Abstract
This chapter considers how village folks surrounding expanding cities impact on the urban environment and ways of life. These village folks have brought rural ways of life into extended urban regions, but these ways of life have been threatened by continuing urbanization. Since the 1980s, the village land surrounding George Town and Bayan Lepas in Penang, Malaysia, has become a site of conflict and contestation, having been acquired for the purpose of urban and industrial development. The kampung people, who consider themselves “insiders,” have expressed their love for place and village life by reinforcing some aspects of the rural economy, networks, culture, association, and built environment. The politics of “insider-ness” is also explored in this chapter in order to discover how kampung folks see themselves and “others.” In relation to this, elements of feelings, emotions, and images of the people toward their land and lifestyles will be revealed. This chapter will also reflect on the historical and contemporary forms of rural-urban linkages and transitions.
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Notes
- 1.
Desakota is a coined Malay/Indonesian term taken from two words, desa (village) and kota (town) (McGee 1989, pp. 93–94, 1991, pp. 23–24).
- 2.
Historically, these villages were known to have been used by the Malay farmers who occupied most of the flat rice land long before the eighteenth century. Their land was subsumed under a customary land tenureship authorized by the Sultan of Kedah. The issues and problems that were involved as a result of changes in land system from customary land tenureship to individual land ownership introduced by the British have been discussed by Zaki et al. (2010), Brookfield et al. (1991), Lim (1977), Wong (1987), and Ghazali (1999).
- 3.
Ground tenant, in this case, is different from the Malay setinggan or peneroka bandar discussed in Bunnell and Nah (2004). Ground tenants here are Penangites and relatives to the landowners. They are also descendents of the earlier settlers. The simply setinggan and peneroka bandar in Kuala Lumpur, meanwhile, are mainly rural-to-urban migrants who have moved to the city between the 1960s and 1980s. Some have claimed that they have the “license and consent” to occupy the land (Bunnell and Nah 2004: p. 2452; pp. 2456–2459). In the kampung studied, it has been said that after the earlier settlers have deceased, their lands have been subdivided and inherited by their children. The size of land per person is getting smaller due to subdivision, and as a result, many of the third and fourth generations are unable to inherit land. However, due to the scarcity of land in Penang, the inability to buy town houses, or simply to enjoy and love the life in the village, many of the children and grandchildren build houses in small vacant spaces around their parents’/grandparents’ houses, usually after getting verbal consent from the landowners, who are their uncles, aunts, and cousins. When the land is to be sold to the state or a housing developer, most ground tenants manage to get compensation for the loss of their house.
- 4.
Gilbert and Gugler’s (1987) work offers a comprehensive account of Third World urbanization, especially in Latin America and Africa. On this matter, they have commented on the large and growing number of people in Third World cities engaged in non-enumerated activities such as peri-urban gardening. Such employment is, however, likely to go unenumerated and fail to show up in employment statistics. Such employment is commonly characterized as unproductive and all too often dismissed altogether as making little contribution to the urban economy (see also Gugler 1992a, p. 95).
- 5.
This refers to experiences across multiple villages studied, but Kampung Batu Uban is the most vocal one.
- 6.
Twin Tower means Menara Berkembar in Malay simply because the building replicates Menara Berkembar Petronas or Petronas Twin Tower in Kuala Lumpur. Local residents prefer to call this condominium Twin Tower even though it has another name given by the property developer.
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Ghazali, S. (2013). Sense of Place and the Politics of “Insider-ness” in Villages Undergoing Transition: The Case of City Kampung on Penang Island. In: Bunnell, T., Parthasarathy, D., Thompson, E. (eds) Cleavage, Connection and Conflict in Rural, Urban and Contemporary Asia. ARI - Springer Asia Series, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5482-9_8
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