Suburban sprawl killed Seremban

Seremban declined because suburban sprawl and highways emptied its core and killed everyday urban life.

From Boo Jia Cher

I read Ravindran Raman Kutty’s recent column on Seremban’s decline with interest. While he described this decline in terms of traffic congestion, ageing shoplots, or a lack of nightlife, these are just symptoms, not the disease.

The deeper rot is structural: Seremban has been hollowed out by suburban sprawl. Growth was pushed outward to Seremban 2 and beyond, while the historic core was left to wither.

What emerged is not a balanced city, but a place designed to be passed through rather than lived in.

No one walks here

A city begins to die the moment people stop walking in it. Downtown Seremban feels lifeless because it is hostile to pedestrians.

Despite its historical walkable grid, as with most old Malaysian urban centres, roads here are wide for car speed, not to allow people to linger, sit, browse, or meet. When walking becomes inconvenient or unsafe, street life evaporates.

Businesses struggle and shutter, public spaces empty out, and by nightfall the city centre retreats into darkness. A downtown without pedestrians is no longer a centre; it is merely a traffic conduit.

Highways destroy cities

Highways and major roads are often sold as tools of connectivity, but in reality they tend to sever cities from themselves. Instead of bringing people into Seremban, these roads funnel traffic through it, linking one car-dependent destination to another: from low-density suburbs to malls, industrial parks, or coastal towns.

The city becomes an obstacle between origins and destinations, not a destination in its own right.

This pattern has played out repeatedly elsewhere. In many American cities, urban highways drained life from downtowns by enabling residents and businesses to relocate outward while still extracting value from the city. Roads multiplied, but urban life thinned out.

Suburbia destroys city finances

Suburban sprawl is expensive to maintain. Local councils must stretch limited budgets to cover longer roads, extended power lines, sewage systems, drainage, waste collection, and street lighting — all serving relatively few households.

A single suburban road serving 10 homes can cost nearly as much to maintain as a dense urban street serving hundreds of residents in apartment blocks.

As infrastructure spreads outward, municipal finances are diluted. Maintenance is deferred, upgrades are postponed, and there is little left to reinvest in the historic core.

Watered-down urbanity

What makes Seremban’s situation especially stark is that it is not a true satellite city in the way successful examples elsewhere are.

Cities like Yokohama, for instance, began as satellites of Tokyo but evolved into full-fledged urban centres in their own right. Yokohama has its own economy, dense neighbourhoods, cultural institutions, universities, and a comprehensive public transport network.

It is not merely an outlet for overflow housing. These cities did not thrive by draining Tokyo of life, but by developing parallel centres with strong internal connectivity and urban density.

Seremban, by contrast, remains fundamentally dependent on the car and on external destinations for work, culture and leisure. The result is not a polycentric region of strong centres, but a weakened core surrounded by low-density sprawl. No one likes watered down soup, and that is exactly what low density sprawl does to cities.

Transit-oriented rejuvenation

Without residents in the core or daily routines unfolding on its streets, no amount of cosmetic upgrades will bring Seremban back to life.

The way forward is to bring people back into the heart of the city: to re-densify the core and treat it once again as a place to live, work and play.

The development of Seremban Sentral presents a rare opportunity to do this right. Anchored around rail, it can support higher-density housing and mixed-use development within walking distance of the station.

Homes above shops, offices next to eateries, and daily necessities within a short walk are not romantic ideals; they are the basic mechanics of a functioning city. Streets must be human-scaled, safe and inviting.

When people walk, sit, buy groceries, drink coffee, and meet neighbours along the street, a city signals that it is alive. These everyday acts create the foot traffic and social presence that sustain small businesses and public life.

Public transport must reinforce this shift. If buses arrive once every 45 minutes, cars will remain the default. Frequent, reliable services connecting outer neighbourhoods to the core are essential, not optional.

The goal is not to eliminate cars, but to break their monopoly over movement and space. Without this, density will not translate into vitality.

Loke must lead by example

Seremban is uniquely positioned to pursue this path. Its MP, Loke Siew Fook, is also the transport minister and a vocal proponent of public transport and transit-oriented development.

If these principles cannot be demonstrated convincingly in his own constituency, it raises a deeper question about Malaysia’s commitment to them elsewhere.

Seremban’s future does not lie in becoming an ever-expanding collection of highways and housing estates. That model hollowed the city out and should arguably be made illegal.

Its future lies in rediscovering the value of its centre, and in having the political will to rebuild it as a place where people actually live. - FMT

Boo Jia Cher is an FMT reader.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.