ELASTI(C)ITY: REDISCOVERING THE NIGHT MARKET AS AN ITINERANT URBAN SPACE

A PAPER PRESENTATION BY

Khalilah Zakariya1 & Assoc. Prof. Dr. Sue Anne Ware2

1
Kulliyyah of Architecture & Environmental Design, International Islamic University Malaysia
(PhD Student, School of Architecture & Design, RMIT University, Melbourne)
2
School of Architecture & Design, RMIT University, Melbourne
khalilah.zakariya@student.rmit.edu.au & sueanne.ware@rmit.edu.au

AT

1ST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON

SUSTAINABLE ARCHITECTURE & URBAN DESIGN 2010
“ISSUES ON GLOBAL ENERGY CRISIS AND ITS IMPACTS ON DESIGN”
3-4 MARCH 2010

ORGANISED BY

SCHOOL OF HOUSING, BUILDING AND PLANNING

UNIVERSITI SAINS MALAYSIA
PENANG, MALAYSIA

(Pages 464 – 479 in Conference Proceeding)

 ELASTI(C)ITY: REDISCOVERING THE NIGHT MARKET AS AN ITINERANT URBAN SPACE

Khalilah Zakariya1 & Assoc. Prof. Dr. Sue Anne Ware2

1
Kulliyyah of Architecture & Environmental Design, International Islamic University Malaysia
(PhD Student, School of Architecture & Design, RMIT University, Melbourne)
2
School of Architecture & Design, RMIT University, Melbourne
khalilah.zakariya@student.rmit.edu.au & sueanne.ware@rmit.edu.au

Abstract

This paper discusses the complexity and richness of Lorong Tuanku Abdul Rahman night market in Kuala
Lumpur as a weekly event that temporarily transforms part of the city space into a social and commercial venue.
Through fieldwork, the material and immaterial structures of the night market are documented and then
conceptually dismantled to understand the elastic nature of this event, and how it operates within the systems of
the city and its people. A re-examination of the night market as an informal urban space could inform planners
and designers of ways to engage with the night market and the city, ensuring that the richness of such culturally-
produced space is not lost in the process of development and gentrification. The paper also unfolds the
challenges and potentials of the night market as part of the city’s physical and experiential character.

Keywords: night market, urban, public space, culture

Introduction

Night market, or pasar malam in Bahasa Malaysia, is a part of Malaysian informal shopping and social
culture. It is a temporary weekly event that usually takes place at available open spaces, and on roads or parking
lots that are temporarily closed to allow for its operation. The suburban night markets commonly operate near
residential areas, and are usually located near familiar and visible zones such as the town centre or within the
vicinity of other business operations such as shops and eateries. The business typology of the suburban night
markets generally consist of food and beverages, house-hold products, grocery needs like vegetables, fruits, fish
and meat, clothes, and other range of everyday merchandise sold at affordable prices. Weekly night markets
also exist within city spaces; and one in particular that is discussed in this paper is Lorong Tuanku Abdul Rahman
(Lorong TAR) night market in Kuala Lumpur. City night markets and suburban night markets are by and large
similar, with a slight difference that city night market like Lorong TAR does not sell grocery products other than
fruits and vegetables, and that their location is within the areas of the city. Vendors at the city night market sell
local food, traditional delicacies, merchandise, clothing and accessories, and these become the main attractions
for visitors and city tourists to regularly patronize the night market on Saturdays. The night market not only
becomes a venue for commercial trades to take place, but as a source of cultural richness and identity. However,
as an ephemeral public space and an itinerant event, the night market often becomes an after-thought in the
city’s physical planning, although it has been an integral part of our social culture. How does the night market fit
into the city’s built form and how can they adapt to the process of the city? This paper further discusses how the
night market can become a model to demonstrate how the informal part of the city operates, to unfold different
ways which designers and planners can engage with public spaces of such nature.

