Radit Mahindro

✦ Kuala Lumpur was named a UNESCO Creative City of Design in October 2025, recognising years of heritage conservation, adaptive reuse and public-space development. ✦ Hotels such as Else and The RuMa show how areas like Chinatown and the Golden Triangle are converting historic buildings and heritage into design-led stays. ✦ REXKL, a 1947 cinema turned community and culture hub, and ChoCha Foodstore, in a former 1960s hotel, anchor a wider adaptive-reuse movement across the city’s food and retail scene. ✦ Warisan KL, the national heritage initiative launched by the Malaysian government in April 2025, is also restoring landmarks, alongside grassroots projects like Kebun Kebun Bangsar and the UR-MU museums that are reshaping how the city uses its public and cultural space.

Beaches. Rice terraces. A gentle, docile beauty. For over a century, this is the Bali that has been seen through a lens crafted largely by outsiders – a romanticised version born from early 20th-century colonial ethnography and spread through canny tourism marketing.