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CELEBRATING OUR URBAN HERITAGE
Strengthening Urban Heritage In Singapore:
building
Economic Competitiveness and civic Identity
Belinda Yuen
1. Introduction
There is much in the research literature to suggest that urban neighborhoods are a key domain for the transmission of
shared values and norms. Such environments offer a wide range of
familiar and historical landmarks that may be important in
creating and sustaining a strong sense of belonging and
attachment to urban life. In a rapidly urbanizing and
globalizing world, these familiar landscapes hold opportunities
for valuing community and enhancing the city’s cultural heritage
and unique competitive edge.
A number of European cities have used cultural heritage as a strategy
to improve their future prospects. One of the key challenges of global urban
development is to preserve structures and
sites that promote identity and continuity of
place. Preserving the cultural landscape can help generate civic pride and foster a sense of
empowerment. From a social
dimension, cultural heritage is about society’s
capacity for self-reflection. From an economic perspective, heritage conservation
offers opportunities for cultural tourism, which is among
the fastest growing segments in the international tourism market and a motor
for economic development.
According to the Travel Industry Association of America,
visitors to historic and cultural-attraction sites spend more
and stay longer than the other types of US travelers; they spend
US $631 and 4.7 nights away from home per trip compared to the
average US traveler’s spending of US $457 and 3.4 nights.
Several cities have begun to invest in place-identity and
heritage tourism. Philadelphia, for example, is investing US $12
million in private and public funds to make heritage tourism a
lynchpin in its economic development strategy. Many cities in
Europe have also started to include heritage
resources on their urban regeneration agendas.
The aim of this article is to explore the notion of cultural
heritage from the perspective of Singapore. As a city-state with
the goal of becoming a world-class city, Singapore has
increasingly included conservation of its urban fabric as an important part of its strategic planning. In the most recent 2001
review of its long-term Concept Plan, a new focus on place-identity is introduced, with the focus on developing Singapore into ‘a
dynamic, distinctive, and delightful city’. Its search is for
identity in familiar places as manifested in the diversity of
the city-state’s multi-ethnic people and cultures. The task of
achieving this objective is not restricted to planners but presented as an
opportunity to engage a wide range of stakeholders in
communities. The public is invited to share and discuss ideas
and possibilities of how cultural heritage assets in their
neighborhoods can be enhanced and retained. Empirically, this
community planning process offers enormous opportunities to take
stock and reveal the heritage assets in neighborhoods that
define the collective memory, or in the words of local poet Koh
Buck Song ‘are gifts to a lived memory’. It is the local milieu
which is fundamental in people's everyday lives. Singapore's neighborhoods are vital in offering new bases for city ‘branding’ and
place-identity in the global urban world. From a theoretical
perspective, Singapore’s community engagement emphasizes
heritage issues as part of the public agenda and integrates
participatory conservation programs within the planning process,
adding empirical substance to the broader theoretical discourse
on how public policy helps shape landscapes and their meanings.
This article is structured in three broad parts. The first
section provides a contextual overview of the purpose and
development agenda of urban conservation in Singapore. The
second section is a detailed examination of the Singapore
development plan, the myriad of heritage attractions and
resources in its neighborhoods, and public attitudes towards
those assets. It also discusses the potential of anchoring such
cultural landscapes in the heritage inventory, and the
challenges to date. The final section summarizes the main
contributions to reinforcing and pursuing the sense of place-identity and heritage conservation in urban development.
2 .
Committing to urban conservation
Many rapidly
modernizing cities are unwittingly demolishing their heritage
resources and character to nourish modern development, in the
misguided belief that urban development and heritage conservation are
incompatible. This need not be the case, as Singapore’s urban
redevelopment illustrates. Modern Singapore started its history
as a British colonial trading port in 1819. Growth of the port
and liberal colonial immigration policies soon attracted traders
and migrant laborers from China, India, and neighboring countries,
and encouraged the settlement and development of multi-ethnic
neighborhoods (Chinese, Malay, Indian, Arab, European), several
of which remained after decolonization and independence in 1965. Rising
prosperity during those years saw the construction of many
buildings for government, commerce, and housing, from
bungalows to the ubiquitous Chinese-style rows of “shop houses”
that combine workplaces, retail stores, and residences in single
small structures.
Since its political independence,
Singapore has thrived as a multi-racial, multi-religious,
multi-cultural, and multi-lingual society comprised of three
major ethnic groups: Chinese (79%), Malay (14%), and Indian
(6%), along with a residual category of ‘others’ (mainly
Europeans and Eurasians). As a nation, Singapore has rapidly grown from a developing to a newly industrializing country, transforming itself from an old colonial port to a modern city-state. Its present goal is to become a world-class city. As with many other rapidly urbanizing post-colonial cities, Singapore has demolished many of its historic
buildings to make way for new modern skyscrapers. Its oldest boys’ school, Raffles Institution
(built in 1837-41), for example, was bulldozed and on its site
now stands Singapore’s tallest hotel and mega-shopping
mall, Raffles City (1986). Other traditional
buildings such as the Chinese-style two- to three-story “shop houses” in Chinatown were similarly demolished to accommodate high-rise residential towers to house a growing population. Urban conservation was not explicitly emphasized as redevelopment took precedence. Making a point about the overriding demands of degraded built infrastructure, poverty reduction, and unemployment, the chairman of Singapore's National Heritage Board
recounts the priorities:
There was simply no time to rearrange the
furniture in the sitting room while pressing matters have to be
attended to in the kitchen. Indeed on quite a number of
occasions there were fires in the kitchen that had to be put out
promptly. In the 1960s and 1970s it was not surprising that
conservation did not feature highly, if at all, in our national
agenda (quoted in Roots, A Newsletter of the Singapore
Heritage Society, 1994, p2).