In the context of South-East Asia, the night market functions as a source of economy for small-scale
entrepreneurs. It becomes a venue for trading of products sold at affordable prices. In a study about night
markets in Singapore, visitors rated night market highly for the ability to bargain, availability of local food,
affordable prices and a festive atmosphere (Muhammad Faishal Ibrahim and Soh Kok Leng 2003). Similarly in
Malaysia, night market becomes an attraction for people to experience a part of the local culture. Street markets
and street vendors add to the liveliness of urban places and undeniably is part of Asian urbanism (Deguchi 2005).
In Deguchi’s Japan and Taiwan research, he mentioned that in modern city planning systems, most of these
temporary uses of space are not recognized as elements to be planned. He emphasized in his argument that
street vendors contribute to the vitality of the modern urban environment that modern city planning theory did not
handle until now. On a similar note, research conducted on the sense of place of traditional streets discussed
the place attachment that local people have towards traditional streets in Kuala Lumpur. One of the case studies
was Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, which is the main road parallel to Lorong TAR night market (Shuhana
Shamsuddin and Norsidah Ujang 2008). The findings emphasized on the functions of traditional streets in
Malaysia as places for social interactions where crowds engage in selling and buying activities. This is a
challenge faced by planners and designers when engaging with such vulnerable urban fabric that is made up of
people’s livelihood. There is the desire to transform and the desire to retain the localness of a place. However,
without understanding the tangible and intangible conditions that enable places like the night market to operate,
development could fail to provide a progressive solution, or end up being overdesigned and become an urban
pastiche, losing its primary reasons for existence.
 In The Creative City, Landry (2008) noted that ‘establishing a cultural identity is crucial as celebrating
distinctiveness in a homogenizing world marks one place from the next’. In this sense, the night market is already
a source of richness for the city’s identity as it demonstrates a complex framework of how our city allows for
informal programmes to be incorporated within the more formal programmes; which is different from Western
conventional notion of making the public and the private spaces distinctively separated. This ambiguity between
what is public and what is private, between order and chaos, formal and informal, reflects the tangible and
intangible characters of the city and essentially symbolizes the cultural production of another form of public space
in Malaysia. The diversity within these spaces and its micro-spaces could allow the body to experience different
spaces of culture. In a study of Filipino women in Hong Kong and how they appropriate space for themselves in
a foreign country, Law (2001) described, ‘senses tell us something different about the politics of diasporic
experience and give diverse space new meanings,’ where senses is a situated practice that is a form of
embodied experience. Similarly, a study on The Culture of the Indian Street by Edensor (1998) found the
traditional Indian street to have spatial complexity and diversity as opposed to the Western notion of order and
aesthetic of public space, that erase much of the social, sensual and rhythmic diversity in urban space. Diversity
is integral in creating or retaining an identity of a place, but this does not mean that local places like the night
market in Kuala Lumpur or the streets in India have to be frozen as they are.

Massey (1991; 2005) discussed a position that starts with understanding that places change. Places are
not static, but rather, they go through processes and accumulate meanings, just how people accumulate
experience and stories through out their lives. It is possibly from this point that we could reshape how we think
about places like the night market – seeing each as being unique from the layers and connections that it has
collated over time. Massey wrote, ‘places are still unique assemblages of global and local processes, even under
modern, globalizing conditions […] because what gives a place is specificity is not its long internalized history, but
the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of relations articulated together at a particular locus.’
Massey related places as points with trajectories; and by imagining a place as a point where these trajectories
cross, we can see how places relate with other places, and that they are open, rather than enclosed. A common
perception of sense of place is the site’s inward character, with less emphasis given to the outward characters
that the site possesses and its relations to the surrounding places. While designers and planners often discuss
the search for a sense of place, Massey argued how ‘the desire for fixity and for security of identity in the middle
of movement and change’ can be problematic because it would require places to have boundaries, and places
would have to be distinguished between the inside and the outside. Places would then revert back to having
single and essential identities where its sense of place is constructed of its introverted history while dismissing its
relations with the trajectories of other events. This idea was demonstrated in a mapping project by Mathur and da
Cunha (2006) in their study of Bangalore’s terrain. Mathur and da Cunha approached the sites to be open rather
than enclosed within its political boundaries. In this way, the events and occurrences of the sites are allowed to
be suspended outwards, creating connections and links to other places, rather than being contained.
Interestingly, the night market’s nomadic nature already demonstrates this idea of looking outside of the
boundaries of a site and understanding how one place connects to other places, because essentially, the night
market unites a collection of vendors at one location for one day, and then as the event closes, the collective is
dismantled and reorganizes itself through a different combination at another location. It spatially expands the
boundaries of a public space and makes physical and experiential connections among places in the city.
Massey’s idea on a progressive sense of place suggests how designers and planners can engage with local
places more openly rather than defensively through understanding its complexities and systems. When we allow
a place to be more open, we begin to recognize the bigger role that a space has that surpass its regulated
perimeters; and only then can we decide the scale where it is appropriate for us to engage and act.

