Displaced Memories: Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya

This paper reflects on Malaysia’s twin capital cities – Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya – drawing on diverse insights about cities, images, absence and memory from Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The paper examines the contrasting spaces, aesthetics and symbolism of Malaysia’s two adjacent capitals. It explores how Malaysian identity and memory are framed within these cities’ historical, cultural and geographical contexts: their landscape settings of jungle and water; their translation of particular architectural and urbanistic styles; and their cemeteries. It examines how Kuala Lumpur’s commemorative sites have been displaced and transformed over time. Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya are explored as an illustration of Calvino’s idea of ‘Twofold Cities’: places that are described, and function, in relation to their twin, their opposite, or their bifurcation. Malaysia’s capital cities are also used to illustrate two themes that frame Calvino’s dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan: Cities and Empire, and Cities and the Orient.