Paper short abstract:

This paper explores processes of social appropriation of space in the city of Malacca (West Malaysia). I analyse how the Malacca Portuguese appropriate and practice their city and its' multilayered colonial built forms.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores processes of social appropriation of space in the city of Malacca (West Malaysia). Using a methodologiacal combination of historical and ethnographically based research, we analyse how the Malacca Portuguese, (a group of Eurasians of Portuguese Origin, living in contemporary Malacca) percieve, appropriate and practice their city and its' multilayered colonial built forms.

Malacca has been represented in academic writting as one example of a global colonial citie during its successive colonial take-overs by European Powers (the Portuguese, Dutch and British, respectively).

Within these spatial matrix, the social and cultural contexts have enabled the development of creole groups, namely the Malacca Portuguese Eurasians, a group of residents that built their social identity around an imagined/real ancestry of descendants of the Portuguese. Based upon their oral narratives and on observation of their daily spatial practices in and around Malacca, We will discuss how the spatial matrix of Malacca ins integrated into their own group stories and their perceptions of how the local and the global intersect in their people's narrative of collective memory.