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2017 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

2. The State, People and the History of Urban Public Space in Singapore

verfasst von : Limin Hee

Erschienen in: Constructing Singapore Public Space

Verlag: Springer Singapore

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Abstract

This chapter provides a historical account of Singapore as the pragmatic model of the “developmental city-state,” detailing trajectories of Singapore’s national and urban development from the colonial era, the post-colonial period of its Independence, into the present. The dominance of the state is characteristic of the Singapore model, with the economic development of the nation deemed as more important than the valorization of individual freedom. The nature of government in Singapore, the influence of its founding father, Lee Kuan Yew and his promotion of neo-Confucian ethics in the forging of national values, and the phenomena of a national middle-class, constitute a particular political and social milieu in which the production of public spaces has taken place over the last few decades. The particular type of beginnings of the state in relation to the provision of public spaces has had a lasting impact on the built environment of Singapore. This chapter outlines the history of public spaces in Singapore, leading up to more contemporary urban developments.

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Vorheriges Kapitel Introduction to Study

Nächstes Kapitel Case Studies

This is a quotation by Lee Kuan Yew from Han, Fernandez and Tan’s book, Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas (1998).

Although Singapore attained self-rule from the British in 1959, the colonial reign was effectively over by the time of the Japanese Occupation.

The largest Chinese dialect group in the late nineteenth century (and now) were the Hokkien who were traditionally involved in trade, shipping, banking and industry. The next largest group, the Teochews, dealt with agricultural production and distribution, as well as the processing of crops such as gambier, pepper, rice and rubber, etc. The Cantonese worked as artisans and laborers. The two smallest groups, the Hakka and the Hainanese were mostly servants, sailors or unskilled laborers. Historical information regarding the occupations of ethnic groups can be obtained from the very comprehensive report of Country Studies: Singapore, Dec 1989.

The smallest community in the late nineteenth century was the Indians, comprising Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians. While the South Indians made a living as shopkeepers, laborers, stevedores, boatmen or bullock cart drivers, the north Indians worked as clerks, traders and merchants. The Malays were not very successful as traders and merchants, losing out to Chinese and European competition, and became shopkeepers, religious teachers, policemen, servants or laborers.

This is a quotation by Lee Kuan Yew from his January 1980 speech at the PAP 25th Anniversary Rally, titled “History is not made the way it is written”. In the speech, he expounded his views on that which has shaped the Singapore entity.

The Maria Hertogh riots occurred over a court decision to send a Dutch girl, adopted by Muslim parents and converted to Islam, to a convent, when her natural parents claimed rights to their child. Eighteen Europeans were killed and many more injured.

These riots occurred when the print media reported the suppression of minority rights of the Malays, which led to suspicion and tension between the Chinese and Malays.

In the Singapore government, the Cabinet, led by the Prime Minister, controls legislative process. Matters of the state are debated in Parliament. The Cabinet is, however, the most powerful body that controls Singapore. Today, Singapore is still under one-party rule although a few opposition members have been elected into Parliament.

Singapore gained self-rule from the British in 1959, but joined the Malayan Federation from 1963–65. The city-state became an independent republic in August 1965, when it became clear that it was no longer tenable to remain as part of the Malayan Federation.

Barr described him as: a socialist (from Cambridge days) who transformed Singapore into a capitalist economy.

There is a good selection in Han, Fernandez and Tan’s Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas (1998). See also Lee Kuan Yew, Prime Minister’s Speeches, Press Conferences, Interviews, Statements, etc. 1959–1980, Singapore: Prime Minister’s Office. Also Lee Kuan Yew, Senior Minister’s Speeches, Press Conferences, Interviews, Statements, etc. 1990, Singapore: Prime Minister’s Office.

Singapore was part of the Malayan Federation from 1963–1965. The reasons for the separation will not be dealt with here, but one of the most fundamental reasons was cultural difference between the Malaysian polity and the Singapore politicians.

“Although the ethnic categories were meaningful in the Singaporean context, each subsumed much more internal variation than was suggested by the term “race”. Chinese included people from mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, as well as Chinese from all the countries of Southeast Asia, including some who spoke Malay or English as their first language. The Malays included not only those from peninsular Malaya, but also immigrants or their descendants from various parts of the Indonesian archipelago, such as Sumatra, the Riau Islands south of Singapore, Java, and Sulawesi. Indians comprised people stemming from anywhere in pre-1947 British India, the present states of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and from Sri Lanka and Burma. Singapore’s Indian “race” thus contained Tamils, Malayalis, Sikhs, Gujaratis, Punjabis, and others from the subcontinent who shared neither physical appearance, language, nor religion”. (Excerpt from “Ethnic Categories” in Country Studies: Singapore 1989.)

