| Based on over two years of field research, this is an ethnographic analysis of the social production of space in George Town, Penang, Malaysia, a culturally diverse urban milieu of originally immigrant communities. Taking a temporal, political-economic approach, it examines how personal and public identities, long-standing cultural and religious values, ideas about history, about communal participation, and about power and autonomy all converge in the meanings, uses and perceptions of urban residential space. It shows how a centralized national development policy, a political culture still inflected by colonial-era racial categories, a recently global movement of urban environmental and ecological concern, and flows of information both two and from local contexts all contribute to the material and social fabric of the city and what its residents feel is at stake in the current transformation of its built environment.; Theorizing issues of housing, heritage preservation and urban development, it analyzes how the city's many single-unit houses historically fostered opportunity and ethnic expression and how urban residential space itself has now become the explicit focus and unifying principle of a number of new social movements hose goals of fostering a responsible, place-based civic consciousness also entail new forms of organization and possibilities for identification that cross ethnic lines. A principal focus is on the ways in which Chinese, Malay and Indian residents actively negotiate both their own identities and those of others in and through an urban space long marked by a proliferation of ethnically specific architectural forms now newly valued as “multicultural” but nevertheless also subject to massive redevelopment. Built environments of homes in three different neighborhoods are interpreted as media for the creation of both old and new forms of identity, as sites for the recollection or reformulation of histories and the reinvention of traditions, as bastions of resistance to the negative effects of haphazard urban planning, as symbolic battlegrounds for occasionally conflicting socioeconomic interests, and as grounds for residents' creation of a sense of self, their sociability, the future trajectories of their children, and their ability to cope with the many physical and social changes wrought by rapid economic development. |