If the local and the global are interconnected, how do we then discuss culture? Designing places that are
considered ‘local’, such as the night market in contrast with a shopping complex in general, is inevitably touching
on the role of culture. The term culture itself is wide and heavy, and holds different levels of interpretations by
people of different fields. Within the context of this paper’s discussion, culture is used with relevance to the local
ways of doing things. Cohen (1993) wrote of culture and understanding culture; where in the past, culture was
understood as an ‘integrated’ and ‘similar’ characters of a group, that we are shaped by what our culture gives us
and that an individual replicate the larger community. But now, culture is treated more loosely, that it is an
‘aggregate’ of people and processes, rather than ‘integrated’. It implies differences collected within a group. He
explains that a person of one culture is not a clone of another person. Rather, “culture is a process and product
of social process”. By looking at this conception, we can perceive that culture, like places, is not singular; and
within that supposedly one culture, are diverse practices and different interpretations of the culture, which is
relevant to Malaysia’s multi-racial and multi-cultural identity. Translation of culture into physical spaces is a
challenging task for any designer, particularly in attempting to be symbolically precise. This may cause the
inclusion of one group of users and the exclusion of other groups of users, and as a result, it limits the potentials
of how a public space can be occupied. The night market in Malaysia provides a compelling case study to
demonstrate how local culture can be understood through acts of spatial appropriation within a less rigid
framework of the city, given that vendors in the night market originate from different regions of the country where
each carries with them diverse cultural backgrounds. The combination of an open and regulated framework of
the night market allows vendors to be more creative in engaging with the spaces given to them, and this is a
significant part of a city’s characters.

Context of study

Lorong Tuanku Abdul Rahman night market was chosen as a case study for this paper because it is a
prominent urban night market visited by local and foreign visitors. It is located at the back lane of Jalan Tuanku
Abdul Rahman in Kuala Lumpur within close vicinities to Bazaar Masjid India, Masjid India and Masjid Jamek,
shopping complexes such as Kompleks SOGO, Komplex Pertama and Semua House, Light Railway Transit
(LRT) stations and near to shops selling textile products, apparels and accessories (refer Figure 1.0). The night
market operates every Saturday, with allocated operating hours from 6 pm until 12 midnight. Lorong TAR night
market is managed by Kuala Lumpur City Hall’s Petty Traders Development and Management Department
(Jabatan Pembangunan dan Pengurusan Peniaga Kecil), where all night market vendors are required to be
approved for licenses to operate their businesses and within the regulations set by City Hall. In the Draft Kuala
Lumpur City Plan 2020 (Kuala Lumpur City Hall 2008), area near Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman is recognized for
its value as a traditional shopping district. Lorong TAR night market has undergone some improvements where
electrical source points are installed to the site to be utilized by the night market vendors. The original tarmac
road surface was replaced with interlocking pavement and stall tents of the vendors have been standardized with
customized colours and the logo of City Hall. Compared to other street markets in Kuala Lumpur like Jalan
Masjid India and Petaling Street, Lorong TAR night market has been able to retain much of the earlier character
of a night market in Malaysia and still able to adapt to the progressive urban environment. Its ephemeral and
event-like qualities prove to be a significant contribution to its resilience surviving in the city’s system as
discovered in this research; but the night market is a complex system on a series of levels and there are a
number of conditions which can affect its success. This is discussed in the research findings.

