Every morning, as the sun rises in Fuad Fahmy's village, he can hear the familiar sounds of a rural existence begin to stir: roosters crowing, kitchens clattering, children chattering, water splashing.
He's lived all his life in a traditional Malay village called Kampung Baru, which means "new village", but he considers himself a city boy.
That's because Kampung Baru is located smack bang in the middle of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia's capital and one of Asia's biggest cities.
There are many places in south-east Asia called Kampung Baru, but this one was established at the turn of the 19th century by the British colonial administration in Malaysia, with help from a grant from the then sultan of Selangor, Sultan Alaeddin Shah.
The idea was to create a place for Malay farmers to live close to the urban centre so they could provide food for city dwellers while retaining a village lifestyle.
Fuad's great-grandfather moved here in 1907 and his extended family has remained, sharing a small two-storey building with a traditional timber second floor, and a concrete lower level.
It's about as close as you can get to a village lifestyle in the city, but Fuad fears it may soon come to an end.
"When I was growing up, it was a totally comfortable atmosphere. But now it has totally changed," he says. "The buildings just mushroomed around the city.
"The whole of Kampung Baru is being surrounded by concrete jungle."
Heritage under threat
Kampung Baru is located on four square kilometres of prime inner-city real estate, so it's no surprise that developers are circling.
Plans to develop the site have been mooted since 1984, and in 2014 a detailed master plan was approved by the Malaysian government, but for a variety of reasons those plans have stalled.
Urbanisation, however, marches on, and Fuad can see the writing on the wall.
"I feel that we can't escape development," he says.
"If you come to Kampung Baru, even today, you can see buildings coming up inside the camp home.
"The landscape will change from my observation probably in another five or 10 years."
If Kampung Baru does get developed, many fear a critical part of Kuala Lumpur's cultural heritage will be lost forever.
Local architect and heritage historian Nadge Ariffin hosts walking tours of Kampung Baru. Speaking with Jonathan Green for RN's travel podcast Return Ticket, he says it's the last place in Kuala Lumpur to see vernacular architecture.
Vernacular architecture refers to local construction styles, using local materials, designed to solve very local issues.
In Malaysia and other south-east Asian countries, that's reflected in the small timber huts you'll see throughout rural areas. Raised on stilts, they serve many purposes at the same time.
"It's a very intelligent way of building … when you raise your house on stilts, you are away from the floods," says Nadge.
"You're also above the wild animals. In the olden days, when it was still a lot of jungle and quite wild, you had snakes, you had even tigers at that time. It's a very intelligent way of raising yourself from that cost.
"Finally, it's a very good way of cooling your house when you're higher. There's better ventilation."
Cities that all look the same
But, of course, Kuala Lumpur is not the only global metropolis losing its vernacular architecture.
Urbanisation has seen cities around the world become homogenised clusters of glass and steel monoliths, stripped of any distinctive essence.
Amanda Achmadi, a senior lecturer in Asian architecture and design at the University of Melbourne, says modern development tends to trivialise the cultural significance of settlements like Kampung Baru.
"Urbanism does not always tie into the physical attributes of the place and the memories, the social environment, the colonial history, the race politics," she says.
Kuala Lumpur itself was not originally an indigenous Malay village, but a settlement founded by Chinese tin miners.
"It's unique, because it was created to house Malay migrants who came from regional Malaysia with their sense of vernacular architecture," she says.
And Dr Achmadi says these migrants brought their sense of home into this new location in the heart of the city.
Development, she says, risks "losing traces of that past".
"Jakarta and Singapore are the same. There's this imposition of a model of a city on top of a cultural landscape that has different ways of defining public space, private space and sense of community."
'A street can change into the market'
In somewhere like Kampung Baru, Dr Achmadi observes, "there's an urban intensity happening in those neighbourhoods".
"A street can change into the market … and all of the family can expand their living room to the street on a festival day."
The blurring of the lines between public and private space is what helps create the spontaneity and informal street cultures unique to Asian cities.
It's also helped create food cultures specific to each locale. Kampung Baru is no exception.
Because many foreign workers have also made Kampung Baru home, the result is a distinctive blend of traditional Malaysian cooking with culinary delights from all around Asia.
"We have our Malaysian Chinese, Malaysian Indian, beside the native groups, including the Malay — so you have such a diversity of cuisine, and they also intermix or influence each other," says Nadge Ariffin.
"These days it's not just Malays cooking Malay food, but you'll find Chinese or Indian cooking Malay food, and likewise Malay people cooking Chinese or Indian food. Food unites us."
Tourism: a double-edged sword
While Nadge is resigned to the fact that development is inevitable, he hopes that some of cultural heritage is retained — even if just for the economic benefits of tourism.
"Cultural heritage value as a tourism attraction demands that any authentic history, culture and heritage be retained, not changed or modernised, or worse, destroyed in the name of development," he says.
"All the preserved inner-city historic centres of Japanese and European cities are priceless tourist attractions which generate millions of dollars annually."
But Amanda Achmadi says tourism is a double-edged sword that can help preserve a place, but necessarily changes it at the same time.
The Balinese town of Ubud, for example, has become so popular that traditional day dwellings now operate as homestays, and local families have moved elsewhere.
"You end up having a shell of what it used to be," Dr Achmadi says.
"The tourist gaze eventually affects how the community sees themselves, as a kind of artefact."
What becomes of Kampung Baru remains to be seen. For now, life goes on as normal — but the lucrative benefits of selling their homes may eventually become too tempting for the remaining residents.
Nadge says the value of the land in Kampung Baru is estimated at around $US2 billion.
"That's a lot of money … but you can't put a dollar figure on heritage. That's what heritage lovers are trying to tell the others."
Fuad Fahmy knows he'll probably have to move one day, but says it will leave big a big hole in his life.
"If you are from Kampung Baru and you have to live outside of Kampung Baru, well, something will be missing from you. That's for sure."
Get under the skin of familiar destinations, find less travelled tracks, and discover the unexpected with Return Ticket, a travel podcast from ABC RN. Catch up with the latest episodes on the ABC listen app.
