Jefferi Chang
KOTA KINABALU (Sept 20): The Kota Kinabalu City Hall (DBKK) has again approved – without informing and consulting the public – a landscape upgrade project of the Atkinson Memorial Clock Tower site.
drawings of the landscape upgrade project of the Atkinson Memorial Clock Tower site.
There is not much information and details offered by DBKK and the State government about this project apart from the recently erected construction board at the site with concept-design drawings.
Jefferi Chang, co-founder of the Heritage Sabah Society and co-plaintiff of the 2011 Atkinson Clock Tower Development judicial review cases, noted that even when there have been consultations with the public about development projects in the city, the so-called consultations are aimed at merely answering public queries (regardless of how incredulous the answers are), without really allowing for a proper debate. Even though this current project is only a landscape upgrade project of the site, there are still lots of questions about this project that demand detailed explanations.
“Why, for example, did the government choose to keep quiet about this upgrade project? The previous project was a huge controversy and a judicial review was filed against the previous development plan.
“DBKK and the state government should have learned from the experience not to disregard public
voices and the need for obtaining public input when approving projects where it involves open spaces, buildings and monuments. In fact, if anything, DBKK and the Sabah state government should fast-track the gazettement of the KK master-plan that has been stalled now for years on end,” Jefferi pointed out in a statement on Monday.
He said the public should have the right to be directly consulted on the decision and direction of the development for this site by DBKK and not solely by the project developer who often disregard and have only secondary or little appreciation for the natural surroundings in their design.
“What happened to the remaining land owned by the Housing & Urban Development Board (LPPB)? The previous project involving the Atkinson Tower was a joint-venture project between LPPB and a private developer which was canceled.
KK professionals and the public did not favour this project because the high-rise buildings could be an eyesore to the heritage clock tower and the construction would cause a huge risk of collapse to the old clock tower with such extreme change and modification to the hill slope stability.
“Since then, there have been a few more development plans proposed for the site. The past BN and Warisan state governments have not made any decision on the site until now,” he added.
In 2010, the DBKK suddenly approved a plan to build a 16-storey commercial building next to the historical
clock tower without any public consultation.
This caused an outcry that brought many different quarters to join forces to save the clock tower from being overwhelmed by the proposed high-rise building which was expected to severely diminish the intrinsic natural surroundings that had existed for more than 100 years.
Jefferi also said civil society groups have all along proposed to the government to let go of the high-density building development concept and turn the whole site into a low-density park and recreation development project, which would cost less and would do more to allow the public to linger and experience the forest next to the city.
He said the current landscape upgrade project is not as big and ambitious as the previous plan which both enclosed and included the clock tower as part of the building design but the public is still concerned about the concept drawing that looks stone cold with its concrete wall and lack of trees, which would presumably add to the hot spots in a city that has already been cited in a World Bank report as an example of an excessive rural-urban-temperature-rise-increase in recent times.
“It should be remembered – and the public needs to constantly remind the local authorities – that Kota Kinabalu was launched in 2000 as a city with the tagline ‘Tropical Rainforest City.’
Signal Hill Range is among the few remaining green pockets for Kota Kinabalu City that is well known by the international tourists and the Atkinson Memorial Clock Tower is among the best top Instagram spots in the world. It is important for DBKK to preserve as much as the city’s tree cover and avoid uprooting more trees and replacing them with high-rise buildings and concrete paths that serve to obscure the beauty of the natural surroundings.
“One would think that with the recurring flash floods in Kota Kinabalu – something that commentators on the aforementioned World Bank report had also predicted – local authorities in Sabah would have sought to allay public fears about development projects in the city through proper consultations,” he said.