A Postcolonial Critical Analysis
Abstract
This article examines urban heritage conservation in Singapore and Malaysia through a postcolonial theoretical lens. Drawing on Homi Bhabha’s concepts of ambivalence and mimicry, Laurajane Smith’s authorized heritage discourse, and Frantz Fanon’s critique of nationalist appropriation, it argues that both city-states engage in a structurally similar process: the selective reappropriation of colonial built environments to serve nation-building agendas, generate tourism revenue, and perform multicultural legitimacy. Through case studies of Singapore’s ethnic enclaves and Raffles-era conservation districts, Kuala Lumpur’s Warisan KL initiative, and the UNESCO-listed historic cores of George Town and Melaka, the article identifies four recurring tensions: (1) the gap between reappropriation rhetoric and commodification practice; (2) the ethnicization of colonial material culture to domesticate its imperial genealogy; (3) the displacement of living communities by conservation policy; and (4) the persistence of the colonial gaze as an evaluative standard for heritage authenticity. The article concludes that heritage conservation in both contexts remains a site of ongoing postcolonial negotiation rather than a resolved decolonial achievement.
Keywords: postcolonialism, urban heritage, Singapore, Malaysia, authorized heritage discourse, gentrification, nationalism, decolonization
- Introduction: The Unresolved Architecture of Empire
In February 2026, Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim hosted his Singaporean counterpart Lawrence Wong for an iftar dinner at Seri Negara, the restored colonial mansion in Kuala Lumpur where Malaya’s Independence Agreement was signed in 1957. The setting was, Anwar declared, deeply meaningful: the two leaders were “continuing to write history” in the same space that had witnessed the end of British rule. The image was striking in its layered ironies — a building constructed to house British rulers, briefly closed, refurbished at considerable public expense, and now deployed as the symbolic scenography of postcolonial diplomatic modernity.
Across the causeway, Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) has spent decades conserving a different but analogous colonial inheritance: the shophouses, civic buildings, and racial enclaves of Raffles’ 1822 Town Plan, which originally divided the population by ethnicity for administrative convenience. That plan’s spatial logic — Chinatown for Chinese, Little India for Indians, Kampong Glam for Malays — has been preserved not as a reminder of colonial categorization but as evidence of multicultural harmony. The state turns, as one critical analyst observes, physical reminders of colonial racial segregation into a story of postcolonial racial integration.
This article argues that urban heritage conservation in Singapore and Malaysia occupies a structurally ambivalent postcolonial position. Both states have inherited urban built environments that were designed to express and perpetuate British imperial authority. Both have subsequently revalued these environments — not by dismantling or ignoring them, but by reinhabiting and resignifying them. The result is a heritage landscape that simultaneously critiques colonialism, profits from its aesthetic legacy, and in many cases reproduces its spatial and social logics under new management. To analyze this process requires theoretical resources adequate to its complexity. - Theoretical Framework: Postcolonialism and the Built Environment
Postcolonial theory, as developed by Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, has been unevenly applied to the built environment. Architectural and urban scholarship has only relatively recently engaged these frameworks systematically, partly because postcolonial theory was developed primarily in literary and cultural studies contexts, and partly because the built environment presents distinctive complications: colonial buildings are materially persistent in ways that texts are not, and their continued use generates ongoing entanglements that literary decolonization can more cleanly resolve.
Three conceptual frameworks are particularly useful for this analysis. The first is Homi Bhabha’s account of colonial ambivalence and mimicry. Bhabha argues that colonial authority is never fully secure: it depends on the colonized reproducing colonial norms, but this reproduction always introduces difference, creating instability in the colonial order. In the postcolonial heritage context, this logic operates in reverse: the formerly colonized inhabit and reproduce colonial spatial and aesthetic forms, but claim that reproduction as an act of sovereign agency. The colonial building is “appropriated,” but its material form and the social practices it sustains remain substantially intact.
