Observations Under The Flyover
SUKE. DASH. DUKE. In zooming on highways across counties, countries, continents, what are we blinded to? This is the question of Singaporean artist Yeo Tze Yang. His first solo exhibition since moving to Malaysia, it marks not a grand migration, but a drift into a different rhythm.
Walker of the Fringe
The city roars with its nine-to-five urgency. Overhead, the rumble of the LRT, the artery relentlessly ferrying human capital back and forth from centre to periphery.
A lone figure drifts beneath the concrete canopy of an overpass by the Pandan Jaya LRT station. The cars whizz by as does the train above, KL as the capital exerts its own gravity. It is beneath all that where the walker dwells. He walks not to arrive, but simply to walk. It is his way of seeing.
Potholes collect little galaxies of rainwater, reflecting neon glints and a patch of evening sky. A stray cat slips between graffiti-stained pillars. It is dusk, but under the flyover, the half-light has its own quiet enchantment. A cracked footpath or a highway pillar near a mamak stall feels as familiar as a favourite chair.
The route repeats, yet each walk reveals something unnoticed: The fresh paint on a faded shop sign near Block C, the flicker of a shop-sign at dusk, the hidden life of a puddle after the rain, rainbowed by engine oil from a passing car. A cluster of half-wilted banana leaves tossed by the curb, a distant radio playing dangdut from a second-floor flat, another abandoned BMW (this time a red one) by the workshop underneath the bridge. Concrete and shadow speak their own local dialect.
Under the flyover, the world hasn’t stopped; it simply whispers. The walker of the fringe listens.
Project: “SkyPark MegaCity @ Pandan Jaya”
Date & Time: Monday, 10:00 AM
Location: Grand Dato’ Lounge, Level 88, Menara SyokSendiri
- Chair: Tan Sri Dr. Tan Kiam Sin , Executive Chairman
- Attendees: Puan Sri Lim Lee Lin (CFO), Ar. Ariffin Ahmad (architect), Isaac Ong (Marketing & PR Director)
Grand Vision: “SkyPark MegaCity @ Pandan Jaya”
1. Tan Sri’s Intro:
- “World-Class Smart Eco-Lifestyle Park City”, “Reimagining Pandan Jaya—Where Everyday Life Meets Elevated Living.”
- Pandan Jaya to be zoned into Pandan Vista, Pandan Skypark, and Pandan Heights to align with premium branding, to be communicated as part of Pandan Smart City Masterplan.
2. Redevelopment Challenges
a) Existing Kampung & Food Stalls
· Concerns from potential buyers over hygiene as well as congestion. To relocate food stalls into a focused Pandan Heritage Promenade (to allocate one back alley for approx. 12 selected hawkers, rest to be offered token compensation.
· To hire artist to do giant mural of “The Pandan Jaya Spirit” to activate the space and stage a micro influencer campaign for launch. Suggested Yeo Tze Yang who has been depicting Pandan Jaya scenes, we can put up his exhibition in our new showroom as show of our commitment to the heritage of Pandan Jaya.
· Capex to be recouped via gradual higher rentals after first 2 years: we also foresee being able to bring in higher value tenants (have already been approached for an artisanal sourdough bakery)
b) Traffic & Public Transport
· Severe congestion around MRR2 as well as LRT. To highlight future expansion where we foresee a robust, integrated traffic solution (not confirmed yet so keep this vague).
· To emphasize it is 12 mins away from KLCC (according to 3am Google Maps)
· Proposed expansions to ease congestion remain conceptual, reliant on future municipal collaboration. Maintain official stance that these improvements are ‘in progress,’ with no fixed timeline.
3. Action Items & Budget
a) Demolition & ‘Green Relocation’
· Formal notices stating “enhanced living solutions” for the squatters have been sent. CFO proposes reallocation of budget to expedite clearing.
· Marketing & PR has instructed hamper sets to be prepared for the ceremony next week (to hire usual photographer). Local MP has been invited as guest of honour.
