WHILE WE NEED social interactions in our daily lives to feel a sense of belonging, there are also some moments where we need space for thinking and reading. As a city grows, a wider variety of spaces also bloom to fulfil people’s various needs.
In this article, we walk you through some of the emerging spaces in Penang and explore the meanings behind them.
Recent Practices
From being an entrepot where immigrants gathered to earn a living, George Town gradually developed its own unique way to allow for different lifestyles. From residential areas to eateries, the division of space not only reminds us of the complexities of surviving in the city but also of how social lives and identities have been formed. For instance, a familiar sharing by our elders would be how they used to squeeze an entire family into a shophouse – sometimes even more than one family. Even today, it is not too uncommon for “kopitiams” (coffee shops) to house more than one family.