Figure 1.0: Location plan of Lorong Tuanku Abdul Rahman Night Market and surrounding context (Fieldwork, 2009)

Methodology

A case study approach was selected as the primary method to understand how the night market systems
operate within the city. Methods were employed qualitatively to allow the researcher to have a more open
engagement and speculative exploration on the conditions of the night market. The field work for Lorong TAR
night market involved multiple personal visits by the researcher as an observer-participant simultaneous to being
a tourist in her own city. Walks through the night market at different weeks and at different hours were conducted
as walking is the best mode to experience the city (Careri 2002; Basset 2004), particularly through intimate
spaces like the night market. Photographs of the general views of the night market, spatial appropriation taking
place in and around the stall spaces, and spatial occupations by vendors and visitors were noted and captured
during the walks. The field work was supported by conversations with vendors and visitors that occur on chance
and opportunity, to find out about their experiences at the night market. The information gathered during the six-
week field work then guided a series of speculative design experiments. In Design Research, Downton (2003)
discusses that ‘designing is a way of researching – that is a way of producing knowledge’. He notes that for a
designer to start design, complete knowledge is not necessary. The need for more knowledge or what is required
is understood during the process. The design experiments on the night market have revealed the different scales
and layers which contribute to the identity and sustainability of the night market.

Findings

Conditions for operation

The field work found that the night market is enabled based on a set of conditions. It is dependent on the
host surrounding, reflecting a symbiotic relationship between the night market and the place which it operates.
On a physical level, the night market requires an open space to operate. Availability of space must be
complemented with a strategic location, and in the case of Lorong TAR night market, it borrows the familiar image
of Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman and the attractions of the heritage quarter. The night market is within a walking
distance from other tourist attractions (such as Petaling Street, Central Market, Dataran Merdeka, Masjid Jamek
and Jalan Masjid India) and shopping venues (such as Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Bazaar Masjid India, Mydin,
Semua House, Kompleks SOGO and Kompleks Pertama); and this has contributed to the proliferation of visitors
to the night market. Hotels and budget accommodation are also located along Jalan Masjid India and Jalan
Tuanku Abdul Rahman, supporting the area as a visitor attraction. Although locating a night market near town
centres may be able to pull instant crowds, traffic congestion and noise pollution are inevitable drawbacks that
may become problematic to immediate hotel residents and shop owners in the long run. Lorong TAR night
market is scheduled to operate from 6 pm until 12 midnight every Saturday, but the field work revealed that
vendors start to set up their stalls as early as 1 pm. The shops, on the other hand, close business at about 6 or 7
pm. This causes the spatial transformations to take place five hours earlier than the allocated operation time.
Even though such temporary set-ups are tolerated by adjacent shop owners and visitors that pass through the
back lane presently, the overlaps between the formal and informal spatial occupations have to be managed
systematically to avoid future tensions among the users. As a visitor during the field work, walking through the
installation process of the night market in late afternoon was manageable, but still having to negotiate with the
passing vehicles. Noise from the night market can be barely heard from the hotel, and as a visitor to the site, the
night market provides a captivating aerial view revealing a unique urban phenomenon that is spatially and
experientially different to other built forms.

Parking space for vendors and visitors is equally important as vending space and location. Based on a
24-hour observation of the night market operations, the field work found that vendors use vehicles to transport
their goods to the night market. Items sold at the night market require storage and mobility. The typology of the
vendors’ vehicles can be categorized into small-sized lorry, van, car, motorcycle, push cart or no transport. Some
vendors park their vehicles on their stall lots and this depends on the size and location of their lots and the nature
of their business. Other vendors drop the goods for their business and stall at their designated lot, and then park
their vehicles at the nearby paid parking areas. A small portion of the vendors are actually shop owners at Jalan
Tuanku Abdul Rahman, and the field work discovered that goods from the shops are brought out from the back
exit to their night market stall location behind their shops. Parking options for the vendors are a choice of
preference and convenience, where the study found that different vendors require different spatial needs and
choose to park at other parking areas to allow more spaces in the stall to be utilized.

