Malaysia's tidy new capital: Strict rules and tranquillity
International Herald Tribune
April 18, 2005
Thomas Fuller

PUTRAJAYA, Malaysia When Samsudin Osman, the chief administrator here, looks out his office window, he sees a broad and tidy landscaped avenue, brand new government buildings, a large artificial lake and verdant rolling hills.
 
Samsudin is president of Putrajaya Corporation, the closest thing Malaysia's new administrative capital has to a mayor. And Putrajaya is the closest thing Asia has to a city where everything was planned from the top down: shopping centers, schools, apartment blocks and lampposts.
 
Built over the past decade, Putrajaya has none of the urban sprawl of most Asian capitals. Houses must be painted in approved colors and lawns mowed; fences are not allowed. It is a place of many rules, and it is the chief administrator's job to enforce them.
 
"We emphasize a lot on uniformity and standardization," Samsudin, 58, a career civil servant, said recently in his spacious office. He is congenial, low-key and direct: "We don't want there to be too much freedom."
 
Putrajaya has the landscaping and orderliness of Singapore mixed with the sameness and open-plan feel of an American Levittown. When residents recently complained that the owners of unoccupied houses were not mowing their lawns, Samsudin took action.
 
"You're supposed to have a very nice garden city and suddenly you have a house where the grass is not cut," he said in an interview. "So we'll cut the grass for them and send them the bill."
 
Samsudin presides over a huge experiment for Malaysia and the region. Putrajaya was designed as an antidote to the suffocating cities of Southeast Asia, places like Jakarta and Bangkok.
 
Like the Intel computer chips and Brooks Brothers shirts produced here, the new Malaysian capital is a manufactured product, a city built where thousands of oil palms and rubber trees once stood. Malaysia paid for it largely with money from oil revenues.
 
At the center of the city, planners created an island by flooding the land around it. Then they built a series of elaborate bridges to connect the island with the surrounding area.
 
At least one recent visitor was reportedly impressed. Indonesia's president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who came here in February, told his ministers to study how the tsunami-ravaged province of Aceh could learn from the construction of Putrajaya.
 
"The Indonesian government wants Aceh's redevelopment to be modeled after Putrajaya," H. Rusdihardjo, the Indonesian ambassador to Malaysia, was quoted as saying in the Malaysian press after Yudhodyono's visit.
 
But what is perhaps most intriguing about Putrajaya is what visitors do not see: the secrecy that surrounded its construction and the relatively undemocratic nature of the corporation that manages it today. Samsudin was not elected to his job. He was appointed by the prime minister.
 
Because it was a relatively controversial project, with the opposition questioning whether Malaysia's resources could be better spent, some basic questions remain unanswered.
 
How much did the city cost to build?
 
"I don't have the figures myself," Samsudin said during the interview.
 
Turning to an assistant, Norhazifa Mohamed, he asked: "Do you know?"
 
Norhazifa looked surprised to be asked and said she did not know either: "My figures will be out of date."
 
Anwar Ibrahim, a former deputy prime minister who was in government when the project was conceived, said no one in government, including himself, had ever really questioned the plans, which were personally overseen by Mahathir bin Mohamad, the long-serving former prime minister.
 
"There was no debate," Anwar said in an interview. "It was the decision of one man." He added that contracts had been awarded "only to those who were very close to the leadership."
 
To some in Malaysia this was the price of getting things done: Without Mahathir's forceful personality Putrajaya would never have been built. To others, including members of Malaysia's political opposition, it was a byproduct of Mahathir's authoritarian leanings.
 
Today, many questions, big and small, remain for the city's future. Local residents report a lack of parking space and a spate of burglaries. The government is running a large budget deficit, so construction of a planned monorail for the city has been postponed.
 
And some embassies are reluctant to move to a diplomatic quarter reserved for them. "We are marketing this," Samsudin said of the earmarked site. Brunei, Egypt, Iraq, the Philippines and Qatar have purchased land in Putrajaya, aides to Samsudin said, and 15 other countries are completing land purchases.
 
