This study focuses on the residential neighbourhoods of Johor Bahru city, the administrative and business centre of the Johor Bahru region and the Malaysian state of Johor. Johor Bahru is a border town, located in the very south of peninsular Malaysia, less than one mile away from Singapore. According to City Population (2018), the Johor Bahru region has a multi-ethnic population of almost 1.4 million, comprised of native ‘Bumiputera’ (52%), Chinese (37.4%), Indian (9.9%) and ‘other’ (0.6%) citizens. Hutchinson and Bhattacharya (2019: 1) describe economic links with Singapore as ‘long standing, far-reaching, spanning trade in goods and services, as well as foreign direct investment (FDI) and movement of people’; both countries are one another's ‘second most important trading partner, in both cases surpassed only by China and outranking traditional commercial allies such as the United States and Japan’.