to switch from traditional car-centric models to those that are people-centric.
A wide area adjacent to the Jalan Abang Haji Openg neighbourhood that has already been cleared of trees for the landscape department’s project.
Traditional planning models mandate sufficient parking space and wide roads for and easy driving, resulting in the need to cut down trees to the dismay of the community.
A better alternative is to come up with a design that promotes walking, which would also require less space.
A visitor centre designed for people rather than cars would have been a better way to blend the building into the landscape, preserve more space for trees, and offer a better park experience for people.
Neighbourhoods such as Jalan Abang Haji Openg were first built in the 1970s when the population of Kuala Lumpur’s metro area was only 500,000, 18 times smaller than today’s count of nine million.
A commuting system that does not require one to drive would have been a more practical, realistic, and future-proof option.
Segambut MP Hannah Yeoh’s argument that people would still need to park their cars somewhere somehow ignores the reality that there will never be enough parking spaces for all park-goers.
In most masterplans, the KL of the future is a safe city flourishing with people at its centre.
To get there, we will have to change zoning and architectural bylaws, raise planning standards, review road design guidelines, and revise speed limits, all of which are still based on car-centric principles.
The landscape department could have used the project to serve as a model of what it would be like for KL to be built with a focus on people, and for neighbourhoods like TTDI to flourish.
But as it stands now, there’s still a lot of work to be done.
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Park goers can expect more congestion on the streets leading up to Bukit Kiara when the landscape department’s visitor centre is completed and opened to the public. (tpbk.jln.gov.my pic)
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Timothy Ong is associate director of Commute Initiatives and an FMT reader.
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.
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