The second framework is Laurajane Smith’s concept of the “authorized heritage discourse” (AHD), developed in her influential 2006 study Uses of Heritage. Smith argues that heritage is not a property of objects or places but a cultural practice — a way of engaging with the past that is shaped by power. The AHD privileges expert knowledge, monumental materiality, and the preservation of “authentic” physical fabric, while marginalizing intangible heritage, community memory, and living practices. State-led conservation in Singapore and Malaysia operates squarely within the AHD: both URA and Warisan KL employ Category 1 heritage standards derived from Western conservation doctrine, privilege the preservation of colonial-era fabric, and entrust decisions to technical experts and sovereign wealth fund managers rather than affected communities.
The third framework is Fanon’s analysis of postcolonial nationalism in The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon warned that the national bourgeoisie of newly independent states tends to reproduce colonial structures under new ownership, substituting nationalist rhetoric for substantive transformation. In the heritage context, this manifests as what might be called “monumental nationalism” — the use of grand built symbols to perform sovereignty and cultural identity without addressing the social inequities that colonial spatial ordering produced. Both Singapore and Malaysia exhibit versions of this phenomenon.
Tim Winter’s work on heritage in Asia provides an additional analytical bridge. Winter argues that Asian heritage politics cannot be reduced to a simple opposition between Western universalism and local resistance; rather, they involve complex entanglements of nationalism, globalization, tourism, and development that require regionally attentive theorization. This is particularly important for Singapore and Malaysia, where the relationship between heritage conservation and global capital flows is especially direct and transparent. - Singapore: Conserving the Racial Grammar of Empire
3.1 The Raffles Town Plan as Heritage Infrastructure
When Sir Stamford Raffles formalized Singapore’s urban layout through the 1822 Jackson Plan, he divided the island’s population into spatially segregated racial zones. The Chinese were assigned to Chinatown, South Asian migrants to what would become Little India, Malays and Arab traders to Kampong Glam, and Europeans to the civic district and hillside bungalows. This arrangement was not incidental but structural: spatial segregation served colonial administrative legibility, enabling efficient taxation, surveillance, and the management of inter-communal relations.
What is striking about Singapore’s conservation program, inaugurated with the Historic Districts plan in 1989, is that it largely preserved the Raffles Town Plan’s racial spatial logic. Chinatown, Little India, and Kampong Glam were designated conservation areas and subsequently marketed as “ethnic enclaves” that embodied Singapore’s multicultural heritage. The URA’s narrative reframed colonial segregation as evidence of organic community formation and cultural diversity. Critical scholars, however, have noted that this reframing performs ideological work: it presents what was imposed as what was chosen, and what was a tool of governance as evidence of social harmony.
Researchers Brenda Yeoh and Lily Kong, in their study of landscape meanings in Singapore’s Chinatown, identified a fundamental tension between state-constructed heritage narratives and the lived experiences of communities who actually inhabited these spaces. The state narrative emphasized cultural authenticity and historical continuity; residents experienced conservation as displacement, rent increases, and the replacement of living neighborhoods by tourist-oriented commercial zones. This gap between authorized discourse and community experience is a recurring feature of Singapore’s heritage program.
3.2 The Displacement Paradox: Conserving Places, Removing People
The 1989 designation of Chinatown, Little India, and Kampong Glam as Historic Districts had an immediate and poorly anticipated consequence: the simultaneous repeal of the Rent Control Act, which had since colonial times protected tenants from arbitrary rent increases. With conservation came commercial revaluation. Property owners refurbished their shophouses and raised rents substantially. Traditional retailers and long-term residents who could not afford the increases were displaced. In Little India, this process led to a documented decline in traditional Indian-owned businesses and their replacement by new commercial outlets, some owned by non-Indians.
The paradox is structural: conservation policy, designed to preserve cultural heritage, produced the conditions for the displacement of the communities whose cultural practices constituted that heritage. What remained was architectural fabric without its social substrate — shophouses without shopkeepers, facades without the lives that had animated them. T.C. Chang’s study of Little India as a “contested landscape” documents this process in detail, noting that the precinct became increasingly oriented toward tourist consumption rather than the working lives of the Indian community it nominally represented.