Parking space for visitors likewise is a critical factor to the success of a night market. In a suburban night
market setting, road sides and curbs are violated as parking spaces during night market evenings. The local
council indirectly allows the suspension of traffic rules and regulations at these times; but the field work found that
in the suburbs, local residents have reported traffic congestions to become a hazard to their living environment.
Ironically, the night market and street vending activities are a part of Malaysia’s public spaces, but their existence
has never been formally integrated into the physical planning of residential areas, cities and townships, and
roads. For Lorong TAR night market, its need for parking spaces rely on the availability of on-ground and indoor
parking provided by surrounding shopping complexes. This concept of sharing customers, where visitors of the
night market pay the parking fees at the shopping complex or the parking facility can become a possible model to
site future locations for a night market to operate.

Other conditions that contribute to the operation of the night market are basic facilities such as toilets and
prayer rooms. Toilets may not be a priority for a suburban night market because the nature of this type of night
market is close to home and shopping is done in a take-away mode. However, if the suburban or the city night
market was to expand its potentials into becoming an attraction for outside visitors, provision of toilet facilities is
imperative. Lorong TAR night market has the advantage of being near to two mosques: Masjid India and Masjid
Jamek. Mosques provide toilet and ablution facilities, and are open to the public for prayers generally from 6 am
until 10 pm. Mosques have been a common stopping point among Muslims as a place to rest, pray and refresh.
Non-Muslims are allowed to use the facilities in the mosques but will require proper dress codes to pay respect to
the mosque as a sacred space. Another option for public toilet facilities is found in the shopping complexes
around the night market area, but it is limited to certain operation hours. In the light of this matter, public toilets
are basic amenities and planning for public toilets in public spaces should be legible and accessible to all users.
This study found that a one-stop model that petrol stations in Malaysia like Petronas uses is worth noting; where
at their stations, toilets and prayer rooms are provided for customers and non-customers. For the night market
sites and other public spaces, the same model could be adapted and re-scaled to look into a combination of toilet
facilities, prayer room and resting space. This could possibly expand the functions of surrounding public spaces.

Layers of enabling conditions of the night market are extracted in these diagrams (refer Figure 2.0).

Hotels Muslim Prayer Facilities Public Toilet Facilities

Public Transportation Site Attractions Parking Facilities

Figure 2.0: Layers of enabling conditions for Lorong TAR night market

Variation of scales

In the design experiments, I discovered that the night market operates on a series of scales: the scale of
the city, the scale of the street, the scale of the stall, to the scale of the products. Identification of these scales
resulted from iterative design schemes that shift back and forth from designing and analyzing the field work
materials. Design becomes an important method to unfold the relationships and sub-systems present in the night
market.
The scale of the city

At the city scale, the night markets operate based on weekly schedule. Their travelling character makes
them unfixed to one particular place, and thus, solutions to problems derived from the night market events should
acknowledge temporality. They are affected by the conditions and changes of their settings, making them
resilient and elastic in nature, and for the same reason, they are vulnerable to any modification in their
surrounding development. The conditions of the different night market settings are not similar, where vendors
who operate at Lorong TAR night market every Saturday may operate at a residential area on a Monday, and on
a different town on Tuesday. The night market’s nomadic systems operate in line, if not directly, with other
operating systems in the city, such as the city’s garbage collection systems. The operation schedule for garbage
collection at Lorong TAR follows after the night market operation schedule is finished. The field work noted that
City Hall’s garbage trucks conduct their cleaning operations at the night market between 12 midnight until 1 am,
and by morning time, the back lane transforms into its everyday condition.

The itinerant nature of the night market also provides a new way of understanding the city. The vendors’
weekly schedule can be a source for local and foreign visitors to experience different places in the city, which
would expand the conception of place as in Massey’s discussions. It allows place to be connected and in return,
may change the way we plan the city’s systems.

The following diagram represents the dispersal model of the night market (refer Figure 3.0).

