The Unsung Elegy of a Post Colonial City

Place Branding kota kinabalu Nexus Resort Karambunai

"What is left when the identity is stripped?"

A collage connoting the rapid development of Kota Kinabalu, a city which was granted its status in 2000 in Malaysia.

Book Title : Look Back to Move Forward- The Unsung Elegy of a Post-colonial City

Research Question : What is the redefinition of the identity of a Post-colonial city, Kota Kinabalu, by taking its centre and periphery as a comparison, under the global culture of city branding?

Tutor : Ms. Alona Martinez Perez

Abstract :

It was my first time being home during the summer holidays and was astonished by how much I have missed out being absent from my hometown for two years straight. What used to be construction sites are now replaced by newly built hotels and condominium; what used to be open spaces are now surrounded by wooden plank stating: Warning! Construction Site. Tourists were everyway. A sudden unfamiliarity filled within me, even on my way back home where I used to remember every sign on the shops, every turn in the corners of the street.

Looking at the rapid urban development of Kota Kinabalu (particularly in shopping malls, hotels and condominiums) has awakened me as an architecture student to look into the urban situation of my hometown today. From its fast development one can easily understand the urge of a developing country to leap and become one of the developed countries in the world- as fast as possible. Have we worked the other way round? Have we missed anything inbetween? Have we sacrificed anything along the journey of transformation? 'What is the redefinition of the identity of a Post-colonial city, Kota Kinabalu, by taking its centre and periphery as a comparison, under the global culture of city branding?' thus become the starting point to identify the dilemmas of a post-colonial city that might be faced in the process of transforming and hopes to find the answer to the struggles of it over the redefinition of its own national identity under the global culture of city branding.

....Wandering around in the city, I was one of the tourists. Everything looked familiar, but not entirely true. Slowly, I recollected the bits of memories where I left and caught up with what I have missed all these times.

While emulating the West in building up a city particularly in recent decades, have the East worked the other way round? Should the past be embraced while promoting and branding a place/ city on the global stage?

Look Back to Move Forward is a book which is intentionally designed to read backwards. The book design takes the general preconception of readers opening a book from right to left, connoting the mistakes that (the East) might have done in building up a city.

Kota Kinabalu on the global stage

Nexus Resort and Spa Karambunai will be taken as a microscopic study to reflect upon the urban transformation of KK city centre. This will be relfected by taking the route from Karambunai to KK Central Business Distrrict (KK CBD) as a slice of urban fabric.

"11.4 Generic City- Buildings that are complex in form depend on the curtain-wall industry, on ever more effective adhesives and sealants that turn each building into a mixture of straitjacket and oxygen tent. The use of silicone-'we are stretching the facade as far as it will go'- has flattened all facades, glued glass to stone to steel to concrete in a space-age impurity... In generic city, its architecture is the rresistant made malleable, an epidemic of yielding no longer through the application of principle but through the systematic application of the unprincipled."

Below are examples of the trend of architecture happening in the centre of Kota Kinabalu (both ongoing as well as recently completed work)

*Photos from the internet