This displacement was not limited to ethnic enclaves. Long-term residents of old public housing estates in Queenstown and Rochor were resettled for urban redevelopment, with minimal public consultation and in the face of unpublicized community resistance. The Cambridge Core study Between History and Heritage notes that heritage activism in Singapore has consistently met success only when its conservation targets aligned with the urban planning objectives of the developmental state. Community heritage, in short, is protected when it is also commercially or symbolically useful to the state; otherwise, it is superseded by development imperatives.
3.3 Colonial Nostalgia and the Black-and-White House
Perhaps nowhere is the postcolonial ambivalence of Singapore’s heritage program more legible than in its treatment of colonial bungalows — the black-and-white houses built for British officers and administrators. These properties, concentrated in leafy enclaves like Nassim Road, Ridout Road, and Dempsey Hill, have been preserved and are now available for lease at premium rates. Their conservation is explicitly aesthetic: the URA’s own literature celebrates the “botanic garden effect” of their manicured tropical surroundings, reproducing what one critical commentator describes as a “stylistic performance of power which asserts the stability, primacy and timelessness of colonialism.”
The critical literature on this phenomenon is pointed: the preservation of colonial residential architecture as premium heritage property is not simply neutral conservation but an active reproduction of colonial spatial hierarchies and their associated aesthetic codes. The transformation of former British officers’ quarters into restaurants and lifestyle destinations — The White Rabbit, Riders Café — commodifies colonial nostalgia for an Anglophone Chinese Singaporean professional class, positioning colonial aesthetic experience as aspirational consumption. There is, in this analysis, nothing postcolonial about the result: it reproduces colonial power relations through the medium of real estate and gastronomy.
A further dimension of Singapore’s heritage politics concerns what is systematically absent. The Raffles Town Plan narrative presents Singapore as effectively uninhabited prior to 1819 — a terra nullius available for British ordering. Conservation policy, which prizes colonial-era built fabric, provides no meaningful space for Malay indigeneity or for histories of the island that predate Raffles’ arrival. The Orang Laut and Malay communities who inhabited the island are relegated to background; their material heritage receives negligible institutional support. The colonial-era enclaves, paradoxically, are preserved with greater institutional commitment than any pre-colonial site. - Malaysia: Nationalization, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Memory
4.1 Warisan KL and the Sovereignty Narrative
Malaysia’s approach to colonial built heritage differs from Singapore’s in important respects. Where Singapore’s conservation program has been largely technocratic, framing heritage in terms of urban planning, tourism, and multicultural identity, Malaysia’s recent Warisan KL initiative is explicitly nationalist in register. Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s framing positions heritage conservation as an act of sovereignty: colonial buildings are reborn as national assets, their imperial genealogy acknowledged but reinterpreted as a “layer” in Malaysia’s historical formation rather than a contamination of it.
This framing has genuine intellectual grounding. Dr. Suffian Mansor’s observation that the Sultan Abdul Samad Building blends Moorish, Indo-Saracenic, and colonial architectural elements — and thus “should not be seen solely as colonial trauma but as part of Malaysia’s historical layers” — reflects a historically sophisticated position. The building’s Moorish arches were not British in origin but were chosen to reference Islamic architecture in a deliberate act of colonial accommodation; they can thus be read as evidence of the negotiated, hybrid character of colonial cultural production in the Malay world. The building was named after Sultan Abdul Samad, the fourth Sultan of Selangor — a naming that was itself a colonial maneuver, associating British administrative authority with Malay royal legitimacy. Recovering this complexity is a legitimate postcolonial scholarly project.
However, the Warisan KL initiative also exhibits the tension between cultural nationalism and economic instrumentalism that Fanon identified as characteristic of postcolonial state projects. Anwar’s rhetoric simultaneously invokes “soul,” “values,” and “historical roots” and positions heritage as a mechanism for generating “the economy,” driving tourism, and strengthening the “cultural ecosystem and creative industry.” Khazanah Nasional, the sovereign wealth fund leading the initiative, explicitly justifies the RM600 million investment through economic multiplier projections. The result is a heritage program in which cultural identity and capital accumulation are simultaneously claimed as objectives, with neither fully subordinated to the other.