Some academics also questioned the restriction of Chinese values to Confucianism and recalled that in the 1950s and early 1960s Chinese was the language of radicalism and revolt rather than of loyalty and conservatism.

Singapore society is considered by Lee as a Chinese society, and he makes little pretense to hide this view.

A National Ideology Committee was established and headed by the younger Lee, which produced the “Shared Values” report in 1991. Drawing from Chinese, Malay and Indian cultural traditions, the national ideology was drafted to counter undesirable traits from the West, namely individualism, self-centeredness, not working hard, and being suspicious of political leaders (and thereby limiting their powers), casual sexual relationships, and single parenthood.

These values are also embedded in the rules for purchasing public housing flats.

Under the Newspapers and Printing Presses Act (NPPA), passed in 1974 and amended in 1986, the government could restrict—without actually banning—the circulation of any publication sold in the country, including foreign periodicals, that it deemed guilty of distorted reporting.

This information can be referenced to the Ministry of Communications and Information ‘Press Release’ page on their website ‘http://www.mci.gov.sg/web/corp/press-room/categories/press-releases/content/circulation-of-foreign-newspapers-in-singapore’.

Singapore is often described as a developmental city-state, in that “it establishes as its principle of legitimacy its ability to promote and sustain development, understanding by development the combination of steady high rates of economic growth and structural change in the productive system, both domestically and in its relationship to the international economy”. In other words, economic growth is prioritized above all else as an indicator of government performance.

This quotation is from Lee Kuan Yew’s address at the Ashahi Shimbun symposium, on May 9 1991. Also cited in Han et al. (1998), p. 372.

The Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry, founded in 1906, was the overarching association that represented the entire Chinese business community. A federation, its constituent units were not individuals or individual businesses, but associations. Its basic structure consisted of representatives of seven regional associations (Fujian, Teochiu, Cantonese, Hakka, Hainan, and “Three Rivers”) and ninety-three trade associations, each one usually restricted to speakers of one dialect.

According to Country Studies: Singapore, these number more than 1000 still, in the late 1970s.

Up till the 1980s in Singapore, many Chinese-run businesses still fell into the traditional occupational groups particular to the different dialect groups. For the proprietors and employees of many small and medium Chinese businesses, it continued to be fruitful to identify with the powerful clans and associations of the dialect and sub-ethnic groups, as the social solidarity proved economically advantageous. This effect has to a certain extent been eroded by the rise of multi-national corporations in Singapore in the 90s, and the powerful government-linked corporations that encompass many industries and businesses in Singapore.

In 1987, then Prime Minister Lee declared Singapore a ‘middle-class society’, based on the criterion that more than 80 % of Singaporeans owned the property they lived in.

This quotation is by then Deputy Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong, in 1998.

The term Goh coined to mark his term of office.

Council members are, however, not elected by members of the new towns.

This quotation is from Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s eulogy for his father, Lee Kuan Yew. Source: http://www.pmo.gov.sg/mediacentre/transcript-eulogy-prime-minister-lee-hsien-loong-funeral-late-mr-lee-kuan-yew-29-march.

This quotation is from a speech by Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan, Chairman of the Remaking Singapore Committee, at the Remaking Singapore Report Presentation and Appreciation Lunch, 12 July 2003. Its report, submitted to Prime Minister Goh in July 2003, proposed recommendations around four themes for renewal and change, viz. A Home for All Singaporeans, A Home Owned, A Home for All Seasons, and A Home to Cherish. 2. Collectively, these recommendations aimed to (i) unleash the creative potential of Singaporeans and attract discerning talent to live and work here; (ii) fine-tune Singapore’s safety nets and engender a more compassionate society; (iii) expand common spaces and strengthen social cohesion; and (iii) create more opportunities for Singaporeans to contribute to the country and strengthen their emotional bonds to Singapore (Apr 2004).

The report outlined two main aims: to establish Singapore as a global arts city and to provide cultural ballast in the ongoing nation building efforts, and was endorsed by the government, to be implemented over five years.

One such example is ‘The Green Corridor’ preservation project, which was successful due to the persuasive efforts of The Nature Society, which put together a proposal for the conservation of a 173.7 ha rail corridor running through the island.

The speech by the Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong was at a Pre-University Students’ Seminar in June 2003, called Singapore@WAP (Singapore at Work and Play).

