As you approach Kuala Lumpur from the airport, the new expres-sway cuts across rugged rocky hills and lush greenery. Amidst this landscape, large stretches of land have been cut, filled, flattened… all the trees are gone and rows and rows of ter-raced houses, shophouses and town centres spring out of the clearances without connection or reference to each other or to their surroundings. The diffused city of growing endlessness slowly invades every corner of our landscapes, creating within us a sense of temporariness, of drift. As we get closer to the centre, the notion of city becomes elusive, diluted in the new, sprawling ‘agglomeration’ emerging from within existing streets that begin to fade, their space stolen by a network of highways linking the various new developments. As the space for interaction of communal human experiences and interchanges loses its meaning, the city becomes erased… and we now read simulta-neously, various and diverse planes of reality. People become a mass that moves in confi-ned spaces within boundaries defined by communication lines; from this mass we receive little or no response. The general policy appeared to be ‘no policy’. Whoever dared, or was able to strike a deal, would come up with phan-tasmagoric proposals to develop just about anything… a new town in the middle of a forgotten valley, a new shopping centre without potential shoppers, yet another golf course with a club house, a hotel, bungalow lots for sale, terrace houses; schools where there were no children, health centres without the sick, offices where there were no workers, a new marina or a port, all private enterprise but with government backing and dare I say encouragement… it didn’t matter that so many of these proposals were sited in the middle of nowhere, that nobody had carried out a relevant study on infrastructure, population movement or acquisition power. Loans were easily granted by banks eager to cash in and turn forever growing profits. Every-one thought ‘planning’ meant that if at current levels a sq.ft. of office space was rented at say 4RM per sq.ft., if you could build 1 million sq.ft. you would earn 4 million RM. Simple! …and the more you built the more you made!… Everyone was practising the multiplication tables to the limit. It didn’t seem to occur to most that in a country of 20 million people of which only a certain proportion is able to afford those prices the demand would run out regardless of how many ‘foreign ex-pats’ American and European multinationals plan on deploying to their Asian offices. It was life in the virtual world, where reality was based on a series of unrealistic,almost infantile assumptions on the shape and size of the future. We were all children in Disneyland. In today’s newspapers, conservative views estimate that property had lost 20% of its value in 1997 and it stands to lose another 20-30% in 98. The real figures could be frightening. It may take 5 to 10 years to absorb what is already built and what is being completed this year. In reality, the market is stagnant as banks have tightened lending policy because of fears of escalating numbers of non-performing loans. The official view projected throughout the media is of a property market that ‘remains stable’. Asian value number 1 is… denial…. Property developers are reducing the hours they keep their offices open, projects are put indefinitely ‘on hold’ or are ‘deferred’, large architectural firms have fired at least 50% of their staff, smaller firms are squeezed. Time to give up, we thought? Perhaps it is all too necessary, albeit all too painful. There was an air of invincibility; as life moved forever faster, dizzier with larger projects and bigger profit margins, everyone grew too greedy to see reality; there was no time to pause, to think, to feel. Our cities were beco-ming the victims of unruly development guided by one single viewpoint: profit. Surrounded by disorder and irrelevant buil-dings, citizens have been losing their traditional connection to the city, alienated from its neglected new structure. A passive, laissez faire attitude where nothing was important enough not to succumb to development has been systematically erasing any traces of passion to fight back and reshape our future urban environment. The public realm as a centre of urba-nity, human exchange and dialogue was being forgotten, eroded by this suburban state of mind in isolation, replaced with a profitable Disneyland, with the anonymous and all-encompassing shopping mall. As we planned for a new, futuristic, artificially idyllic vision of life, as we refused to see what was the rea-lity surrounding us, cities were left to become more congested and polluted than ever. With governments fascinated with a progress represented by the IT era, the hopes for the future rested on the semiconductor industry, the computer keyboard and the virtual world that would enable the possible leap-frog in history. Physical, tangible reality is ignored. In this newly developed, chaotic, Asian urban reality, where everything has been sacrificed to instantly profitable commercial develop-ments, where the global condition threatens the existing cultu-res with a homogeneous landscape of confusion, in this fast growing nation, the fear of losing one=s own self in the mad-ness that surrounded us, must force us into a state of alert… it was so easy to be swept away with the tide, to stop liste-ning, to forget the dialogue, the rituals, the sensuality, and with it the loss of real responses to the ever changing necessities of our fast evolving surroundings. Perhaps this recession (or slowdown), this contrived economic condition where it has suddenly become evident that capital is a fickle lover who shifts according to its own prediction of a self fulfilling prophecy without recognizing fixed boundaries of cities, natio-nalities, religions, genders and local customs, as in a virtual reality world, being there one moment and somewhere else the next… perhaps this will make us reconsider its value and force upon this society the commencement of a time to pause, to think, to feel, to rekindle our spirits and our spaces. Architecture can now revert back to the human experience.