4.2 The Ethnic Lacuna: Chinese Malaysian Heritage and the Bumiputera Framework
The most significant postcolonial tension in Malaysian heritage policy is its relationship to ethnicity, specifically the relative positioning of Malay-Muslim heritage against the heritage claims of Chinese and Indian Malaysians. This tension has deep structural roots: Malaysia’s New Economic Policy (NEP), introduced after the 1969 racial riots, institutionalized a framework of Bumiputera (indigenous) preference that has shaped resource allocation across all policy domains, including cultural heritage.
The Cambridge Core study of Melaka, Penang, and Singapore identifies this dynamic directly. In Melaka, development plans — whether involving heritage buildings or new construction — were consistently oriented toward reasserting Malay economic presence in a city historically dominated by Chinese merchant capital. Attempts to clear the Chinese cemetery on Bukit Cina for urban development, which sparked major controversy in the 1980s, illustrated the fundamental conflict between a state-sanctioned heritage narrative centered on Malay sovereignty and pre-colonial Islamic trading civilization, and the demographic reality of a city shaped as much by Straits Chinese culture as by Malay culture.
In Kuala Lumpur’s case, the Warisan KL initiative’s focus on buildings associated with the Malay nationalist movement and the Independence narrative — Seri Negara, the Sultan Abdul Samad Building, Dataran Merdeka — reflects a heritage politics in which Chinese Malaysian history plays at best a supporting role. Kuala Lumpur was founded as a Chinese tin-mining settlement; its early growth was inseparable from Chinese migrant labor, capital, and entrepreneurship. This history is acknowledged in the Sultan Abdul Samad Building’s galleries, which trace the city’s tin-mining origins, but it is framed as prelude to the main narrative of Malay national sovereignty rather than as a constitutive element of the city’s identity in its own right.
4.3 George Town: UNESCO Inscription and the Gentrification Paradox
The UNESCO inscription of George Town and Melaka as World Heritage Sites in 2008 provides perhaps the most fully documented case study of the contradictions inherent in postcolonial heritage conservation in Malaysia. George Town’s inscription recognized its “unique architectural and cultural townscape”, shaped by centuries of multicultural trading interaction. The application emphasized the city’s living heritage: the coexistence of Chinese clan associations, Hindu temples, mosques, churches, and colonial administrative buildings as evidence of an organic, pluralistic urban culture.
The consequences of inscription were rapid and severe. The repeal of Malaysia’s Rent Control Act in 2001 had already begun displacing long-term residents from the historic core; UNESCO status accelerated this process by dramatically increasing property values and tourist-related commercial pressure. Research published in 2018 documents how inscription generated unprecedented capital appreciation and rent increases, triggering gentrification in which original inhabitants and their traditional trades were replaced by new residents and tourism-oriented businesses. The Penang Heritage Trust reported in 2024 that the resident population of the heritage core had fallen from an estimated 50,000 before inscription to approximately 9,000, with the loss of residents accompanied by the disappearance of the intangible cultural practices — the Hungry Ghost Festival altars, the Chinese New Year domestic rituals — that had constituted George Town’s living heritage.
George Town presents a particularly acute version of the paradox identified throughout this article: UNESCO designation, motivated by the desire to preserve outstanding cultural heritage, produced economic conditions that destroyed the social substrate of that heritage. What UNESCO recognized — living multicultural community practice embedded in a distinctive built environment — was progressively hollowed out by the very processes that inscription set in motion. By 2016, George Town had been ranked the most attractive destination for commercial property investment in Malaysia by Knight Frank, a metric that measures precisely the economic transformation that heritage conservation was meant to constrain.
The street art phenomenon adds a further dimension of irony. Lithuanian artist Ernest Zacharevic’s murals, commissioned as part of post-inscription cultural programming, became among the most circulated images of George Town globally and a major driver of tourist interest. Scholarship on “gentrification aesthetics” in George Town demonstrates that this street art, while celebrating local culture and community, simultaneously shaped processes of aesthetic gentrification: attracting middle-class tourists and new commercial investment while sidelining traditional uses and displacing established communities. One mural’s informal caption — “Guess I’m next to be erased” — has been read as an inadvertent commentary on this very process. - Comparative Analysis: Four Recurring Tensions
Across Singapore and Malaysia’s diverse heritage contexts, four tensions recur with sufficient consistency to suggest structural rather than contingent origins.
