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