Figure 3.0: Conceptual dispersal model of night market in Kuala Lumpur

The scale of the street

The night market is a public event that unifies a collection of vendors, each with different business
typology that requires different programs. This collection produces product variety which is one of the rich
characters of the night market. Visitors at Lorong TAR night market will be able to find food from various regions
in Malaysia such as delicacies and dishes from the North, East Coast and South. Some vendors at the night
market localize Western food such as pizzas and burgers, and improvise other globally known food such as
kebabs and ice-blended drinks. The collection of products is a valuable source of Malaysian culture and is able
to be sustained in spite of modernization and urbanization. The physical characters of the night market may have
gradually changed over the years from having informal characters to being more formalized with a unified image.
Nevertheless, the inherent characters of the night market lie within the craft and creativity of the vendors
themselves. If seen from this perspective, globalization does not necessarily homogenize cities, but rather, the
acculturation of those global elements to the local way of life gives birth to a new form of local culture.

At the street scale, the night market negotiates the street spaces that they occupy with the adjacent
buildings and void spaces next to them. Collectively, the stall locations are pre-arranged by the local authority
through a lottery and with general zoning of food and non-food products. Individually, the vendors adapt and
appropriate their tents on-site to fit the urban conditions which they are in, like fitting in puzzle pieces. They take
opportunity of the feathered building edges by filling in the voids with their stall spaces or vehicles. For example,
a vendor that has his stall near a spacious void has the opportunity to utilize into the empty space to its
advantage as a parking space for his vehicle (refer Figure 4.0).

On the other hand, the irregularities and shifting layout of the night market add to the unique character of
this shopping space, which set it apart from a formal shopping complex and the built urban fabrics. The
informality of the night market creates a casual shopping ambience and this was found to be among the qualities
that draw people to come to the night market, other than for reasons of affordable prices and product variations.
Conversations with visitors of Lorong TAR discovered that they are attracted to come to this venue on Saturday
because of its convenient location, the wide range of products it offers and the festive pasar malam ambience.

Figure 4.0: Night markets elastic qualities at the street scale

The scale of the stall

At the individual stall scale, in my field observation, I documented how the stall spaces are appropriated
by each vendor. The vendors of Lorong TAR night market are given a ‘framework’ to operate – the location of the
lot, lot size of approximately 2.2 m by 2.2 m, and a standardized tent with the size of 2.6 m by 2.6 m (refer Figure
5.0). Within this given framework, each vendor occupies and arranges the spaces inside and outside of the tent
according to their different needs and requirements. For example, a vendor selling drinks has a different spatial
requirement than a vendor selling rice dishes. Their appropriations are results of where their stalls are located,
their ways of preparing and displaying their products, climatic needs such as shade to shelter from sun and rain,
as well as spatial improvisation based their own cultural or everyday practices. In which ever way, the vendors
are able to work out the framework that they are given in order to operate their businesses.

This phenomenon highlights the richness of the night market where hints of personal creativity and the
everyday culture is expressed. The stalls at the night market become the vendor’s extended private space made
into a public space, where visitors are allowed inside. This personal space is improvised according to personal
taste and needs, similar to how people renovate or decorate their rooms, homes, shops and offices. The way the
vendors take advantage of the lamp post as a place to tie their tent extensions and their techniques of using the
frames of the tent as armatures to hang signage, their products, hooks for plastic bags and light are temporary
interventions that reflect a complex spatial practice (refer Figure 6.0). The observation of such practice is
significant to how night market spaces, street furniture and public spaces could be designed in the future to cater
for multiple reading and use of space.

At this scale, the symbiotic relationships among the vendors are also evident. One vendor may use the
tent poles of another vendor in front of him to tie his canvas extension, which goes beyond the private boundaries
of his stall and poaching into the boundary of another vendor’s stall (refer Figure 7.0). This reflects how the
ownership of space is shared and the distinctions between private-private and private-public often exceed each
other’s boundaries; unlike the Western notion of the public- private and the idea of sub-spaces. Most importantly,
it shows the quality of permeable and organic systems of the city, making the city itself having an elastic quality,
rather than rigid and static.

