Urban renewal in Asia-Pacific: A comparative analysis of brainports for Sydney and Kuala Lumpur

This paper reviews the concept of brainports and application to a South-East Asian context. The “brainport” concept is relevant for analysing transformation of an existing physical and information infrastructure, but a key finding of the research project is that brainports can act as a key component of a new and emerging global creative infrastructure with features and capabilities that help to facilitate the global mobility of human talent. We explore the brainport concept and apply it to two specific cities in the South-East Asian region that have different approaches to urban renewal — Sydney, Australia where an existing shipping port is undergoing transformation into a different brainport, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, presenting a region not associated with a shipping port – the “Multimedia Super Corridor” (MSC) – as an intelligent city or brainport. The authors' comparative analysis sets up the attributes and a framework by which to review other cities in South East Asia or globally as brainports. The project adopted the “bricolage” research method, which includes interviews with domain experts, government officials of both cities and creative talent, providing a rich description for the attributes under investigation, as well as workshops with key stakeholders and a selection of a montage of photographs from a pool of photography and video footage.