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Singapore: Disneyland with death penalities

 

Long time ago there is a small city covered in jungle, it is so small to the extent that it will perish without further development. Then the nation started to make adjustments, old buildings torn down, private lands are expropriated to construct for a better future, the entire city becomes a laboratory for modernist ideologies. United Nation are also involved in the planning of the city. The success of its development, this modernist development in an Asian world, shocked the Western world. They cannot believe that an Asian city has achieved all the modernist ideals that once seems impossible to operate. However, this flourish is at a cost of losing identity. Old colonial heritages are not preserved because the ‘makers’ of the city seeks for a complete new start. This ambiguity of identity is also articulated in the diversity of language spoken across the nation. The intelligentsias are upset with this tabula rasa and bulldozing and they hope that the people will align with them in the belief of making a better city. But they are disappointed and their voices were only to be heard by the government long after the development when nothing can really be changed nor reversed. After everything was done, they discovered the problem of overdevelopment. The congestion of the city leads to a fabrication of artificial landscape and tree canopies. Everything is fabricated, even the nature. This city represents the ideological production versus chance and randomness. It forces us to think whether excessive urban planning and the concept of ‘urban renewal’ is the best way for a city to grow out of economic ambition and demographic urgency. This city is Singapore.

Thirty years of tabula rasa: what can we learn from the urban renewal of Singapore?
1. Dystopian. Fumihiko Maki suggests in his ‘Investigation in Collective Form’ that the worse that can happen to urban development is ‘raw renewal’ which ‘displace, destroy, replace’ and that is exactly what happens to Singapore
2. Singapore is a test bed of metabolism which introduced the concept of city corridor and city room (excavation). This concept was articulated in the People’s Park Complex, The Golden Mile Complex which comprises a split of volume and ‘its attendant creation of a monumental interior nave a potent theme of resistance against the banal orthogonality of slabs’.
3. A city sized museum. Singapore is the most impressive repository of realised architectural doctrines of the sixties
4. Singapore’s planning is formless. It emerges from nowhere and can be erased easily
5. Singapore is doomed to remain a Potemkin metropolis. With huge increase in matter, the overall effect is increasingly unreal.
6. The sparkle of its organisation, the glamour of its successful uprooting, the success of its human transformation, the laundering of its past, its manipulation of vernacular cultures present an irresistible model for those facing the task of imagining and building new urban conditions for the even more countless millions


Koolhaas, Rem.; Mau, Bruce. 1998. Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large.  New York, N.Y. : Monacelli Press
 

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