The establishment of characterization for traditional Malay cultural landscape / Ismail Hafiz Salleh

The cultural landscape is an important component in exploring and developing the national identity and heritage while the landscape design concept as the prominent element in representing and manifesting the culture and world view of a community. Apart from architecture, art and culture, understanding the culture and tradition of the past community are vital to the present generation. In Malaysia, vast development and rapid urbanization has given an impact on the landscape design development. However, these developments were not thoroughly understood when there was lack of understanding and appreciation of the traditional local culture. This thesis investigates and explores the characteristics of traditional Malay cultural landscape through observation on traditional Malay villages in Peninsular Malaysia by attempting to understand the past traditional community. The search for the characterization was a complicated attempt because of the various changes based on their region as well as the difficulties in obtaining references and accurate documentation about the traditional Malay cultural landscape. From 60 purposive sampling of traditional Malay houses, 24 were chosen to become the case study samples based on three geographical settings and groups of community; Orang Bukit, Orang Sawah and Orang Laut in the qualitative method for 11 states in Peninsular Malaysia. All the field data was collected by using Robert Melnick's Characteristic to conduct cultural landscape inventories, followed by Ian McHarg's Overlay Analysis to correlate the data to understand the preferences and influences within the social and cultural contexts. It was found and concluded that geographical setting has certainly had influence in the landscape characters and activities of the three types of group community that include the nature setting of Orang Bukit, Orang Sawah and Orang Laut respectively. In addition, this thesis also provides an overview and distinction throughout the approach to be used by municipal administrators in creating and adopting the traditional Malay landscape into their design in future. Hence, from this study, the image and the authenticity of the traditional Malay cultural landscape and their design concept can be expanded and will be referred by all landscape architects who are active in promoting the design of the traditional Malay culture due to the increasing awareness of design and the quality of life.