Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

“Build it and they will come”? A critical examination of utopian planning practices and their socio-spatial impacts in Malaysia's “intelligent city”

“Build it and they will come”? A critical examination of utopian planning practices and their... Cyberjaya was heralded in the mid-1990s as the Multimedia Super Corridor's (MSC) flagship “intelligent city” and designed to prepare Malaysia and its citizens for a giant leap forward into an imagined new “information age.” The urban mega-project constituted a state led response to the much hyped “siliconization of Asia” and was planned to fast-track national development through investment in information and communications technologies (ICTs). The creation of an “intelligent city” replete with science parks, technology districts, green campuses for high-tech companies and a manicured environment for their employees was envisaged to attract investment from multinational companies (MNCs), enabling the country to leapfrog up the development chain and become a global “knowledge economy” hub. Ten years on from the excessive high-tech utopianism and urban boosterism that accompanied the city's launch, the paper promotes qualitative methodologies to addresses the uneven socio-spatial consequences of Cyberjaya's utopian project. The paper argues explores how the “intelligent city” manifested itself as a sensorially impoverished, disconnected business park clone with limited innovative capacity and benefits for wider economic and social development. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Asian Geographer Taylor & Francis

“Build it and they will come”? A critical examination of utopian planning practices and their socio-spatial impacts in Malaysia's “intelligent city”

Brooker, Daniel
Asian Geographer , Volume 29 (1): 18 – Jun 1, 2012
Download PDF
18 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/taylor-francis/build-it-and-they-will-come-a-critical-examination-of-utopian-planning-0LciNAZLgT

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Copyright
Copyright Hong Kong Geographical Association
ISSN
2158-1762
eISSN
1022-5706
DOI
10.1080/10225706.2012.659192
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Cyberjaya was heralded in the mid-1990s as the Multimedia Super Corridor's (MSC) flagship “intelligent city” and designed to prepare Malaysia and its citizens for a giant leap forward into an imagined new “information age.” The urban mega-project constituted a state led response to the much hyped “siliconization of Asia” and was planned to fast-track national development through investment in information and communications technologies (ICTs). The creation of an “intelligent city” replete with science parks, technology districts, green campuses for high-tech companies and a manicured environment for their employees was envisaged to attract investment from multinational companies (MNCs), enabling the country to leapfrog up the development chain and become a global “knowledge economy” hub. Ten years on from the excessive high-tech utopianism and urban boosterism that accompanied the city's launch, the paper promotes qualitative methodologies to addresses the uneven socio-spatial consequences of Cyberjaya's utopian project. The paper argues explores how the “intelligent city” manifested itself as a sensorially impoverished, disconnected business park clone with limited innovative capacity and benefits for wider economic and social development.

Journal

Asian Geographer – Taylor & Francis

Published: Jun 1, 2012

Keywords: Utopia; intelligent city; splintered urbanism; Cyberjaya; Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC); Malaysia

There are no references for this article.