Fix Penang Island instead of making new islands

The supposed green utopia of the Penang South Islands project will do nothing to fix the current urban problems of the island of Penang.

The Penang South Islands project is a plan to build three islands south of the island of Penang.  The project has been mired in controversy from the beginning, with objections about environmental damage, the impact on the fishing industry, as well as the economic cost to the public.

Since the project has been announced the scale has been reduced to one island, though this could be a foot in the door to get started, with the other two being revived later.

The islands are being touted as an environmentally-friendly project with green living spaces. The images of the urban areas look like a futuristic Solarpunk dream, and I will admit that it makes me want to live there.

– Penang South Islands – not your grandpa’s Penang.

This utopian green paradise reminds me of the plot of the cyberpunk classic, Blade Runner. In this movie (based on a novel) a futuristic Los Angeles set in 2019 is a decaying wasteland, while there is advertising for a better life in the Off-world colonies.

While Penang isn’t a dystopia that is being abandoned, making an Off-coast “green” island doesn’t fix any of the urban problems of the island and state of Penang.

Most visitors to Penang only go to Georgetown, as it is the most architecturally interesting place on the island (and most of Malaysia for that matter). Here is what Georgetown (in the circle) looks like in relation to the island, with the state boundary outlined in red.

If you stay long enough and venture beyond the UNESCO World Heritage area, you are confronted with big roads and unwalkable streets. There is no other urban area where you would want to hang out.  I have spent months of my life in accumulated visits to Penang, so I always think about staying somewhere else, and then I am repelled when I see the urban blight outside of old Georgetown.

There is Gurney Drive, which is near Georgetown and has some historic architecture. The other popular tourist area is Batu Feringgi, which is better known for the big resorts and not the actual township. I have stayed in the town, and it is boring, and you have to walk on the edge of the road to get anywhere.

Penang could have been the Manhattan of Southeast Asia, but they blew it

The historic corner of Penang reminds me of the Financial District on the island of Manhattan in New York. Not for the skyscrapers or for being an economic superpower, but for the street layout. When Europeans arrived on the island of Manhattan, the roads were laid out haphazardly, like in the Old World. New York continued to grow, and then by the time they got to 14th Street, they adopted the famous grid that goes up the rest of the island.

I think about the New York grid when I visit Penang, because once you venture outside the old town, it becomes an unwalkable hellscape, and not just because it is hot. The roads get worse, not better.

Start retrofitting urban Penang into a green paradise

It’s too late to layout out a walkable road network in Penang, so they have to work with what they have.

We can all agree that the images shown on the sales brochures for PSI are the sort of places that people want to live, so why not build that immediately instead of approving more car-centric developments? Every new apartment block in Penang now comes with an enormous car park podium, because everyone needs a car to live there.

Having another look at the projected images of the island, you have to ask why the government urban planners aren’t doing this everywhere else. Why can’t we have tree-lined walking and cycling spaces near pleasant bodies of water?

Start by fixing the polluted canals and clearing buildings built up against the canals. There is already a precedent for this at the Prangin Canal. Start identifying suburban roads that can have lanes reduced and have more trees planted with paths for pedestrians and cyclists.

This will take time (longer than a 5-year election cycle in Malaysia), and the Prangin Canal redevelopment is an example of a delayed project. Ultimately, it will be a generational project, with the benefits really being seen in 30 years. The Netherlands was car-centered in the 60s and 70s, so the people-friendly cities of today are actually decades of continual progress rather than something that always was there.

Building the Penang South Islands will only benefit a small percentage of people, and there will be no trickle-down effect for the rest of the state.