Putrajaya

Daniel PS Goh and Tim Bunnell

Sage Journal, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

Dec 25, 2025

Overcrowding, congestion and environmental degradation are often the reasons cited for the building of new administrative and business cities to locations away from existing metropolitan centers. In Asia, the planning of right urban densities has become the dominant paradigm for designing these new cities and selling these cities to investors and citizens. Following the wave of building eco-cities in Asia, framing and dressing this paradigm is the ecotopian imagination of a future of humanity living in harmony, with nature and each other, the right densities secured by technological progress in the age of climate crises. We see this imagination at its height in the ongoing planning and construction of Nusantara, the new capital of Indonesia in Kalimantan, heralded as a sustainable forest city sited in the Borneo rainforests. Using a genealogical analysis, we show that the ecotopian imagination began to take hold in Southeast Asia in the reviewing of urban densities and greening of planning and design in Putrajaya (Malaysia) and Singapore from the 1990’s to today, and that these are exercises in producing ecotopian densities to right-size urban societies. Analyses of these cities tend to focus on the postcolonial aspect of civilizational representation through spatial design to create nationalistic affects. We argue instead that these cities are sites of utopian futures constructed to disperse affects stemming from discontent regarding urbanization and globalization concentrated in capital cities. However, the ecotopian imaginations may not be potent or persuasive enough to disperse the affects, yet the state cannot afford for the projects to fail. Thus, the state is left with only the temporal fixes of delays and revisions pushing back eco-density targets.

Dec 25, 2025

Macedo, J., & Tran, L. V.

Journal of urbanism: international research on placemaking and urban sustainability, 6(2), 139-159

Jul 1, 2023

Brasília, the national capital of Brazil, and Putrajaya, the new administrative capital of Malaysia, were created generations apart and on different continents. Brasília was created as an icon of Modernist architecture, while Putrajaya represents the emergence of new symbolic relationships between government and economic prowess. Like most new towns built in the twentieth century, they were made possible by government backing. This paper explores the ideological basis for the production of urban space in the development of seats of national governments. The analysis of Brasília and Putrajaya confirms that governments use urban design in national capitals to represent power.

Jul 1, 2023

Lim, K. Y., Woods, P. C., & Koo, A. C.

2nd International Conference on Creative Multimedia 2022 (ICCM 2022) (pp. 15-21)

Dec 24, 2022

Smart city is a popular concept used widely by policy makers and administrators to promote socio-technological advancement in urban cities. In a disquisition of idealism of the smart city, it would be fruitful if we could at the same time highlight some of the challenges to achieving the very idealism we advocate. To speak of utopianism without any serious reflection, refining and re-examining in putting the ideals into practice is mere rhetorical idealism and failure to plan. This paper sets out to investigate how the city of Putrajaya, aspiring to become a smart city, can manage the expectations to realize that ambition. We present a narrative exploring the practical challenges Putrajaya has been facing in its ongoing efforts to be a smart city. Active idealism as put forward in this paper refers to the recognition of the humanistic ideals that are to be manifested or practiced in individuals and society

Dec 24, 2022

Bunnell, T., Aung-Thwin, M., Clendenning, J. N., Goh, D. P., & Smith, N. R.

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 40(6), 1082-1099

Oct 23, 2022

Geographers and historians have contributed to a well-established literature on how places become repositories of inherited meanings and contested memories. Much less attention has been afforded to space and place as future-making resources. In this article, we consider how extant places feature in the imagination, planning and development of ex novo cities. Focusing on three new administrative capitals in Southeast Asia – Putrajaya (in Malaysia), Naypyidaw (in Myanmar) and Nusantara (in Indonesia) – we show how places have been mobilized as points of persuasion, or what sociologist Thomas Gieryn has termed “truth spots”. Drawing and building upon Gieryn’s work, we identify three heuristic types of truth spots: aspirational truth spots that demonstrate progressive developmental possibilities for emulation; antithetical truth spots signaling past failures to avoid in planning and developing the future city; and anticipatory truth spots that articulate future expectations, justifying forms of (in)action in the present. While existing work on truth spots emphasizes powers of persuasion associated with physical, in-person experiences of place, our emphasis and contribution centres on the narrative mobilization of place references.

Oct 23, 2022