This book argues that a LPE framework can provide powerful insights into the ways in which particular landscapes can be seen as crucial sites in generating local resistance to processes of urbanization. Rather than viewing landscape as a passive arena for urbanization, I engage with landscape theory in order to demonstrate how landscapes actively shape and are shaped by the processes of urbanization. The term ‘landscape’ has been used in cultural geography to refer to the appearance or physical characteristics of a certain place, with particular reference to the social, cultural and political processes that shape it (Cosgrove and Daniels, 1988; Mitchell, 1996).

Controversies over the form and function of the urban landscape are important to study from a political ecology perspective because they reflect uncertainties regarding the costs of particular instances of socio-natural transformation on the built environment and are frequent symptoms of rapidly developing urban regions (Walker and Fortmann, 2003: 469). Indeed, Mitchell (2007: 316) has suggested that the central motivation in conflicts over the form of urban landscapes is to increase the ‘exchangeability’ of the urban landscape in a global economy marked by increasing competition for ‘footloose’ capital. The significance of landscape is therefore bound up with its function, which is a marker of social identity, a generator of profit or a space of everyday life (Matless, 1998: 12; Mitchell, 2008). Focusing on the contested transformation of landscapes, then, provides an analytical lens through which to understand how and by whom (and at the expense of whom) landscapes are positioned as sites of consumption and investment (Gezon, 2006: 11).

While Brenda Yeoh (1996) has asserted that most urban landscapes can be investigated as terrains of quotidian conflict and negotiation, she maintains that this is particularly true of colonial cities given the divergence in perceptions of the urban environment. For instance, Penang's colonial heritage, rich natural environment and situation within the modern Malaysian nation state, has created a society with divergent cultural and economic interests, and environmental subjectivities, which have resulted in the controversies analysed in this book (Harris, 2017: 90). The transformation of urban landscapes are therefore important to study from a landscape perspective, as it can bring to light the normative values and ideologies associated with the (re)production of particular urban forms.