Wrecking balls, recognition, reform: The ambivalent experience of law, justice, and place in urban Malaysia

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the Malaysian state's attempt to transform the physical space and demographic character of a predominantly Malaysian Tamil neighborhood and the effects of large-scale development projects on local communities in urban Kuala Lumpur. Focusing on Brickfields, one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city, I examine the discourses and practices associated with these development projects that reveal complex attempts on the part of the state and the community to reconcile techno-rational conceptions of law, development, and city planning with local understandings of justice and relatedness.; Specifically, this project explores the workings of the law in the context of urban development projects and the gap between formal legality and local notions of justice and relatedness. By establishing the multiple ways in which law and justice circulate in Brickfields, the project then considers how area residents seek to form a sense of personhood in the context of an ambiguous legal subjectivity and a rapidly changing urban environment. Finally, the project considers alternative avenues of engagement with the state, particularly religion, available in an setting where urban subjects find themselves formally excluded from the processes of law and the formation of what are believed to be ideal, ordered urban spaces.; These issues are addressed by this dissertation by asking how the right to the city and community is imagined and articulated in Malaysia. Through an analysis of ethnographic data obtained during fourteen months of fieldwork between 2000 and 2002, this dissertation demonstrates how variously situated Malaysians (city planners, property developers, temple priests, Brickfields residents) worked to make urban modernization consistent with Malaysian cultural and religious practices at the local level and meaningful in terms of Malaysian public life.