From Kampong to City and Back Again: A Case Study of De-urbanisation in Malaysia

Abstract

Malaysia’s significant resources of oil and gas have fuelled industrialisation that has driven rural people to urbanisation and begun to change a culture of a sustainable rural lifestyle to an unsustainable urban existence. Theories of urbanisation conclude that mankind will eventually become almost fully urbanised. However, this thesis documents the beginnings of a reverse migration; de-urbanisation. The country is de-industrialising and peak oil and gas are now in the past. However, industrialisation brought with it useful technologies and infrastructures that offer increased comfort and productivity to the returnees. As people begin to move back to their ancestral land, they are learning again to live successfully with photosynthesis rather than fossil fuel. The circumstances that allowed this to happen are unique to Malaysia. The customary land rights, the matriarchal ownership of property and the cultural tradition of migration mean that this is unlikely to be replicated in the same way elsewhere in the world. However, the story of this thesis has an important lesson for other countries (especially the developing countries) that challenges the convention that mankind will be able to continue to live indefinitely (sustainably) in a ‘planet of cities’. The method used to conduct this study involves questionnaires and semi-structured interviews with both urban migrants and returnees to villages to establish the desires, intents and reasons for future migration. Based on this data, it predicts a trend of de-urbanisation and the rate of urban-to-rural migration. To assess the impact of de-urbanisation, the capacity of rural land to absorb the returnees is assessed by an inventory of productive land available. The ability of the returnees to re-adapt is analysed by in-depth interviews with the inhabitants of a typical rural village. The sample of people for this thesis has shown both ingenuity and resilience that has been achieved by a combination of a sustainable cultural tradition with more modern technologies. Finally, the findings have illustrated the beginnings of a voluntary trend of people who have ‘voted with their feet’ to move out of urban areas and return to a subsistence livelihood that is anything but poor.