5.1 Reappropriation versus Commodification
Heritage conservation in both countries is consistently framed as cultural reappropriation: the recovery of spaces from colonial alienation and their return to popular or national ownership. In practice, however, the modalities of this return are consistently market-mediated. In Singapore, colonial bungalows become premium restaurants; in Kuala Lumpur, the Seri Negara mansion is flanked by Carcosa, converted into an “eco-sanctuary hotel.” The RM600 million Warisan KL initiative is led by Khazanah Nasional, whose mandate is investment return. In George Town, the celebrated survival of colonial shophouses has been achieved partly through their conversion into boutique hotels and artisan coffee shops.
This is not to argue that conservation and commercial viability are necessarily incompatible, or that market mechanisms cannot serve heritage goals. The question is rather one of primary orientation: when preservation is justified primarily through economic multipliers rather than community benefit, the communities most affected by the colonial past are least likely to be its primary beneficiaries. Khazanah’s commissioned studies project that heritage tourism will generate twice the economic activity through supply chains — but supply chain benefits accrue to those already embedded in economic networks, not to the displaced communities whose former presence constituted the heritage.
5.2 Ethnicization as Domestication
A recurring interpretive strategy in both contexts is what might be called the ethnicization of colonial material culture: the identification of non-Western aesthetic elements within colonial buildings as a basis for claiming them as expressions of local rather than imperial culture. In Malaysia, the Moorish and Indo-Saracenic elements of the Sultan Abdul Samad Building are emphasized to position it as belonging to an Islamic and Asian aesthetic tradition. In Singapore, the shophouse — a building type developed under British colonial urban governance but adapted with Chinese and Malay architectural elements — is claimed as intrinsically multicultural.
This interpretive move is not without historical merit: colonial architecture in Southeast Asia was genuinely hybrid, produced through encounters between British planning ideologies, local building traditions, and migrant community practices. However, as a conservation strategy, ethnicization selectively foregrounds the hybrid elements that can be claimed as indigenous while backgrounding the administrative and coercive functions that gave these buildings their original purpose. The Sultan Abdul Samad Building was a colonial courthouse; its Islamic arches did not make it a less effective instrument of British jurisdiction.
5.3 The Living Community Problem
Both countries’ conservation programs have systematically privileged architectural fabric over living communities. This reflects a deep assumption of the authorized heritage discourse: that physical structures are more durable repositories of heritage value than social practices, and that preservation of the former is sufficient without preservation of the latter. The George Town case demonstrates most vividly why this assumption is problematic. What UNESCO valued in George Town was not merely its shophouses and civic buildings but the multicultural community practices embedded within them — and it is precisely these practices that have been most severely eroded by the conservation-driven gentrification that inscription set in motion.
The urban planning scholar Dr. Shuhana Shamsuddin, who led the Kuala Lumpur Heritage Trail Master Plan, has acknowledged this gap and argued that heritage trails should “tell a story rather than just marking buildings.” This is a step in the right direction, but storytelling through interpretive panels and guided tours is a thin substitute for the presence of actual communities whose lives continuously generate the heritage in question. Architecture can be preserved indefinitely; communities, once displaced, rarely return.
5.4 The Persistent Colonial Gaze
A final structural tension concerns the evaluative standards by which heritage conservation success is measured. In both Singapore and Malaysia, the quality and legitimacy of conservation work is partly assessed by reference to international standards: UNESCO criteria, the Venice Charter, Western heritage conservation doctrine. The Warisan KL initiative is explicitly benchmarked against Singapore and Melbourne. George Town’s validation came through UNESCO inscription. Singapore’s URA employs Category 1 heritage standards derived from the international conservation community.
