Demolition of urban villages and their communities is a commonplace global phenomenon that knows no borders. In 2007 we entered the Urban Age when total urban population exceeded rural population. By 2020 world slum population will reach 1.4 billion due to migration, a widening urban divide, and increased inequality. At the same time, demolition of urbanized villages in land-and-space-hungry urban areas erases them from the landscape. Deemed as unhealthy and eyesores, in Penang they have been replaced by luxury housing that villagers cannot afford.
Urbanized villages, water villages and their communities, are endangered species, socio-ecological systems under siege. They are described as “chaotic, dilapidated eyesores, slums” by developers who ignore communities and property rights.
Writing in The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War, Robert Bevan deplores the refusal of the International Court of Justice to prosecute perpetrators of cultural crimes. Charges of destruction and demolition are normally tacked on to main charges of human rights abuses. Raphael Lemkin, who drafted the 1948 Genocide Convention defines vandalism as the “destruction of the cultural pattern of the group and as attacks on culture that is the very expression of a people’s genius.”
Destruction by development may not be as dramatic as destruction by natural disaster or war yet it also wreaks havoc on communities. No matter how modern or globalized, culture permeates relationships and shapes our societies and our ability to understand one another. We must ask ourselves if that which replaces community is a truly better way of life.
Valiant attempts are made to preserve culture in living museums and UNESCO heritage sites, like the Georgetown Clan Jetties on Penang Island, while others are demolished with no regard for history and culture.