Jalan Dhoby, Johor Baru. An NGO founded in 2024 called Kelab Bandar Kita Johor Bahru, known as Bando Kita, has been running monthly cultural programming in the old city centre. Street music. Puppet theatre. Film festivals.
A recent puppet theatre performance on Jalan Dato Onn pulled around 200 people.
Two hundred isn't a lot. It's also, if you know Johor Baru's city centre after dark, quite a lot.
1. The line worth keeping
Ghazali Bunari is 58, an artist, and a senior lecturer at UTM. He said this:
"A city needs spirit. It cannot just be about development. A city must have activities."
And then the part that's actually the diagnosis: "We have the heritage, we have the history, and we have creative people, but we need to connect all these things."
That's not a complaint about a lack of resources. It's a complaint about a lack of connective tissue, which is a much more solvable problem and a much more annoying one.
2. Why Johor Baru specifically
JB has spent twenty years being defined by what's across the causeway. It's the place people commute out of. The city centre emptied as development pushed north and west toward Iskandar Puteri, Bukit Indah, Mount Austin.
What's left in the old centre is the actual city: Jalan Dhoby, Jalan Tan Hiok Nee, the shophouses, the heritage that every masterplan promises to activate and mostly doesn't.
An NGO doing puppet theatre once a month is not a masterplan. It's just people showing up. Which, historically, is the thing that actually works.
3. Who's involved
Sekolah Seni Malaysia Johor. UTM. The Johor Baru City Council. And the students, which is the bit that matters most.
Nur Dayana Zafira Mohd Faizol is 13, in Form One, from Skudai, and was doing mask-making. Imran Hailmy Mustafakamal is 15, Form Three, in the theatre programme.
A 13-year-old from Skudai making masks in the old city centre is worth more to JB's cultural future than most line items with a budget attached.
4. The state's position
P. Pannir Selvam, the state unity, heritage and culture committee chairman, made the standard point that urban development should preserve identity, history, culture and heritage.
Everyone says this. The test is whether it survives contact with a development order.
JB is under enormous property pressure right now, with the Johor-Singapore Special Economic Zone and the RTS Link changing what land in that city is worth. Heritage shophouses in a district that's about to get very well connected are exactly the assets that get preserved in speeches and demolished in practice.
5. What "activation" usually means, and why this is different
The standard version is a council builds a plaza, brands it a creative district, holds a launch event with a minister, and then nothing happens on the 51 other weekends.
Bando Kita is doing the opposite. Monthly, small, repeated, run by people who live there. It's cheaper, it's less photogenic, and it's the only model that's ever produced a functioning cultural district anywhere.
6. What to watch
Whether Bando Kita is still doing this in 2028. Volunteer-run monthly programming has a brutal attrition rate, usually around the two-year mark when the founders get tired.
If it survives that, JB gets something real. Watch also whether MBJB moves from attending to funding, because the difference between a council that turns up and a council that pays is the difference between a nice story and an institution.
Two hundred people at a puppet show. Start there.
Source: Cultural push reclaims heart of Johor Baru, The Star, 20 August 2026, by Mohd Farhaan Shah.