This persistent recourse to external validation reproduces a version of what Said called Orientalism in reverse: the postcolonial state validates its own cultural achievements by reference to the standards of the former metropolitan center. In the news reportage on Warisan KL, French tourist Juliette Goblet’s approval — “Malaysia should have more museums like this” — functions as a mark of success. That the standard of success for Malaysian heritage conservation is a French tourist’s comparison to European museums is a telling index of whose gaze continues to structure the terms of heritage value.
This is not a counsel of isolationism. International heritage standards serve genuine functions: they provide common languages for preservation, enable knowledge transfer, and create accountability frameworks. But their hegemonic deployment — as the primary standard against which postcolonial heritage work is measured — forecloses the possibility of distinctly different heritage epistemologies emerging from these contexts. What would it mean to assess heritage conservation by reference to the wellbeing of displaced communities rather than the aesthetic integrity of restored facades? - Toward a Decolonial Heritage Practice: Possibilities and Limits
The preceding analysis should not be read as a counsel of demolition or disengagement. Colonial buildings are materially there, and the question of what to do with them is unavoidable. The choice is not between postcolonial purity and colonial contamination but between different ways of inhabiting, interpreting, and distributing the benefits of colonial heritage. Several more genuinely decolonial approaches can be identified, even if their full realization faces significant structural constraints.
The first is community-anchored conservation: conservation programs that treat the preservation of resident communities as a primary objective, coordinate with housing policy to prevent displacement, and distribute conservation benefits to those who have historically inhabited and maintained the built environment. The Armenian Street pilot in George Town, which enabled traditional families to retain their homes at unchanged rental rates, provides a small-scale model. Its limited geographic scope and dependence on philanthropic partnerships, however, indicate the difficulty of scaling this approach against market pressures.
The second is counter-hegemonic interpretation: the development of heritage narratives that do not simply invert the colonial story but complicate it, restoring suppressed voices and contesting the selective memorization that authorized discourse produces. The Seri Negara film, with its unapologetically anti-colonial narration, is a partial example — its limitation being that it substitutes one totalizing narrative (colonial glory) for another (nationalist liberation) without fully inhabiting the complexity of the historical record. More substantive would be interpretive programs that foreground the experiences of laborers, women, and minority communities rather than confining these to supplementary galleries.
The third is recognition of what is lost. Heritage conservation narratives in both countries are consistently optimistic, framing each restoration as a triumph. A more honest heritage practice would reckon explicitly with what has been permanently destroyed — communities dispersed, intangible practices ended, histories rendered irrecoverable. This reckoning need not be paralyzing; it can itself become a form of historical witnessing. The urban designer’s observation that “if you wait too long, sometimes you lose the building and that piece of memory so crucial to KL’s identity” applies equally to the communities whose departure leaves buildings as shells. - Conclusion: Heritage as Ongoing Negotiation
Urban heritage conservation in Singapore and Malaysia cannot be characterized as simply colonial, simply postcolonial, or simply decolonial. It is all three simultaneously, in different proportions in different sites and at different moments. The Sultan Abdul Samad Building is genuinely a living history lesson, and it is also a tourist attraction. Seri Negara genuinely marks the moment of Malayan independence, and Carcosa next door is becoming a luxury eco-hotel. George Town genuinely embodies centuries of multicultural encounter, and its original communities are disappearing at a pace that suggests those centuries may not be reproducible.
What postcolonial theory contributes to the analysis of this complexity is not a resolution but a set of critical tools: attention to the gap between rhetoric and practice; sensitivity to whose heritage is authorized and whose is marginalized; skepticism toward economic justifications that reproduce colonial patterns of extraction under nationalist cover; and insistence that the standard for heritage success should ultimately be the flourishing of the communities in whose name heritage is preserved.
The queues outside the Sultan Abdul Samad Building on Valentine’s Day 2026 — young Malaysians sketching its Moorish arches, taking TikTok videos, drinking coffee in a building where courts once tried political prisoners — are not evidence that postcolonial negotiation has been concluded. They are evidence that it continues, lived out in the bodily practices of people who are simultaneously reclaiming and enjoying and half-knowingly inhabiting a complex inheritance they did not choose and cannot fully escape. That this negotiation is ongoing, contested, and unresolved is not a failure. It is the condition of postcolonial culture.
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