Preservation Of Our City

Having an architecture background does give me unique new perspectives on how I see things, especially the buildings around me. I don't just "oh, that building is beautiful" but I see beyond it, like how old is the building, what materials do they're made of, whether it has an ideal proportion or not, who was the architect designed it and etc. Sometimes I feel like a professional looking at an artefact but sometimes it bothers me as to why do I care so much, I should just enjoy the view instead of thinking hard about its architectural specifications. I believe not only architecture people but everyone has their own architectural building style preference and most of us love our heritage buildings during the British colonial period such as the KTM Railway Station in Kuala Lumpur and Ipoh.

Honestly, the world is getting old and we realized that the city and these buildings need to be preserved so they could last longer. With this mindset, yesterday, the planning department of my office held a meeting discussion with a heritage preservation organization on how to enhance the visual of Ipoh town in term of preservation of its heritage buildings, the landscape, and cultural activities. Here are the main interesting points of the discussion.

Firstly everyone, especially the younger generation loves art. We could take an example of Sarang Art Hub at Tanjung Malim, a collaboration of a cafe with art as its attraction. People love it! There comes the idea to highlight art and cultural activities to be the centre of attraction to the city. For example, turning scary alleys into cultural activities just like what the citizens of Ipoh themselves did at the famous Concubine Lane. Also, having a collaboration maybe with university students to paint the buildings on back lanes to have a more lively street just like along the river cruise route in Melaka.

One thing that the organization doesn't have a control over is the people's attitude of littering. We always admire Japanese and Singaporean for having a very very clean city, but the crucial part of having a clean city is their people's first class mentality. It's disappointing to know that we could have the first class mentality but we chose not to. I mean, why can't we be like them since we're all human anyway. But it really is not easy to educate people on this matter, even the Japanese took at least three years to have their current mindset.

In conclusion of the discussion, I find that most of us do want to try the best as we could in preserving the city to be at its bestest state for our younger generation, to build a legacy that we could be proud to tell the stories to our grandchildren but unfortunately, there're people who are still ignorant of these matters and they're the constraints we're facing in making the world we live in to be better.

Let us be the people who want to change, who want to be the better version of ourselves to help preserving our city so the rest could follow our lead, hopefully. And so we could enjoy living in a better world, giving our children the best they could have.

Till then,
Lya.