THE DEAD, PLACE SPACE, AND SOCIAL ACTIVISM - CONSTRUCTING THE NATIONSCAPE IN HISTORIC MELAKA/

In Malaysia under state-led economic restructuring, government interve ntions in cultural heritage landscapes reflect divergent priorities be tween local place-based conservation interests and forces of political and economic restructuring at broader spatial scales. I examine a maj or land-use conflict, between economic development interests and a gra ss-roots preservation movement with links to the national opposition p arty, to assess how preservation activists mobilised place-based const ructions of cultural identity and representations of state nationalism to halt development plans for a historic landscape. These issues are examined by negotiating the relationship between locally based culture s of place, and political and economic forces seeking to appropriate s pace, in a piece of historic land in Melaka, Malaysia. I work through two lines of approach. The theoretical framework applies Lefebvre's wo rk on spatial processes and spatial categories to conceptualise the si gnificance of the historic landscape, and utilises Merrifield's readin g of Lefebvre to write between the place-space dualism. A social const ruction approach is adopted to demonstrate how people actively create meaning about place in space, and work out the dialectic of preservati onist intervention between local and state-level land-use goals. The s ocial construction approach shows how cultural identity may be place b ased, and therefore the basis of a powerful localised social movement. Through the movement generated by this debate, a monumental tradition al Chinese burial ground became local park and 'nationscape': a site-s pecific distillation of half a millenium of Malaysian history.