Where Past, Present And Future Meet

Think City, a community-focused urban regeneration organisation, seeks to breathe new life into old places.

- Flavia Galeotti

The city of Kuala Lumpur has grown in the last 60 years, both in terms of infrastructure and population. What was first a sleepy tin-mining settlement in the 19th century has since become a global city, and one of South-East Asia’s biggest economic players. Keeping up with this breakneck pace of development, the face of the city has changed since independence, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. 

“If Kuala Lumpur remakes itself to be another city and doesn’t create an identity of its own, it will lose its flavour,” says Hamdan Abdul Majeed, Managing Director of Think City, the community-focused urban regeneration organisation breathing new life into old places. “That’s the USP: the uniqueness of space. Culture adds a big value to that uniqueness, historic urban fabric is a big asset and that’s something you cannot ignore. The challenge is about how to build this by keeping the old and, at the same time, building the new.”

Think City cut its teeth in Penang in 2007, with a programme to breathe new life into the gracefully declining city of George Town. “Penang was a microcosm in the sense that it was at the forefront,” Hamdan says about the island’s role in Think City’s history. “Over the years, George Town was emptying out and, by the time we had started our programme, it was not really a place that people wanted to go to – it was not on the map.” George Town was fortunate to receive UNESCO World Heritage Site status the following year and, together with Think City’s programme of restoring buildings and regenerating the city through 250 projects over five years, helped to bring about a transformation.