But a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Kuala Lumpur, the former seat of government and the commercial capital, said there were no plans to move to a new site. "We believe our current embassy location in KL is a convenient site for the many Malaysian citizens and American visitors who require our assistance and services," said the spokesman, Karl Stoltz.
 
The other reluctant tenant in Putrajaya is the prime minister himself, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi.
 
Although he has been in office 18 months, he has not yet moved in to the massive green-domed prime minister's residence. One popular theory making the rounds in Malaysia is that the place is haunted. Samsudin rejects this idea with a hearty laugh but does not offer an alternative reason.
 
"He's moving in soon," Samsudin said.
 
Khairy Jamaluddin, a member of the ruling political party and the prime minister's son-in-law, says the house displeased the prime minister's wife, Endon Mahmood. "We convinced her to move in, but it still needs renovation," he said.
 
It is tempting to compare Putrajaya with other manufactured cities like Canberra, Islamabad or Brasília, but the Malaysian capital is different in one important way: it is only 25 kilometers, or 15 miles, from Kuala Lumpur, making it a kind of leafy suburb.
 
If it were not for the huge government buildings in Putrajaya you might mistake it for a resort or a theme park. The lake is stocked with fish and has a sailing club. There are wetlands and many parks: 37 percent of the city is supposed to remain green.
 
Samsudin, a tailor's son who went to graduate school in the United States, lives in a two-story, cream-colored house with a red-tiled roof. He has a pier on the lake which he could theoretically use to get to work by boat.
 
"What this place has is a great deal of peace and quiet," Samsudin said. "Every day I open my window and there's the lake. When I go to sleep there's the lake." He says he knows the lake is clean because he fell in once while sailing.
 
What Putrajaya lacks, say residents, is bustle, night life and meeting places for young people. At a newly opened shopping mall, Najmi bin Abidin, a 17-year-old high school student in an England soccer jersey, said he liked the fact that he could walk to school, swim in a local pool and jog on a track. But he said he missed the big city. "It's quiet here," he said.
 
In the mall's food court, Fikri bin Ahmad Jamani, 18, said he missed his old home, another suburb of Kuala Lumpur that he left two years ago.
 
"There was more entertainment there," he said. "There was snooker and video arcades."
 
Samsudin says he is working on providing more facilities for young people such as playing fields, but on a personal level he is unmoved by the argument that Putrajaya lacks night life. "To me it doesn't make a whole lot of difference," he said. "I don't do clubbing."
 
Khairy, the prime minister's son-in-law, says he believes Putrajaya should be seen for what it is: an administrative center.
 
"When you manufacture a city you're not going to get that organic feel to it, you're not going to get that vibrancy," Khairy said. He calls the city "monoglot" because it is inhabited mainly by civil servants, who in Malaysia are usually Malays, the main ethnic group.
 
The beginnings of diversity can be found in a neighborhood near the Lake Club. John Choong, a middle-aged co-owner of an electronics factory, lives with his family along a row of houses beside a canal, part of a small minority of Chinese residents in Putrajaya.
 
He says he likes the tranquillity of the place, security provided through closed-circuit television cameras and frequent patrols by private guards.
 
"Every day is like a Sunday," he said. The air quality is better than Kuala Lumpur and it is cooler. Everyone knows each other in the neighborhood, he said, including the 13 Chinese families. "We get together and have a drink," he said.
 
(Malays, who are Muslim, are banned by law from drinking alcohol in Malaysia, but the rule is loosely enforced.)
 
Choong, who lived in Britain for several years, says he is delighted with life here. "I am very fond of the British and U.S. lifestyle," he said, referring to the sense of community and the lack of walls. "This is the closest thing I could get to that."
 
Samsudin said Putrajaya's open-plan concept initially made many people uneasy. "People were a bit squeamish about staying in places where there were no walls," he said. But after a while, he said, they appreciated it.
 
"We would like to maintain this ambience," Samsudin said. "That would be the challenge of the future."

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