Meeting an affordable unit target alone is far from sufficient for “ensuring inclusive housing development”. For meaningful accomplishment of that wider objective, it also clearly matters how and where affordable housing is constructed, and with what kinds of amenities, facilities, and opportunities, writes Tim Bunnell
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In preparing to speak at a recent forum on “Malaysia Futures” held in Kuala Lumpur, I was struck by the prominence of “inclusion” in official discourse on the aspirational city. I doubt that observation was surprising to many of the other scholars or policy makers who attended the event, especially those who work on urban issues in Malaysia itself. Returning to the country in a professional capacity for the first time since the advent of COVID-19, and having conducted research mostly on cities in other countries during the years immediately preceding the pandemic, I was clearly playing contextual catch-up. Nonetheless, I left the forum – where I contributed to a panel on urban futures – convinced that there is value in examining the rhetorical work that “inclusion” is doing in Malaysian urban policy circles today, and how that relates to other times and geographical contexts. Where has the term come from and what other terms or phrases have travelled alongside it? In what specific ways is inclusion currently being deployed in urban policy discourse in Malaysia? What further potential lies not only in official commitment to inclusion but also in the possibility of mobilizing other terms within its discursive orbit? In what follows, I address each of these questions in turn.
On the origins of inclusion-centred urban agendas
Both official commitment in Malaysia to inclusive urban futures and the focus that implies on cities (and other human settlements) reflect recent emphases of multilateral organizations, particularly the United Nations. Following demographic conceptions of the world having entered a majority urban “age” or “millennium” (Martinez et al., 2021), the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) announced in 2015 included one that was specifically “urban”. SDG 11 is titled “Sustainable Cities and Communities” and makes explicit mention of the need for inclusive urban planning and management. Inclusion assumed even greater discursive prominence in the New Urban Agenda (NUA) discussed at the HABITAT III meeting in Quito, Ecuador the following year. The words “inclusive”, “inclusion” and “inclusivity” appear dozens of times across the 24 pages of the English language version of the NUA (see also Bunnell, 2019). Translated into more than 30 other languages, including Bahasa Malaysia, this provided a normative vocabulary as well as an overarching roadmap for national urban policy commitments. With Kuala Lumpur hosting the World Urban Forum in 2018, Malaysia also gained some global attention in discussion of progress being made towards more inclusive and sustainable urban development.
The Kuala Lumpur Declaration that arose from the 2018 World Urban Forum followed the NUA not only in its repeated reference to inclusion, but also in its apparent preference for that term over others. The case of “equitability” is worth brief further consideration, not least because it featured in the urban panel at the Malaysia Futures forum. Specifically, the first question that my fellow panelists and I were asked to respond to was: “Can cities create inclusive and equitable futures?”. With time for our responses strictly limited, none of the panelists – myself included – ventured far into unpacking the difference between inclusive and equitable, and so we treated them as largely interchangeable descriptors of the good city. Yet while the two terms have long been discursively entangled, differences have been discerned and disputed as well. In the UK, for example, where there was robust debate on such definitional matters even before they gained traction in global policy domains, some saw pursuit of “social inclusion” as undermining efforts to address inequality (understood in terms of economic redistribution) (Lister, 1998). In contrast, efforts to promote economic inclusion by prioritizing active participation in geographically uneven and socially inequitable labour markets arguably blurred the distinction around long-term equality of economic opportunity.
Terminological choices are consequential in ways that exceed academic attention to semantic detail. Nation-states are generally very careful about the language of documents that they commit to, with the result that these tend to be couched in what are perceived to be safe terms through a process of “decision making by committee” (Willis, 2016: 106). In comparison with equitability, part of the likely international appeal of inclusion is its capaciousness and malleability. While aspects of an orientation to inclusion overlap and align with equitability goals in a (re)distributive justice register (as noted above from the UK example), they can also be oriented to more squarely procedural forms of social justice. Such malleability means that a variety of different policy pathways can be pursued in the name of – and as means of demonstrating commitment to – more inclusive futures. Against this backdrop, it is remarkable that amidst repeated mentions of inclusion, the NUA also features reference to “the Right to the City” (Parnell, 2016). Academics, activists and others continue to disagree whether this should connote an institutionalized, legal right (as in Brazil’s City Statute) or an oppositional rallying call (see Huchzermeyer, 2018). Either way, the lineage of the Right to the City back to the radical thinking of Henri Lefebvre in the 1960s means that it is planted in the NUA as a linguistic “depth charge” (Simone and Pieterse, 2017: 166) for future political action, whether alongside or beyond the work of “inclusion”.
