Melaka trip report: Little Dubai in the Strait of Malacca

Melaka in Malaysia is a historic port city that was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in July 2008. This is the Melaka that most visitors are familiar with, but beyond the old town, there are big plans that look more like something out of Dubai.

The first time I visited Melaka was before it became a UNESCO city. The last time I visited, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) hadn’t begun. Melaka has since become a key city in the BRI vision, so it was time to visit on behalf of Future Southeast Asai.

I visited Melaka in July 2023, and while I was there I visited some of the biggest projects that are planned or underway. This includes the controversial land reclamation area, a 9-tower project connected by a skybridge, and a proposed 88-storey tower.

Melaka Old Town

I gave myself a day to wander around the old town area before throwing myself into the hot and dusty work of wandering around the new urban areas.

The old town of Melaka was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site with Georgetown, Penang. It seems like an odd decision to have put both cities on the same UNESCO ticket, but there is so much in common that they lumped them together.

Melaka has a much smaller heritage area than Georgetown, though there was more to see than I remembered. The main road of the heritage area is Jonker Street, and the streets around here form the core of the heritage area.

Big podiums beefing up the skyline

While Jonker St and the surrounding heritage streets still looked the same, there are now tall apartment towers that were visible from the old town. I used these landmarks as targets to walk to. The tallest building in Melaka (153 m) is The Shore hotel and mall complex. This was the first big tower I visited in Melaka, and like every other apartment complex in Malaysia, it comes with a big car park podium. There is no thought of making the ground level architecturally interesting, and I there didn’t appear to be a grand entrance for pedestrians. It was a bleak site to see this giant car park in front of another giant car park.

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