Legible spaces and citizen-subjects: how urban design guidelines discursively construct the Multimedia Super Corridor

Abstract

The Malaysian government has embarked on an ambitious program of national development through the building of a large urban region known as the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC). I contextualize an official planning document for the MSC within international planning practice and critically interpret the document's organizing discourses. I argue that this planning document narrates the MSC through stories of both space and subjectivity. By relying on the concept of legible spaces, the planning document presupposes ideas about the territory of the MSC and the ideal citizen-subjects for whom it is planned. While certain egalitarian principles of urban design are present in the planning guidelines for the MSC, these same guidelines guarantee that the MSC will also be a landscape of exclusion.