Inclusion in Malaysian urban futures, past and present
Despite having featured in discussions at the World Urban Forum in Malaysia in 2018 (notably in a session on gender), and in the text of an associated statement issued by the World Assembly of Local and Regional Governments, the Right to the City gets no mention in the official Kuala Lumpur Declaration. The seemingly safe(r) language of inclusion/inclusive (as well as “liveable” and “sustainable”) is also preferred in Malaysia’s 2022 national report on implementation of the NUA. Yet alongside reference to inclusive policies, inclusive consultation processes, and even “extensive inclusiveness”, emphasis in that document is also placed on tackling rising inequality. It is important to recall a long history of explicit state efforts in Malaysia to realize “an economically just society, in which there is a fair and equitable distribution of the wealth of the nation” (pp. 3-5). These words from Malaysia’s NUA implementation report, are themselves quoted from the text of the much earlier national Vision 2020. Introduced in 1991, Vision 2020 succeeded two decades of affirmative action for Malay and other “bumiputera” citizens under the New Economic Policy (NEP). Thus, while state-driven economic redistribution and restructuring is far from novel in post-colonial Malaysia, it has predominantly been addressed along ethno-racial lines (despite the fact that NEP also had poverty reduction targets that transcended issues of inter-ethnic redistribution). In this national context, the prevailing multilateral discursive idealization of “inclusion” today not only spurs the promotion of procedural or participatory forms of justice, but remains bound up with the politics of specifically inter-ethnic conceptions of equity that Vision 2020 sought to decentre.
Looking back at Vision 2020 affords some comparative insights into both the discursive possibilities and limitations of a commitment to inclusion. First, the negotiated origin of the text that became known as Vision 2020 signals longstanding awareness among activists and researchers in Malaysia of the significance of linguistic detail. In particular, struggle over the incorporation of the term “Bangsa Malaysia” into Vision 2020 (as a means of extending national issues of equity and fairness beyond crude ethno-racial lines) has similarities with the more recent multilateral struggle for the Right to the City to be included in the NUA (Bunnell, 2022). Second, getting the policy language right is clearly not sufficient to realize progressive outcomes. In Malaysia in the 1990s, a term such as Bangsa Malaysia served to legitimize initiatives addressing inequities beyond a bumiputera/non-bumiputera divide and could be mobilized to critique ethno-centric policies as not being “in line with Vision 2020.” However, there were inevitable gaps between rhetorical commitment and material developmental reality, which serve as a reminder of the wider importance of paying attention to developments on the ground. Third, it is possible for numerical targets in policy documentation to seize attention and capture imaginations in ways that trump wider discursive phraseology. For all its negotiated wording (and commitment to a multifaceted, more-than-economic conception of national development), popular as well as political accomplishment of Malaysia’s Vision 2020 ultimately became reduced to realization of a specified per capita income target by the year 2020.
There is a corresponding danger that even seemingly progressive, inclusion-oriented policy targets today may become “fetishes”[1] that serve to obscure or shackle transformative future possibilities. One such example concerns headline “affordable housing” targets in the 12th Malaysia Plan: specifically the goal of completing 500,000 new affordable houses by 2025. This is not to cast any doubt about housing affordability being a genuine and pressing concern in urban Malaysia, especially in the most populous cities. Rather, the point is that meeting an affordable unit target alone is far from sufficient for “ensuring inclusive housing development”. For meaningful accomplishment of that wider objective, it also clearly matters how and where affordable housing is constructed, and with what kinds of amenities, facilities, and opportunities (among many other factors). Independent research and reporting is required to track material, on-the-ground development as well as to evaluate affordable housing qualitatively, even if overall quantitative targets appear to have been met.
Extending (beyond) inclusion: towards the future city in common
There is no doubt that the prominence of inclusion as an ideal in multilateral agreements enables some progressive orientations and policies for urban future making in Malaysia and elsewhere. Yet beyond the noted need for vigilance with respect to how this capacious term is currently being defined in any specific policy context, and what effects associated policies are having at the level of implementation, it is important to consider what more might be done through – or in the name of – inclusion. Equally important is a need to recognize limits to the discursive power of inclusion and to consider the possibility of mobilizing other terms, concepts, and ideals.