· Negotiations underway for relocation of flat residents. To stress message of “improved quality of life for all”. Please ensure meet-and-greet photos especially handshakes with flat residents are published.
b) Marketing & PR
· Visual collateral to include:
o Computer-generated skyline with abundant greenery, minimal indication of real traffic or flooding.
o Need to adjust marketing images: to have expat family + Chinese family walking a Corgi
o Drone shots to be done near sunrise to avoid peak hour traffic shots
· To emphasize ‘international class’ and ‘award-winning designs.’
· Emphasize MRT3 coming up and walkway (if asked re: maintenance, make clear this is city council responsibility)
4. Community Engagement
a) Town Hall Session
· Brief 10-minute Q&A with fully scripted answers.
· Provide free mineral water and mini cupcakes. Possibly roping in a local celeb to hand them out for Instagram coverage.
· Plan curated tours focusing on “Hero Zones”: tastefully landscaped show units, info boards featuring future public transport expansions (keep this vague).
· Make sure to feature the TRX and PNB118 million-dollar view
b) CSR Program
· Plant a few decorative ‘Eco Trees’ along the walkway to show our ‘Commitment to Nature.’
· Trees must be those that rarely shed leaves for easier maintenance for photos.
Closing & Final Remarks
· Tan Sri thanks everyone for their innovative synergy.
· Meeting adjourned with enthusiastic applause and a quick official group photo for social media.
Tze Yang and I were walking through Pandan Jaya when we cut through a workshop full of abandoned luxury cars—BMWs, Mercs—like some graveyard of aspiration. Passing under the flyover, we entered a temple. I put my hands together in prayer then spoke to the uncle there. He told us the flyover above had been pushed just a dozen metres or so to avoid demolishing the temple. That the ground we were standing on had been raised, layer upon layer, after the floods. That this was not the original earth.
The soil was not just mud but memory. Altered, engineered, compacted, but still holding form. The temple lived on under a highway designed to bypass everything.
Modern urbanism, especially in its high-functioning, high-speed iterations, demands obedience to abstraction: the city as diagram, traffic model, zoning, and metric. Such planning necessitates flattening complexity and difference into legibility: to see like a state, to see the city as network before neighbourhood, as throughput before texture. In this schema, anything that resists standardization, be it ritual, memory, or any idiosyncrasy, becomes friction to be smoothed over.
Flyovers are the bluntest instruments of this logic: arteries of capital and logistics, carving through neighbourhoods, cleaving histories. They divide, sever, conceal; what lies underneath are regarded as sites of noise, waste, and abandonment. In New York, Robert Moses's expressways rendered entire communities invisible, just collateral damage in a calculus of efficiency. Too often, roads were built not to serve people but to circumvent them. Movement was privileged over encounter, velocity over relation. The pedestrian was reclassified as obstruction to the vehicle.
Yet beneath the flyover: shelter. In the Malaysian monsoon, motorcyclists pull over and gather beneath them. Cigarettes are lit. Conversations are sparked. A pause in motion, a momentary village of strangers formed by weather and necessity. In Paul Rudolph’s speculative design for the Lower Manhattan Expressway, the flyover becomes scaffold—homes tucked between columns, shops folded into shade, vertical ecologies, and modular urban infrastructure that bound communities together instead of cutting them apart. It was seductive. It was never built. What survives are visions: blueprints dense with promise, and the ghost of a belief that infrastructure could be salvaged for care.
Some of them have already arrived. Even in KL, there are undersides of gymnasiums improvised from steel bars and benches, markets that emerge in tarpaulin and tape during the evenings, shrines that remain places of deep worship. They are vernacular insurgencies that insist on the flyover not as void, but as heterotopia: a space claimed by all, governed by none. Sites of contradiction and cohabitation.
This is not an invitation to romanticise decay. It is a provocation to revise our vocabulary of value. The underside is not dead. It is unresolved. Therein lies its most urgent potential.
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