Putrajaya: A City of the Future?

Putrajaya is the administrative capital of Malaysia 🇲🇾.

We arrived to Putrajaya by KLIA Transit (a passenger rail transport service that runs between Kuala Lumpur and the International Airport) at a cost of almost 20 ringgits ($6.5) per person.

For us, the city is reminiscent of Astana. This is not coincidental, since both are purpose-built capitals — young and rather deserted ones — with the territory comprising the country's governmental buildings.

In addition to the governmental residences and offices (or should we call them palaces 😵), there are also many mosques in Putrajaya.

To ease the hot climate of the area, the city is built on the banks of a huge man-made lake. The banks of the lake are covered with greenery, which conceals elegant houses in its shade.

Apart from civil servants, it seems that only maintenance personnel are abundant in the city.

We met several groups of cleaners during the day. People in each group were wearing a particular uniform, which even included a specific type of shoe.

The city is so well-groomed and beautifully designed, that — being someplace in a green park at the river bank, listening to a birdsong that intermingles with the lines of the Quran, melodiously flowing from the surrounding minarets — one begins to involuntarily feel: here I am, in a mythical Paradise already.

Well, we'd really like to see more of such green cities established around the planet.

It would be the opposite of what Kuala Lumpur suggests: a future consisting of multistory apartment buildings, rooted several floors underground, rising dozens of floors high, interconnected into complex labyrinths of concrete.

In that dystopian future, the luckiest ones would live on the top floors (since the air is cleaner and the traffic noise is not that loud there). While the littered ground would be populated mostly by rats and the poorest, homeless people.

Let's choose our common future carefully 🌏.

Shah Alam and the Blue Mosque

The People of Malaysia