THE RESUSCITATION OF A RUINED LANDSCAPE OF THE URBAN INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY : REVERSING THE SCARS OF THE TIN-MINING INDUSTRY AND TURNING THEM INTO ADVANCE HUMAN SETTLEMENT

Abstract

Our current civilisation is marked by the number of incredibly populated urban areas and mega cities, and how the environment and some aspects of human social landscape is affected by living in such places, some negatively. In the rural areas, resources are constantly drained from these places to the urban and leaving small towns shrinking and dying. Kampar is a such a small town in the Kinta Valley in Malaysia. It used to be a booming tinmining place in the 1920s; after the collapse of the tin industry, the town is left with extensive mined-out land and little job-opportunities. Throughout the past 30 years, there has been attempts to revitalise the sleepy town, but the interventions had not been successful, and causing more damage to the environment and the social landscape. The thesis is to study what type of settlement is suitable for the dying postindustrial town and plan a series of minor and realistic interventions to capitalise the existing landscape found on site. One major physical landscape feature identified is the numerous mined-out quarries, which are now filled with water and turned into lakes. The new masterplan is to design for a settlement, implemented over time, which turns the scar of a tin-industry into a desirable advance human settlement.