One aspect of urban development in Malaysia that could benefit from critical rethinking about modes of inclusion concerns the preponderance of private ownership logics. The private sector-led proliferation of gated communities in and around Malaysia’s largest cities has been well documented. There is also a well-established international literature on the socio-spatial fracturing of the public city-in-common that often attends such developments. In contrast, there appears to be less appreciation of how the application of private sector logics to low-cost housing provision may be difficult to square with realization of the inclusive city. Even in a middle-income country such as Malaysia, low-cost housing ownership can certainly give individuals and families a foothold as well as shelter in the city. However, mere ownership of a housing unit does not itself constitute a significant step towards equitable incorporation into city life. This is only partly a matter of the design or size of the units concerned or even of the facilities provided alongside them. More significant are wider issues of economic and social geography that shape degrees of access to opportunities (e.g. for education and employment) as well as to networks of sociality and support. Such issues are particularly pertinent in a context where relocation of lower socio-economic groups for profit-seeking (re)development has often: (i) been to low-cost housing in marginal urban areas; or (ii) involved dispersal of households that previously formed part of wider residential communities. Any notion that shelter and private property ownership of low-cost housing alone equals inclusion grossly underestimates what is required for diverse members of city populations to gain equitable access to a city’s existing and future affordances.
So ingrained are private property ownership logics and ideals – not only among private sector actors but in the rationalities underlying public partnership with them – that perhaps discursive commitment to something beyond inclusion is required to address socio-spatial inequities of urban development in Malaysia. To what extent can the Right to the City be productively mobilized for this purpose? On the one hand, Lefebvre’s critique of private property and its role in capitalist urbanization means that the Right to the City has often been read as a purely oppositional demand for radical socio-spatial transformation rather than a vehicle for policy revision. On the other hand, the Right to the City has already been referenced in Malaysia in (i) an urban policy advisory Whitepaper for addressing liveability and social protection challenges in public housing, recommending residents’ participation in neighbourhood governance; and (ii) a call for the reintroduction of local elections in writing arising from the research and think tank community. While the details of these two contributions to national policy debate each require further examination, one orientation that they share concerns giving city inhabitants expanded roles in (re)making the(ir) city. This orientation might reasonably be expected to provide redress for public sector paternalism (e.g. in public housing management) as well as preponderant logics of individual private property ownership, suggesting possibilities for realizing the inclusive city in ways that exceed existing urban policy in Malaysia.
There is little prospect of local/municipal elections being reintroduced in Malaysia. In any case, it is far from certain that this would in itself yield more inclusive urban developmental outcomes, judging by recent historical experiences of city-level electoral democratization in neighbouring Indonesia. Yet there do appear to be other significant possibilities for expanding participation in the collective political imagining and remaking of urban futures in Malaysia. Beyond residential neighbourhood governance – which, as noted above, has already been advocated for rebuilding and sustaining quality of life in public housing – COVID-19 drew attention to wider-scale capacities for action. Viewing Malaysia comparatively from Singapore during the pandemic, I was struck by Malaysians’ comparative ability (as well as need) to provide social support to vulnerable members of the population. This suggests post-pandemic potential for social groups to do more than fill temporary gaps in state capacity – to generate, distribute, and manage resources by (and for) themselves, and also to work collaboratively with state actors and infrastructure.[2]
My motivation for drawing attention to such collaborative possibilities stems not merely from a need to avoid duplication of efforts. It is also certainly not intended to give state actors an excuse to abrogate responsibility for social services or protections. Rather, I conclude on this point and set of possibilities because it is by working together, across prior state-society partitions, that new communities of practice can come into being. And while in Malaysia as elsewhere these will be internally contentious, the diverse people who constitute them can come to share concern for the city in common. Pooling knowledge and resources about the city may in itself be understood as a form of research commoning. As Anant Maringanti showed through his work in Hyderabad over a decade ago, collaborative knowledge generation – democratic approaches to the creation and use of knowledge about cities – can give rise to, as much as it is built upon, an ethic of commons. Here, the right to the city is about inclusive (re)making of a city and as a right to a more equitable share of its future affordances.
[1] I take this expression from Jomo Kwame Sundaram’s special address (on “Recent world trends and threats to Malaysian prospects”) at the Malaysia Futures event, on 31 May 2023. Jomo used the term with respect to the commitment of the Chair of the Federal Reserve of the United States to keeping inflation below 2%.
[2] This falls within the scope of what has elsewhere recently been cast as “new municipalism”.
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*Banner photo by Deva Darshan on Unsplash
*This blog is based on a presentation given on 31 May 2023 in the ‘Urban Futures’ session at the Malaysia Futures Forum, jointly organised by the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre and Khazanah Research Institute.
*The views expressed in the blog are those of the authors alone. They do not reflect the position of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, nor that of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