The elastic and symbiotic nature of the night market is experimented in a speculative design exercise to
demonstrate the relationship between the individual and the collective, between the ephemeral and itinerant, and
between the unifying and dispersal qualities of then night market. The working model learns from the
appropriations of the vendors with their stalls, with other vendors and with the street space while taking into
consideration the climatic factors in Malaysia for the need of shelter against sun and rain. At the same time, the
model retained the quality of the night market’s outdoor ambience and the openness of its setting by
experimenting with an expanding and contracting tent form. This design aimed to explore a possible way to cater
the needs of the local authority’s requirements for standardization, while acknowledging the traveling and
temporal nature of the night market (refer Figure 8.0).

Figure 5.0: The night market framework Figure 6.0: Spatial appropriations Figure 7.0: Symbiotic and
within the stall tent opportunistic relationship

Figure 8.0: Working model to demonstrate elasticity of the night market stalls

The scale of the product

The products sold at the night market exhibit diversity of culture present in Malaysia. Food in particular is
a source of cultural richness as recipes may have rooted from different cultural backgrounds and then adapted to
the local ways of doing things. What is more remarkable was observing the ways which some vendors package
their food through the use of traditional methods. Two crafts that were visible during the night market field work
was the range of Malaysian food that are wrapped, folded or skewered, and the use of natural materials
combined with man-made materials. Material examples are the way a nasi lemak is wrapped, which is still using
the traditional material of banana leaf on top of a brown waxed paper; tapai wrapped in banana leaf and sealed
with a toothpick, otak-otak wrapped with two portions of coconut leaves and also sealed with a toothpick, and the
use of bamboo skewers for ayam percik (refer Figure 9.0). These traditional packaging coexists with modern
materials like plastic bags, plastic and polystyrene containers – reflecting to how the traditional and the modern
can simultaneously co-exist. It also displays the people’s efforts in retaining some essence of tradition in their
businesses, without subjecting to a ‘staged’ culture that is often re-presented at tourist attractions. Even if in the
future the vendors may shift to using materials that may be cheaper and readily available compared to natural
materials like banana leaf and coconut leaf, this does not mean the end of culture, but rather, it is cultural process
and we should allow for personal crafts and cultural practices to progress on its own terms.

Figure 9.0: Night market products

Conclusion

The night market co-exists along side other built forms in the city’s fabric as a public space, a social
space, a commercial space and as discovered in the study, the night market is also a cultural space. It is one of
Malaysia’s visible urban cultures that temporarily transform the city space into an event space. However,
changes to the city are inevitable, where it is only a matter of pace and time. The night markets will, if not
already, be under pressure from the process of urbanization. Examples of possible pressures are more stringent
requirement for health and hygiene, changing taste and comfort level, population shifts due to suburbanization,
changes in transportation and mobility, possibility of relocation due to competition from other types of
development, and changing values of economic and social space.

Findings from Lorong TAR night market field and design works re-discovered the complexities and
richness of the night market that have always been present as part of the city’s culture. Through the research, I
have identified actors or components which make the night market unique and rich, and they are the qualities of
mobility, temporality, complexity, ambience, products, cultural occupation of space and the global-local
adaptations. The night market and its contents are a valuable source of the everyday culture that is interpreted
into spatial practices. The research has demonstrated the multiple layers that constitute the night market and
revealed how each layer contribute to the richness of the night market. This revealed the complex characters of a
night market that are critical factors to be considered in its planning, design and management. The extraction of
layers also reinforces the connections between one place to another, and eventually, the connections between
the local and the global. It is evident from previous studies of other researchers that night market is not solely
unique to one country or one culture; but even so, each night market will still be unique because of the multiple
factors that shape it to become what it is. In conclusion, the research at this point has unfolded the complexities
of a night market, and I will further interrogate how it can continue to shift with these forces similar to cultural
adaptation and resilience to become a progressive place. As part of globalization process, Malaysian small-scale
night markets have also started to sprout in Melbourne, crossing the borders of its homeland. This, in return,
creates a different kind of localness.
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