Five foot ways (Malay/Indonesian: Kaki lima) are paved pedestrian walkways, 5 feet (1.524 metres) in width, projecting from the ground floor of a building into the road. This feature can be found in many shophouses (and buildings of similar structural design) all over the world, and also in some office buildings.
The examples of five foot pedestrian walkways can be found dated from colonial Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. Such as those walkways along Old Batavia in Jakarta, Braga Street in Bandung, Georgetown in Penang and Shenton Way in Singapore. In Indonesia, the term kaki lima has become synonymous with street food, since in the country numbers of warung humble tent shops or gerobak food carts often occupying this five-foot wide pedestrian sidewalks.
Video Five foot way
Description
The term five-foot describes the width of the sidewalks projected from the wall of the building into the street. The overhanging canopy, roof extension, or projected upper floor on top of the five foot pathways can provide a cover to shield pedestrians from the sun and rain. As the ground floor of most commercial buildings in downtown areas are shops or eating places, the five foot ways can also function as a corridor for people to window-shop or stop by for some refreshments.
As implied by name, five foot ways were intended to assume a consistent width of five feet from the absolute front to the wall and entrance defining the frontal of the inner space, but the guideline is not necessarily applied universally, as certain five foot ways are wider or narrower depending on the age, size, and function of the building.
Maps Five foot way
History
The five-foot way may have been inspired by the presence of verandahs, footways and continuous eaves in Batavia dating to the Dutch colonial period that were observed by Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles where he lived in 1811-1815 as a governor during the British Java period. Sidewalks along the main streets of Batavia of 1 foot high and about 5 feet wide may have been built at the time of Raffles.
However, it was in Singapore that the five foot way became firmly established as an architectural feature of the region, when the Stamford Raffles included this and other details in his Town Plan of 1822. Raffles stipulated that the buildings in the newly established colony should be uniform, and should be built of brick and tiles to reduce fire risks. He added that:
... a still further accommodation will be afforded to the public by requiring that each house should have a verandah of certain depth, open at all times as a continued and covered passage on each side of the street.
This would become the five foot way, and this feature of shophouses in Singapore was observable by the 1840s from the drawing of Singapore John Turnbull Thomson. Ordinances and by-laws requiring such verandah walkways were then enacted from the mid-19th and early 20th century in the Strait settlements; however, the term "five foot way" was not specifically mentioned in such ordinances and by-laws, rather words as arcade, verandah or verandah-way or as five-foot-path were used. The term may have been coined by builders in response to the minimum width of the walkway. The walkway would become an integral feature of many settlements in neighbouring British colonies in the Malaya peninsula, and by the later half of the 19th century formed the distinctive "Strait Settlement Style" of buildings. It remains a prominent element in modern architecture in Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei. Although it was planned as a public walkway, the five foot way would also become a place for hawkers to trade, and it was used as retail, storage, and even living spaces. Attempts in Singapore to clear the walkways of hawkers who were obstructing the walkway in the 1880s led to the so-called "Verandah Riots".
This architectural feature also spread to other South East Asian countries, such as Thailand, the Philippines, and Burma after the mid-19th century. Such feature may have been introduced to Bangkok after the visit of Rama V to Singapore in 1871, while towns in southern Thailand were influenced by their proximity to Malaya. They also appeared in Hong Kong, Taiwan and other cities and market towns in South China in the early twentieth century in the form of qilou.
Terminology
The Indonesian term kaki lima is interchangeable with trotoar (from French via Dutch: trottoir), as both refer to pedestrian pathways or sidewalks. In Indonesian colloquial term pedagang kaki lima refers to street hawker that often occupy the pedestrian or walkways along the busy street. The kaki lima in Indonesia historically offered a potpourri of goods such as shirts, socks, blouses, pots and pans. Nowadays, sidewalks are still often occupied by small eateries and stands.
The Malay term for "five foot way", kaki lima (literally "five foot"), is also used generally to refer to corridors or verandas, regardless of their width.
See also
- Verandah
- Portico
External links
- The Five Foot Way of Georgetown Penang
- The 5 feet story of Thomas Stamford Raffles
References
Source of article : Wikipedia
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