Members of the group were accused of hatching a plot to sabotage American military interests in Singapore.

The elder Lee made a speech in which he said that he would not hesitate to confront dissenters with knuckle-dusters in a back-alley.

Originally named the Padang Besar, (padang is the Malay word for “playing field”) it is the open green space of the British colonial plan for Singapore, as the maidan (Bengali for “field”) is to Calcutta (now Kolkata).

The Japanese occupied Singapore from 1942–1945.

These included the Maria Hertogh Riots (1950), the anti-British riots and street curfews, the Hock Lee Bus workers riots (1955), the race riots of 1964 (which led to the expulsion of Singapore from the Malayan Federation) and the Chinese students’ rallies of 1965.

Nantah is the shortened name of Nanyang University, the only Chinese university in Singapore, that was widely used in local lingo.

The Garden City concept here is not the notion as proposed by Ebenezer Howard. The term ‘Garden City’ in Singapore was more apt to mean the literal introduction of plants into the city to procure a green mantle and a pleasant environment.

This was a catch phrase of the 1970s.

The first Concept Plan of 1971 envisaged a Ring Plan, where the population was to be housed in satellite towns laid round the island—circumventing a green ‘heart’—that would be connected by high capacity transportation routes, while the city center was to be hollowed out and redeveloped for commercial purposes. This move was to lay the foundation of the physical base for the economic development of Singapore.

The conceptualization and implementation of the planning of Singapore fell under the auspices of the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA), a statutory board initially instituted as the Urban Renewal Department (URD) in 1966, with immense powers in shaping the physical landscape—and until recently, answerable directly only to the government.

The underlining basis of land use had been the concept of regulatory control through zoning, as crystallized in the Master Plan. This remains the basis of the Master Plans of 1965, 1970, 1975, 1980, 1985—right up to 1993, the latest Master Plan. To be read in relation to the Masterplan, the Concept Plan is an advisory and not statutory tool. It embodies the coordinating framework for public agencies and was flexible enough to accommodate changes in population growth trends.

This was said by Lee Kuan Yew in 1980.

This figure is outlined in the URA’s 1991 Concept Plan.

This is one of the principles in the Center for Liveable Cities’ publication on ‘10 Principles for High-dense and Liveable Cities’ (2013).

The National Parks ‘Community in Bloom Project’ is a community gardening movement. There are now close to 1000 community gardens tended by over 20000 residents. See https://www.nparks.gov.sg/gardening/community-in-bloom-initiative.

The Singapore Flyer is an attraction that was marketed to rival urban icons such as the Eiffel Tower and the London Eye. See Singapore Flyer website. http://www.singaporeflyer.com/about-us/design-concepts/.

This was launched in conjunction with URA’s new mission to “Make Singapore a Great City to Live, Work and Play”—an exhibition was held in June to August 2003 on “Our City Center—a Great Place to Live Work and Play!”.

See the National Parks Board’s website on Hong Lim Park. https://www.nparks.gov.sg/gardens-parks-and-nature/parks-and-nature-reserves/hong-lim-park.

These are findings from a funded research project, “Design, Use and Social Significance of Public Space in Public Housing: Singapore and Hong Kong”, National University of Singapore, for which I was the principal investigator.

An extensive Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) system for monitoring road usage went into effect in 1998. The system collects information on an automobile’s travel from smart cards plugged into transmitters in every car and in video surveillance cameras.

These phrases were taken from the transcript of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s speech at Smart Nation launch, Prime Minister’s Office on 24th November 2014.

This was expressed by Vivian Balakrishnan, a Singaporean Minister, at a forum on “Civic Spaces in the Cities of the Asia Pacific” in March 2002.

The URA makes a “Streets for People” how-to guide available for download on their website here: https://www.ura.gov.sg/MS/CarFreeZones/Events/Streets-for-People/~/media/CarFreeZone/Streets_For_People/PDF/Streets_For_People_How-to_Guide.ashx.

PARK(ing) Day is an annual event where people transform parking spaces into temporary public parks. See the URA’s press release: https://www.ura.gov.sg/uol/media-room/news/2014/aug/pr14-47.aspx.

Titel: The State, People and the History of Urban Public Space in Singapore
verfasst von: Limin Hee
Verlag: Springer Singapore
Buch: Constructing Singapore Public Space
Print ISBN: 978-981-10-2385-9

Electronic ISBN: 978-981-10-2387-3

Copyright-Jahr: 2017
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2387-3_2

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