The Bangsar Boy: Call for more open spaces

Today, my The Bangsar Boy article is about “public spaces”. Perhaps I didn’t explain it as clearly in my article but I was really referring to the academic definition of it, as opposed to something general like “any space accessible by the public”. I did include a definition I found in Wikipedia though, to build the context.

I wrote:

By definition, public spaces are “an area or place that is open and accessible to all citizens, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, age or socio-economic level”, according to Wikipedia.

The picture above, showing the exterior of a low-cost flat in Kuala Lumpur was taken from S.H. Photography on Flickr, under the Creative Commons License.

Well, this blog post is a chance for me to elaborate more on the little anecdote I shared in the story:

A couple of years ago, I interviewed a group of urban poor youths who were part of huge families – several people living in a two-bedroom flat. I discovered that they had almost nowhere to go other than to loiter around the streets because it was too crowded in the house at any time of the day. All they had was an empty compound shared among a few flats for them to chat, nap and play sports at.

Where do they have to go?

The story was published in R.AGE (or was it Youth2 then). It was actually interesting how it came about. There had been a couple of reports in the papers about shopkeepers in the Pudu area (opposite Pudu Jail) complaining about young kids loitering around the bus stop and in the alleys behind Berjaya Times Square. They claimed that the kids were sniffing glue and damaging their property.

We at the youth desk wanted to speak to these kids and find out exactly what was going on. If they were spending a lot of time loitering about, and sniffing glue, we wanted to know why and what was causing them to engage in such activities.

My colleague Sharmila and I went down to town one weekend – dressed as casual as possible, in an effort to be unassuming – to just observe them. We sat there for a couple of hours and just looked at them, some of these kids looked like they were primary school age, others were a little older.

True, most of them were noisy teenagers. Some were smoking although they were too young to smoke, and they walked around with a sense of youthful arrogance. Some of the boys whistled at girls and women walking by (as kids do), and some of the girls were tom boyish, and would be shouting at boys bothering them.

If those couple of hours are anything to go by, they appeared quite harmless. Some of them hung around the area for quite a long time, but we also noticed that buses they were taking were far and between and often full. They had no qualms waiting for the next one – and sometimes, groups would be split (some could fit in, some couldn’t) but they took it in good spirits.

In that couple of hours were were just sitting there, no one harmed any public property. The cars in the car park went not damaged, and the youths looked pretty regular – not high on anything. We even took a walk through the lanes behind the shopping centre where most of them appeared to have come out from (we would later discover that Berjaya Times Square is a favourite hang out spot for these youths). No glue, no syringes on the ground nothing. Just young people smoking.

We tried talking to some of them, but they were wary of us. They told us that they were only hanging out, and would just come here during the weekend because they had nothing better to do. We asked if they knew of any people around sniffing glue etc, and most said they didn’t – a couple said they’ve seen it happen but it’s not so frequent. Some told us they came by motorbikes, others said they took cabs. But that was all they would tell us. We also found out where they lived – most lived in low cost flats.

Following that, we asked around to see if anyone could hook us up to find out more about these kids. Another colleague actually had relatives who lived in these flats, so she helped us arrange to actually visit the homes of some of these kids.

We actually did a video for this which you can watch here:

How does this fit into my article on public spaces? Well, the video says a lot about how the lack of public spaces affect the lives of these kids. They have to save up, and scour around for money to afford a visit to Internet cafes, for a game of futsal. They live in such conditions which are not conducive to growing up – they stay out when working family members need their sleep, and go to school tired and fall asleep in class. They loiter around town wherever they can because they have nowhere else to go.

I feel that the lack of public spaces have a negative impact on the social landscape of a country.

Besides my initial problem with finding a place to wait at, there are bigger social issues linked to this including the well-publicised lepak phenomenon and the dreary state of our country’s sports, among others.

You can read the full article here.

9.03pm Malaysian time (+8 GMT)

Tags: public spaces, R.AGE, StarMetro, The Bangsar Boy, The Star, urban poor, Youth2