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The Other Kuala Lumpur: Living in the Shadows of a Globalising Southeast Asian City Yeoh Seng Guan, ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2014, xiii+220pp.
The rapid growth of Asian cities in recent decades, fueled by neoliberal policies, the accelerating production of real estate, and the global circulation of unprecedented amounts of capital, has received a great deal of scholarly attention over the past two decades. Scholarship has focused particularly on the political elites and their urban policies, the command and control centers of global capital, and the movers and shakers who circulate ideas. As a counter to the study of topdown urban processes and urban spectacles, there have been growing calls for empirical studies that examine how "regular" or marginalized urban residents are affected by these sudden urban changes, how they negotiate fragmentary spaces, and the survival strategies they develop in an environment that is hostile to their presence. The Other Kuala Lumpur: Living in the Shadows of a Globalising Southeast Asian City is a valuable contribution to this literature. Edited by Yeoh Seng Guan, the collection seeks to illuminate the Kuala Lumpur beyond its ambitious development agenda and "world-class" aspirations. Eight essays document the lives of residents-both citizens and non-citizens-who live in the "other Kuala Lumpur," on the fringes and in the shadows of a city undergoing massive urban change.
The Other Kuala Lumpur takes a similar approach to Yasser Elsheshtawy's insightful work on the United Arab Emirates, particularly in Dubai: Behind an Urban Spectacle (2010), a book that also seeks to illuminate the lives of subaltern residents in a city that aspires to be a world-class global city. A key difference between the contexts of Dubai and Kuala Lumpur lies in the com-position of residents who are marginalized from developmentalist growth agendas. Residents of Dubai who hold Emirati citizenship are overwhelmingly Arab Muslims, while multireligious and multiethnic non-citizens are socially and spatially segregated from the Emirati population, with no path to citizenship.
In contrast, Kuala Lumpur is a far messier and more complex social milieu than Dubai. Malaysia is a highly diverse country consisting of people with a variety of ancestral origins (China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia), varied claims to the land, different legal statuses, and multiple religions (Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Confucian,...