Deciphering urban cultural heritage, community and the city S. S. Zubir & W. A. Sulaiman Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia Abstract Cities must have prerequisite elements that attract people to appreciate their context. Usually, historic cities have the advantage over newly established urban centres because of their archaeological vestiges and collective memories of the past could still be projected as valuable public commodities. The primary concern of this paper is to highlight culture as a significant attribute in the development of urban form, and as a product of the collective and individual experience of the various social groups. It is culture that triggered the emergence of the socio-economic, technological and political structure of colonialism, which shaped the various social groups, which in turn shaped their built environment. By investigating the built forms of the colonial city of George Town through urban morphology and building typology, the objective is to unveil the characteristic patterns, the ambience and image portrayed, and finally the prevailing architectural styles within each particular historic setting. These will then be compared at various junctures to the existing context of the city in order to identify elements that have contributed in preserving a stable and a unified built environment. Keywords: shophouses, historical and cultural enclave, vernacular, traditional, Kampong, Kongsi, morphology, typology, verandah, colonial. 1 Introduction The traditional city can be considered as an amalgamation of architecture over time that is composed of semi-layered accumulation of history, buildings, streets, open spaces, city block, etc. The city, whether planned or unplanned, has a direct relationship to urban morphology and the sense of place. Usually, planned cities The Sustainable City III, N. Marchettini, C. A. Brebbia, E. Tiezzi & L. C. Wadhwa (Editors) © 2004 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISBN 1-85312-720-5 234 The Sustainable City III are concerned with either a predetermined component, or with the visual appearance of unplanned disorder and unplanned urban centres, where growth is accommodated in a practical and coherent manner rather than in a principled manner (Slater and Schultz [1]). These qualities are evident in almost all major cities. However, the characteristic of urban form can no longer be applied to the modern city. A major confrontation to many traditional urbanisms is structured around the idea of opposition between placelessness of the modern vehicular city and the meaningful places of old urban centres. Sexton [2] highlighted that “Automobile… is a manifestation of the devolution of community from a shared realm with shared purpose to an amalgamation of closely bunched, independent mini-estates”. Instead of the immense financial, technological and political energies that are developing campus-like mega malls, transit stations, skyscrapers and etc, the city of today according to Boyer [3] “seems to stimulate a complex switchboard of plug-in zones and edge cities connected through an elaborate network of highways, telephones, computer banks, fibre-optic cable lines, and television and radio outlets”. A similar condition is experienced in Malaysia today. The introduction of the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) has propelled market-place urbanism to consecrate the frontier. Land, which once seems to be far from the city centre, is now encroaching nearer to it. The fine- grained qualities of individual lots have to make way for huge campus-like development and so forth. The process of human needs inherent in the environment that indicates form determinants have been assumed to be essentially rational forces that can be measured in architecture (Ungers [4]; Rossi [5]) and urban geography (Conzen [6]; Whitehand [7]) seems to be not valid anymore and is only occasionally reciprocal. Aldo Rossi’s conception of the city as a sedimentary base of meaning critical to the further creation of accumulations through time and space, which is constituted by principles such as sameness, repetition, geometry, grid, rhythm, symmetry, harmony and the likes, hold no meaning in the newly form urban structure of the capital–driven urbanism. 2 The Asian city The lack of an authentic theory of indigenous urban form have led scholars and policy makers to deny the validity and the contributions of vernacular culture in the development of the contemporary city. Most of these studies and recommendations often begin and conclude with alien construct with the assumption that Malaysian cities were the off springs of colonialism and later capitalism. Few might wonder if the underlying activities in the public realm might have been originated from the indigenous culture itself. This is no surprise since many openly deny indigenous or vernacular built forms and substitute them with the architecture of the International Style or other equivalent typologies. Contemporary urbanism have been embedded with alien meanings, specifically the belief in a single, fixed and knowable underlying reality or popularly described as the “bottom-line” where self-interest reigns, the The Sustainable City III, N. Marchettini, C. A. Brebbia, E. Tiezzi & L. C. Wadhwa (Editors) © 2004 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISBN 1-85312-720-5 The Sustainable City III 235 level to which social phenomena can and should be reduced (O’Connor [8]). The modern city as seen from their perspective, reduced man to their natural self- interest. As a result, the contemporary Asian cities, customs, habits and even culture disappear to leave man as the natural quintessential urbanite. The metaphor often governs urban research not only in the Malaysian context but also in many countries of the Third World. In respond to the issues mentioned above, it becomes our task to identify elements of urban form that can be considered as indigenous to the locality. Perhaps, one approach to counter the prospect of our cities becoming dismembered architectural artefacts produced by the elementary, institutional and mechanistic typologies of the West, is to be constantly reminded of the full potential of understanding the history of architectural form. By observing the evolution of architectural form through the cultural context, we might learn to create a more responsive and meaningful built environment and that the most effective tool for this analysis is that of typology. The emphasis here is not the search outside the legitimation of the technological sciences but the notion that within our built environment itself “reside a unique and a particular mode of production and explanation” (Vidler [9]). This idea, described by Vidler as the third typology or urban morphology (Gosling and Maitland [10]) focuses its attention in a “return to the use of traditional systems and paradigms. With a rediscovered understanding of these systems it might be quickly possible to propose new cities or, more believably, interventions within old cities”(Vidler [11]). A few scholars (Lim [12] and Hoselitz [13]) have emphasized some doubts as to whether the cities in the Malay Peninsular ever experienced “primary urbanization” where the indigenous culture remains the matrix for urban centres that developed from it. And in this sense, these cities are considered orthogenetic, meaning able to carry forward into a systematic and reflective dimension of the old culture. This may be due to the fact that the indigenous culture does not have a tradition of the high-style order to be referred to by the colonizers and immigrants and that can be adopted and transformed into the newly established cities. In many cases, it was natural for colonizers and immigrants to create the built environment to resemble the urban landscape of their homeland. Eventually, the indigenous cultural landscapes were relegated to a non-urban image due to the displacement or juxtaposition of a higher tradition of urban culture. Nevertheless, there exist some degree of assimilation of indigenous built culture in the cities particularly in the vernacular shop houses that are a common feature in this part of the world. The inclination of this study is purely academic and stresses the importance of local inflicted culture over foreign ideas. Therefore, this study required us to adapt a concept of culture that is sensitive to the causes of cultural change and mutation as the collective experience of the society at large. Furthermore, experiencing the city from the cultural perspective provides a new sense of direction to re-examine the validity of the universal concept of globalisation on the development of local urban form. It is a truism that the one world vision or universalisation was the result of the linear concept of time, while being The Sustainable City III, N. Marchettini, C. A. Brebbia, E. Tiezzi & L. C. Wadhwa (Editors) © 2004 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISBN 1-85312-720-5 236 The Sustainable City III innovative and progressive towards an advancement of mankind and at the same time has led to the subtle destruction of traditional cultures that had produced great civilization of the past. This threat has triggered many developing countries in search of a critical regional identity in the design of their built environments. To a certain extent, it has become a paradoxical quest for allied environmental designers of these countries in trying to become modern and return to the source of traditional norms; at the same time trying also to revive an old dormant civilization and