Urban Space, Belonging, and Inequality in Multi-Ethnic Housing Estates of Melaka, Malaysia

Abstract

Through ethnographic inquiry, this article explores the dynamics of urban space and ethnicity in a multi-ethnic and predominantly middle-class neighborhood in Melaka, Malaysia. Chinese developers and Malay political officials contributed to the social production of the built environment in the neighborhood, including several housing estates, commercial shop lots, religious institutions, kindergartens, and day care centers. Indians, Malays, Chinese, and Christians mark and claim spaces with polysemous symbols entailing shared meanings of protection and representation of their respective categories. While the Malay-dominated government and Chinese capital have established stable religious institutions, Indians are struggling to maintain two unregistered temples. Chinese and Indians interact in many contexts producing a shared politically marginalized identity of Malaysian citizens. International students, mostly Arabs and Africans of various nationalities, produce a politically marginalized identity of non-citizen student-customers. Fluctuating and persisting aspects of identity schemata embedded in processes of social production and construction are integral to citizen and subcitizen struggles for life-space.

Key Words:

• Urban space
• ethnicity
• housing estates
• belonging
• citizenship

This article stems from my project, “Urban Spaces and Cultural Meanings in Malaysian Cities,” which was funded by the Hofstra College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Faculty Research and Development grants in 2006, 2007, and 2009. I thank all of my friends and informants in Melaka and the editors of this journal for their useful comments.

Notes

1. I use “ethnic” in this article to refer to broad collective or maximal identities, inclusive of those that emphasize constructions of biological and/or cultural features. In the case of Melaka, my data collected on “ethnic” identities indicates that they are constituted by underlying notions of biological and cultural differences.

2. Many contemporary scholars deconstruct “Malay” identities arguing that Malays are “really” natives of Indonesia and not Malaysia. These arguments, aimed to undermine dominant constructions of Malay and Malaysian identities, paradoxically rest on assumptions of the naturalness of borders erected by European colonial powers (see Kessler 1992: 139; Goh 2002: 46; King 2008: xxiii).

3. I use pseudonyms throughout this article to protect the anonymity of my interlocutors.

4. British colonial administrators imagined the appropriate place for Malays to be in agricultural kampung producing food crops (Andaya and Andaya 2001[1982]: 220). Thompson (2002) explores usage of the term kampung in late twentieth-century return rural migrants' discourses.

5. During the British colonial period, there were two land tenure systems in Peninsular Malaysia: one in the Straits Settlements of Melaka and Penang, based on British law of privately conveying deeds, and another in the other nine states, based on the Torrens system of government land grants and title registration (Singh 1994: 10). Several Malay Reservation acts were passed, reserving land for Malays from the aggressive economic expansion of Europeans and Chinese. In Melaka, lands set aside by the state for Malays were called Malacca Customary Land. In 1965, the National Land Code brought these two land tenure systems together under one national system.

6. Sathya Sai Baba centers are part of a Hindu revitalization movement in Malaysia. Alexandra Kent (2004) conducted ethnographic research at this movement's main center located in a suburb of Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia.

7. One of my Malay interlocutors in the northern city of Georgetown, capital of Penang, the only state in Malaysia with a Chinese chief minister, told me that political leaders in Penang had replaced this Muslim-skewed regulation with one based on the proportions of members of different religions in the local area. Thus, if there was a large enough percentage of Chinese or Indians in a particular area, state funds could be allocated to build Chinese or Indian temples. Soon after the Chinese opposition party, DAP, won the election in 2008 in Penang, its leaders quickly announced that all race-based discrimination policies would be terminated in their state (MSN News 2008). Later, influenced by their opposition coalition partners, they pulled back from ending these policies; although Anwar Ibrahim, the leader of PKR, maintains that, if the opposition coalition wins the general election, they will replace pro-Malay policies with ones focusing on the poor of all ethnic categories.

8. Shah (2002: 46) argues that the presence of religious institutions for ethnic minorities in the vicinity of their dwellings provides positive health benefits, whereas “the lack of such a facility, or efforts to prevent the construction of religious facilities, increases the inequality experienced by ethnic minorities.”

9. Chinese and Indian “nons,” expressing their concerns about what they perceive as a rising “Islamization” and government refusal to change race-based discrimination policies, voted in large numbers for the three-party opposition alliance in the March 2008 election, catapulting the opposition alliance to its greatest electoral victory (MSN News 2008).