Lost space in Chow Kit / Noor Syarafina Sallehudin ... [et al.]

In today’s cities, large numbers of vacant, unused lands in the city centre can be easily seen. These terms can also be called as lost space. Lost space is the undesirable urban areas that are in need of redesign, making positive contribution to the surroundings or users. Revitalisation of lost spaces can provide opportunities for reshaping a city’s appearance, and streetscapes in enhancing the city’s experience for the community and at the same time solving the issue of lacking of public spaces in the city centre. This study therefore examined the elements of a public space in a city centre by revitalising the lost space. It is found that a successful public space includes three main elements of access and linkage, comfort and image as well as use and function. Thus, this paper aimed to design a successful public space in context of lost space underneath Chow Kit Monorail Station. This study applied qualitative method to analyse the lost space underneath Chow Kit Monorial Station. This study examined the reason why there are lost space in Chow Kit. With the guide of the successful public space attributes, the lost space will be proposed with new design that could revitalize the lost space as a successful public space. The findings shows that the space has not meet the three attributes of successful public space. Therefore, from the synthesis done, a new design was proposed to achieved the aim to revitalize the lost space as a successful public space.