Making Sense of Putrajaya (and other similar capital city developments)
I am not an architect or urban planner by profession but have involved directly, professionally with several urban mega city developments in Dubai. It is something that I cherish for being able to expand my horizon and enrich my own experience in areas that used to be my childhood dream.
At one time I was given the role as ‘Development Manager’ for a city project A long way from my ‘IT or computer science’ academic background.
Currently, I am currently involved with certain mixed development projects in two distinctive up-and-coming ‘cities’ in new Dubai. One billed as ‘The new business capital .’ There was one time another mega project that claimed to be the new Dubai capital, it was aborted due to the global financial crisis. Abu Dhabi has a new capital city as well, which will span an area of 4,900 hectares and be located about 15km from Abu Dhabi city and would be able to accommodate three million people by 2028…that’s a long way to go.
The word capital reminds me the used-to-be-called new capital of Malaysia, which is now coined as the administrative capital, Putrajaya. Does it mean the business capital is still Kuala Lumpur?
However, I do not really like Putrajaya for some personal reasons. It is nice city, awesome (aloof) architecture but for common people to deal with government departments and agencies, it would be very much desired to have better transportation links to other parts of old cities. Parking in certain areas of Putrajaya is also a problem. I could be wrong as there could be some improvements.
