I recent years, Seremban has become increasingly important to Kuala Lumpur, with the distance between the two shrinking as Putrajaya, Cyberjaya and the KLIA link the two locations, and more and more of KL’s workforce finding a home in Negeri Sembilan’s capital and commuting to and from the federal capital every day.
And yet Seremban itself is having a difficult time to be itself a declared a city, despite its rapid urban and suburban growth.
The municipal councils of both Seremban proper and adjacent Nilai are merging and rebranding themselves the Seremban City Council to take on the challenges of being a full-on city, and Seremban probably exceeded the minimum requirement of having at least 500,000 residents a while ago. The soon-to-be city is also safely in the earning bracket for its city council to be generating revenue of RM100 million or more per year. These are all prerequisites to being a city in Malaysia.
But Seremban also suffers from regarding itself as a halfway stop town. For years, those who drop by the city do so mainly because it’s the most developed stopover on the North-South Expressway (PLUS) route up north to KL; as mentioned, many of its residents work and spend most of their time in Kuala Lumpur, only coming back to Seremban to rest and prepare for the next work day. Probably their weekends are also spent elsewhere, in Putrajaya’s expansive gardens or Melaka’s historic tourist sites, if not back in Kuala Lumpur where the shopping malls offer more and are more familiar. Seremban has its charms, but doesn’t seem to be proud of them, or else doesn’t know how to dress them up for its own residents, let alone to outsiders.
The would-be city also suffers from a lack of public security and public transportation. For a town that’s not yet a city, crime in Seremban is already pretty urban, and snatch theft rates are similar to those in KL. For a city to be a home for its growing population, it must engender trust and affection. If people are pining for other locales for not only entertainment and social activities, but also for simple home security and ease of mind, Seremban will have a rough go of it for years to come.
While its population is dwarfed by KL’s, there are already massive traffic jams in Seremban, with the highway runoff being a contributing factor, to be sure, but also because Seremban has a weak public bus system. Becoming a city, and the investments and development that entails, will only make that traffic situation worse if the new city council isn’t putting plans in place to alleviate it now.
That said, Seremban has some upcoming highlights, at least as far as infrastructure is concerned. The setting up of more colleges and university in the city’s environs will temper Seremban’s industrial growth, and will hopefully foster a more sophisticated population with stronger roots to the city. Inti International University, Nilai Polytechnic, the International University of Nursing and the International Islamic University’s medical campus all call Seremban their home, and will likely bring a wave of younger families into the population. New townships will make this transition easier, and Seremban 2 & 3, Bandar Sri Sendayan, Bandar Baru Nilai and Bandar Enstek will be instrumental in not only widening Seremban’s reach, but also to mellow its current utilitarian nature.
Kuala Lumpur, overcrowded as it is, is still expanding, and in time the perceived distance between KL and Seremban will be as short as the one dividing downtown KL and Petaling Jaya now. Soon enough KL and Seremban will just be neighbourhoods in a much larger metropolis, so Seremban’s growth as city – and how it tackles its challenges – will affect all of us. It’s just a matter of building the best possible neighbourhood for everyone.
Photo: Brett Wilms / Flickr
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