Urban Development
The city/island of Singapore provides
good examples of the issues of producing the built environment, mixed use development,
and the production of public space. (The
majority of this post is taken from a case study I did last year – Spring 2014).
Singapore (Danes)
The city-state of Singapore is an
island located at the southern tip of Malaysia.
Its limited size and large population makes it one of the most densely
populated metropolitan cities in the world.
Singapore attempts to mitigate the intense urbanization through an image
of greenness and cleanliness and promotes itself as a model sustainable city with
the development of several ‘green’ initiatives and expertise in sustainable
urban planning. It is a world shipping
port and has established itself as an international headquarters for
manufacturing and services. It is also
seeking to become a world financial hub and is developing the arts to become a
world-class global city.
Economics
and the development process
The settlement was originally
based on European planning principles that emphasized merchant trade and
segregated the different ethnic groups into separate areas. The British colonial method of town planning
with corridors, straight-line avenues, and grids, as well as a focus on landscaped
open spaces to segregate the British colonists from the rest of the population,
was
imposed on the foreign landscape without regard for the natural
or cultural land use. This urban structure still exists today (Pomeroy, 2011, p.
382), (Limin, 2003, p. 81).
1822
Master Plan (Pearson,
1969)
With limited natural resources, Singapore’s greatest asset was
its cheap, abundant labor force so, shortly after independence, the new government
began an urban renewal strategy based
on economic development. Industrial estates were planned to
attract foreign manufacturers and
often required the removal of the current occupants of these sites through slum clearing (Bernick, p.332).
Top-down leadership made it
possible for these renewal and redevelopment projects to be carried out quickly.
Post-war Singapore slums (bruclass.com)
Mixed
use destruction, nostalgic propaganda, and conservation
The first urban renewal of the city in the 1960’s was a move to create a clean, orderly, sanitized environment through mass slum
clearing and the relocation of most of the
local population from the center of the city
to
high density, Corbusian
style high rise apartment
blocks at the fringe. The traditional 2 -
3 story shophouses were replaced with the tower and podium model and, after this forced suburbanization, the city center became the domain of international
banks, hotels, and shopping centers and was later repopulated by transient foreign workers (Pomeroy, p.
383), (Yeoh, 2005, p. 948).
The city’s second
morphology occurred in the mid 1980’s
when the state realized that a significant part of the urban heritage
and culture had been
removed from the city during the previous renewal process and the
resulting social
disconnect. Imitation reconstruction of historical streets and
public spaces was an ineffective effort to build
a tourist economy and prompted a
conservation movement to protect the older urban
fabric of historical districts such as Chinatown, Little
India and Kampong Glam (Malay quarter). The conservation movement
included the renovation of the shop houses
for reuse for a variety of small
businesses, socializing venues, and housing (Pomeroy, p.
384).
A lively street - shop houses and street
market (Google Earth)
Little India
(iConnect.org)
Chinatown (iConnect.org) CBD
(Wikipedia.org)
Kampong Glam (iConnect.org)
District conservation and revitalization
‘New Town’ housing estates were developed to provide
housing for the residents being relocated from the
industrial estate sites, as well as
the congested city
center, to the outer edges of the city. The model of mass high-rise housing
was adopted from Europe as the solution to carry out this
major population shift. The
traditional houses had provided space such as a five-foot way or veranda for socializing, outdoor living,
and business spillover, creating
a lively streetscape,
but the towers separated
people from the ground and
these activities (Limin, p.89). Each new stage of new town development sought to create better, more complete communities. Later stages integrated housing, education, shopping, and recreation into more compact
and pedestrian friendly mixed use estates
served by a light
rail
node within walking distance. (Limin, p.95).
HDB Flats - high rise housing (Tan, 2014)
Public space and privatization
With
the ever increasing population density, it is increasingly
difficult to increase or maintain
the desired amount of public
green space.
Rooftop gardens, vertical green walls,
and sky terraces create a ‘vertical
garden city’
and add to the greenery
space but not all of these spaces are available to the public
(Tan, p. 29). Public spaces, an important part of Singapore’s image, vary
from being publicly owned and very accessible and user friendly for everyone to being privately owned and exclusive to
those who can afford to use and
shop on the premises.
Mini plaza behind
a mosque with places to sit and
linger or meditate. (Google
Earth)
Expensive shopping district
may make this space exclusive to some. (Google Earth)
References:
Bernick, M., & Cervero, R.
(1997). Transit Villages in the 21st Century. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Limin, H., & Giok Lin, O.
(2003). The politics of public
space planning in Singapore. Planning
Perspectives, 18(1), 79.
Pearson, H. F. (1969).
Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic
Society. Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. Retrieved
from http://www.jstor.org
Pomeroy, J. (2011). Defining Singapore Public Space: From Sanitization to Corporatization. Journal
Of Urban Design, 16(3), 381-396. doi:10.1080/13574809.2011.571164
Tan, P., Wang, J., & Sia, A. (2013). Perspectives on �ive decades of the urban greening of Singapore. Cities, 3224-32. doi:10.1016/j.cities.2013.02.001
Yeoh, B. A. (2005). The global
cultural city? Spatial imagineering and politics in the (multi)cultural marketplaces
of South-east Asia. Urban Studies (Routledge), 42(5/6),
945-958. doi:10.1080/00420980500107201
