Syuk Bash's Blog

Between Shoes and Walls: Reflecting on Ashihara Yoshinobu’s Last Lecture

What makes a space “inside”? Where does “outside” begin? For Yoshinobu Ashihara, these weren’t just architectural questions, but reflections on how human beings dwell, relate, and interpret space. In his 1979 farewell lecture at the University of Tokyo, The Order of Space: Inside and Outside, Ashihara shifts our attention from walls and ceilings to something more intimate: the threshold.

Farewell, Peninsular: A Climate Fiction Story Set in Malaysia

What if the Malaysian peninsula began to sink—and no one wanted to admit it? Farewell, Peninsular is a climate fiction novel about silence, collapse, and the people who choose to stay behind. Free eBook for first 100 readers.

A City That Keeps Building, Even as the Cradle Grows Quiet

A quiet reflection on Malaysia’s falling birth rate and what it means for the cities we keep building, even as fewer people arrive to live in them.

The Way Malaysian Cities Breathes: A Planner’s Digression

This is the first post on Distant Worlds . Which is another way of saying I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing yet. It’s a bit of a soft...

Understanding Malaysians: Should we take environmental psychology seriously in designing our cities?

Photograph by Edmund Lou The nature of cities has always been discussed in depth by researchers, professionals and philosophers in the...

Townscape conservation through community participation in Japan

Japanese cities are composed of neighbourhoods that combine like organic cells to form urban organisms that are quite different from most...

The Curious Case of Genius Loci: Phenomenology of Cities

Urbanist may be familiar with the term Genius Loci, the "Soul of the Place", a rather poetic term though the concept itself has been one of the most difficult conundrums faced by urban experts worldwide in determining its meaning and practicality.