The Coliseum Theatre, Kuala Lumpur: A Site for Collective Engagement, A Space of Urban Imagination

AbstractCompleted in 1920, the Coliseum Theatre holds the distinction of being the longest-running cinema in Malaysia. Located on a main thoroughfare in downtown Kuala Lumpur, it sits strategically on the territorial boundaries of the Indian Muslim textile trade, Chinese retail shops, and neighbourhood mosques. Throughout its near-centennial existence, the striking neoclassical building and its compound have continuously served as a social hub for British officers who patronised its eponymous cafe during the colonial era, the street vendors that occupied its square in the mid-twentieth century, an active migrant community of cinema-goers and, more recently, as a space of gathering for local supporters when the cinema came under threat of compulsory purchase by the federal government. The Coliseum’s urban and social history discloses its capacity to perform as a site showcasing a politics of accommodation behind this facade of modernist consumption. At the same time, visual spatial analysis demonstrates ho...