By Ooi Kee Beng, Penang Monthly Editorial, October 2026
THIS ISSUE HIGHLIGHTS liveability in Penang, and an initial word of warning is in order. A particular kind of misleading confidence comes from a spreadsheet. Ask a town planner what makes a city liveable, and you will be handed numbers: walkability scores, transit access, density targets, hectares of green space per resident. These are not unimportant, but they only describe a city’s skeleton, not its temperament. And a city, like a person, is not reducible to its bone structure.
What I want to do here is walk through what gets left out when we let a checklist do our thinking for us—and why the disciplines that study meaning, rather than infrastructure, need to be heard.
Start with something modest: the idea of place. Marc Augé distinguishes between “place”—saturated with memory and relationality—and “non-place”—functional, anonymous and interchangeable. A city can be efficient in every measurable sense and still produce non-places: the mall corridor, the transit interchange, the plaza nobody remembers. What transforms ordinary geography into something people actually love is repetition, whether from the same walk, seeing the same stallholders or nods exchanged each morning. This is not nostalgia; it is how meaning accrues, which in the case of George Town, emerges from its living heritage and street life.
The corner coffee shop, the barber-shop and the void deck are examples of what American sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls “third places”. Neither home nor the workplace, these are where casual and low-stakes contact between people actually happens. A planner might tick the box that says an amenity exists within a radius of 500m; but this is a different achievement from inviting people to linger (see Penang Monthly, February 2026).
CONDITIONS FOR RELAXING
Environmental psychologists bring a more physiological argument to the table. Rachel and Stephen Kaplan’s Attention Restoration Theory proposes that the mind, fatigued by the demands of urban life, needs exposure to environments of
“soft fascination”—for example, greenery, water or the gentle complexity of a gar-den—to recover. This is not an aesthetic preference, but hews closer to a biologi-cal requirement. Colin Ellard’s work measures this need directly. Blank façades and relentless visual monotony produce quantifiable stress responses, as does the opposite extreme: chaotic overstimulation. The live-able street, it seems, lives in a narrow band between dullness and onslaught.
And then there is the older, more intuitive observation that streets feel safe not because of statistics, but because of “eyes”, in the sense that someone, somewhere, is paying quiet attention. Oscar Newman’s concept of “defensible space” argues that the legible ownership of a courtyard or stairwell changes how people behave within it. A place can be statistically safe yet feel unsafe, simply because no one appears to be responsible for governance and management. The gap between the two is where a great deal of urban anxiety quietly lives. Sadly, the prevalent culture in Penang, and Malaysia at large, is one of bad maintenance, where public spaces actually cause “urban anxiety”, thus detracting from their levels of liveability.
Feminist geographers also point out that most liveability metrics are built around commuters travelling in a straight line—from home to work, and the reverse—when a great many residents, particularly those with caregiving responsibilities, move through the city in loops: school, market, clinic and home again. A city designed for linearity fails the loop, even while scoring well on paper.
CULTURAL DIVERSITY NEEDS WORK TO FLOURISH
One condition for liveability rarely appears on any checklist at all: whether residents can, in any meaningful sense, think together. A shared working language is not a convenience; it is what makes arguments, com-plaints and negotiations between strangers possible in the first place. Sociolinguists studying linguistically fragmented cities describe a condition of spatial proximity without social contact—people who share a street but never quite share a sentence. A related point is how intellectual vibrancy in a multicultural place like Penang needs conscious input from its residents. Public exhibitions, seminars and book launches, such as those held at Penang Institute in Pulau Tikus, and Hikayat in George Town, contribute vitally on this front.
Social scientists have also argued, plausibly, that the capacity to argue with strangers in public is a trained skill, one that atrophies without spaces designed to exercise it. And where local newspapers close, American research on “news deserts” finds concrete civic costs: falling voter turnout, weaker scrutiny of local govern-ment and a public retreating into partisan shorthand adopted from the national level, because it no longer has anything more local to reason from. Penang Institute has consciously been contributing here with Penang Monthly since 2009, providing a structured textual space in which cases are made and passionately defended, in line with editorial and civic norms.
No discussion of liveability can avoid the question of plurality, and here the honest answer cuts both ways. Diverse cities plug into wider economic and cultural net-works; Ash Amin’s idea of “thrown togetherness”—that is, the ordinary, unglamorous contact of queuing and commuting along-side difference—does real civic work over time, however modesty. Along this sits Robert Putnam’s well-known finding that ethnic diversity, at least in the short run, can correlate with lower social trust, although this particular finding has since been substantially complicated. Such effects may actually be traceable to where people of different backgrounds happen to be sorted, rather than a result of diversity itself. The more defensible position, which most careful scholars now hold, is that diversity’s fruits depend on whether a city’s institutions convert proximity into actual contact—such as mixed schools, integrated housing and shared public spaces—or merely allow difference to sit beside itself, unmet.
Malaysia and Singapore, close neighbours facing the same demographic inheritance, have answered this question in almost opposite ways. One keeps ethnicity constantly present in formal politics while leaving public argument relatively open, and the other removes ethnicity from formal contest while engineering integration directly into the architecture of public housing, at some cost to open contestation. Both approaches to governmentality mentioned above are, therefore, wagers about which parts of civic life a state should shape by hand, and which it should leave citizens to work out by themselves, slowly, at street level.
What runs beneath all this is a shift in the question being asked about a city. The planner asks whether a city functions. The sociologist, the anthropologist and the psychologist ask whether it produces encounter, memory and restoration; the elements that a person needs to simply keep living well within urban places.
Both questions deserve an answer. It is only that the second rarely gets asked with the same rigour. This is an imbalance that needs correcting: a city, in the end, is judged less by its efficiency, than by whether the people living in it feel, in some unmeasurable but real sense, at home.
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