Observation and Analysis~

after going to malacca and experiencing the place first hand, I have realized many things...or I would call them as ''issues'' that was going on. One of the main issues I realized was when I was walking around the building, the front looks okay, well maintained but when you go to the back, its horrible. You can see clearly that the material of the building at the back is not well maintained and theres defects in the material. It is sad to see that only the facade of the building that generates income and interests are maintained but the back of the building where less people will actually go to visit and pay attention to are neglected. 

Front view

Neglected areas

Another issue I realized that there were too many visitors!!! There were no laws or rules and regulations to actually put a limit on how many visitor can enter  and visit the building. It is actually a disaster because when there are too much human contact with the heritage building, there will be the deterioration of the heritage building's materials, no matter of original material or after conservation. Plus, too much human contact and human traffic will cause soil degradation of the site caused by its improper use of human activities.  Vandalism also occured due to too much human contact and lack of education on the importance of our heritage buildings.

I also noticed that the local customs and cultures are destroyed as the government tries to bring in things to suit foreign visitors. When the local culture of a place is not properly conserved, it affects the heritage building as well as the building itself serves a purpose in the olden days and from there it get its own significance. In addition, dutch square is a really popular place in malacca and it tends to attract many small scale vendors to the site where they set up their stalls right next to the heritage buildings.

These small vendors may seems to bring more visitors to the site but actually it is disturbing the heritage buildings. This not only causes the lost of respect to the building, it also causes the lost of the building's significance and important. Degradation of the site's quality also happens because these stalls causes the change of attraction and attention of the visitors from heritage buildings to stalls. Therefor visitors wont be able to appreciate the heritage building fully. Also through these stalls i realized that the community here are very economic dependant and costs of living here is increasing.The land value  also increases rapidly, no wonder there are empty houses as the poor ones are driven out. 

All these issues are to be analyzed deeper, but what can I say is when the foundation of the heritage site and heritage building are not strong enough, eventually the site will slowly degrades, causing the income in heritage tourism will reduce gradually.