How bad urban design set Cyberjaya up for failure

Cyberjaya is a city in Selangor state, about halfway between Kuala Lumpur and Kuala Lumpur International Airport. This is a great place to build a new city. A real estate agent would put “strategic location” in their sales blurb, and on paper it is.

Unfortunately Malaysia is bad at building new cities, and Cyberjaya is a fumbled opportunity to make a great city. There have been plenty of articles written about how Cyberjaya is Malaysia’s ‘failed Silicon Valley’. What they don’t talk about is how the bad urban design of Cyberjaya set it up for failure.

Why Cyber?
As the name would suggest, Cyberjaya is a new city that was built with the intention of being a technology and multimedia hub. The vision was to become the Silicon Valley of Malaysia.

Cyberjaya was officially opened on 17 May 1997 by Prime Minister, Mahathir bin Mohamad, and it was built alongside Malaysia’s new government seat of Putrajaya.

The “cyber” name hints at its 1990s origin, when anything that was technologically futuristic had cyber in its name. From the early internet cafes that were called cybercafes, to the cybernetic organism in Terminator 2.

As a fan of the cyberpunk genre, I was also intrigued by the name of Cyberjaya. I have spent enough time in Malaysia though to know to not expect a Blade Runner-esque city.

The Putrajaya Line
I had never visited Cyberjaya because it was difficult to get to by public transport from KL. That changed in 2023 with the opening of the extension of the Putrajaya Line to Putrajaya Sentral.

The Putrajaya Line includes two stops in Cyberjaya. I figured that I would get off at the first stop, walk around, and then get on at the second stop.