URBANISATION has demolished a "living site of people of multicultural origins" in Kuala Lumpur, according to sociologist and author M Nadarajah.
Describing it as a venue for a floating community of commuters, including aspiring singers, musicians, magicians and curio hawkers, Nadarajah lamented in his book Living Pathways: Meditations on Sustainable Cultures and Cosmologies in Asia, that it was "inadvertently destroyed and insensitively" replaced by an ineffective road system and a train station.
More such vibrant sites, Nadarajah warned, were being destroyed.
Social and cultural loss of such spaces due to careless urbanisation, he added, was too huge and deep to be quantified.
"These are forgotten in our hurry to grow, but their cumulative impact is silently manifested in many of our present social ills," Nadarajah wrote in his book of essays that is handsomely illustrated by photographs he took during his travels around Asia.
He went on to liken mainstream urbanisation to a torrential river that violently washed away many "fine tuned, tenuously sustainable everyday cultures" that took years to build.
Urbanisation and modernisation, Nadarajah wrote, have become gaps that are separating the generations.
Citing the example of the mountain communities of the Karen people in the Mae Chaem area in Northern Thailand, he explained that links between the past and present were quickly becoming severed.
Urbanism, Nadarajah suggested, has affected the people's relationship with nature as it has detached the deep experience with forest and vegetation.
These days, jungles and forest, he observed, were increasingly presented as a domesticated, manicured eco-system that is packaged as "theme parks."
Nature, Nadarajah elaborated, had to be dressed up for people.
"But we have stopped living with nature as an intimate part of our everyday world," he said.
Earlier, Nadarajah said that many who live in urban areas across Asia had a desire to move to an even bigger metropolitan centre.
"The general pattern of migrating elsewhere, both regionally and internationally increases 'eco-unfriendly' consumption and continues to present us with complex problems," he said.