However, on entering a period of rising economic globalization, there are increased efforts to reinforce and integrate past heritage with present developments in Singapore. As with many other cities, the influences of globalization have fostered the rise of heritage conservation as a growing need to preserve the past, both for continued economic growth and for strengthening national cultural identity. According to a Foreign Policy
magazine survey of countries in 2000, Singapore is the world’s
most global country. This fact has prompted the government to
emphasize urban heritage to promote a sense of national
identity. As early as 1988, Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister C.
T. Goh made this point:
We are part of a long Asian civilization and
we should be proud of it…We should be a nation that is uniquely
multiracial and Asian, with each community proud of its
traditional culture and heritage.
There is greater appreciation that the buildings and traditions of Singapore’s multi-ethnic communities add to the visibility of its cultural roots and territorial identity. As the Urban Redevelopment
Authority (URA) stated in 1994, the built heritage represents ‘our history, captured in brick, plaster, wood, and stone…to lose these architectural assets would be to erase a living
chapter in our history’. History and territorial identity are
important for establishing “place specialization” in a rapidly
urbanizing and globalizing city. The URA recently argued that:
…we need to create a sense of place, to enable
collective memories and vibrant communities to thrive, to tug at
the heartstrings of our traveling companions. These days, more
than 200,000 Singaporeans work overseas. And many more travel
frequently…
In the postmodern era, leading urban policies are
now pronouncing that heritage and identity can play an important
role in Singapore’s efforts to construct a modern city, while
still preserving ‘the distinctive Asian identity in Singapore’. More
and more urban researchers worldwide are arguing that culture is
the business of cities — the basis of their competitive
advantage. Sir Peter Hall, in a recent analysis of the cultural
economy of cities has described ‘culture…as the magic substitute
for all the lost factories and warehouses, and as a device that
will create a new urban image’. Besides strengthening the city’s
symbolic images, heritage conservation opens a new perspective
for Singapore’s economy. As the Singapore Tourism Task Force
Report concluded, ‘to woo tourists back to Singapore, Chinatown
and other historical sites would have to be conserved’. The
tourism value of heritage conservation is amply illustrated in
analyses of heritage tourism in Europe. Culture and tourism are
interdependent; cultural resources can be developed into new
tourist products.
Tourism is one of the growing pillars of
Singapore’s economic growth. Tourism receipts for 2002 are
estimated at S $9 billion (SGD) and the long-term goal is to
grow visitor arrivals and tourism receipts by 8% per annum. The
latest travel brochures have begun to describe Singapore as a
city where “east meets west” and ancient traditions blend with
modernity. The search for citizenship identity, and the economic
pragmatism of product development for competitive advantages are
powerful persuasions for a new emphasis on conservation. Both factors provide
greater definition to and implementation of heritage
conservation in urban growth.
3. Discovering neighborhood
heritage assets
To empower urban conservation
efforts the Planning Act was amended in 1989. In the same year,
for the first time a Conservation Master Plan for Singapore was
prepared, stressing the place of conservation in Singapore’s
urban planning and halting the further loss of historic buildings to urban redevelopment. Parallel efforts have since been launched to recover the built heritage and place identity.
By the early 1990s, dozens of “shop houses” in historic
neighborhoods were saved from the fate of demolition, and
instead were renovated and conserved. Thus far, more than 5600
buildings are preserved and 0.2% of Singapore’s land area is
under conservation protection, primarily neighborhoods with
colonial, early period, and formal architecture such as
Chinatown, Little India, and Kampong Glam.
As conservation develops, the planning process is increasingly focused on balancing two important considerations: a) the need for new
development to position Singapore as a modern 21st
century business city, and b) the need to conserve Singapore’s
built heritage. The challenge is to create a thriving
world-class city where Singapore is not just a workplace but
also a home. This has generated a renewed policy commitment to
heritage conservation for emphasizing place identity, articulated as a key element in Singapore’s Revised Concept Plan
2001, which states:
Identity will become an important aspect in
our planning process. We will continue to look into conserving
more buildings in order to retain the collective character and
memory of places.
The Concept Plan
is the long-term strategic development plan for Singapore. It
has guided Singapore’s physical development since 1971 and is
revised every 10 years. Beyond sustaining economic growth, the
2001 Concept Plan dwells on vernacular buildings and places
(collective character and memory) in making Singapore
a dynamic, delightful, and distinctive city. In emphasizing
vernacular building design, Singapore joins with many postmodern urbanists in acknowledging that conservation should go beyond the monumental relics of church, state, and monarchy to include the process of celebrating the more familiar and beloved cultural
heritage in our everyday lives.
In pursuit
of a sense of the familiarity of urban places and their cultural
heritage, Singapore’s planners have increasingly tapped
the city’s population for suggestions and views when searching
for places to conserve. This participatory planning process
provides a conduit for residents to express their memories of
places and identify the living culture in everyday spaces and
neighborhoods. As unfolding in the current review of the
Singapore Master Plan 2003, the next step in Singapore’s
development planning cycle, local communities are invited to
help establish strategies for identifying and conserving
cultural assets in the city’s development.
The Singapore Master Plan — Identity Plan
The Singapore Master Plan is a short-term
development plan, revised once every five years within the
framework of the long-term Concept Plan. Public feedback
gathered from focus group discussions and civic dialogues on
Concept Plan 2001 have indicated that people highly value
place-identity and community heritage. According to the URA, they
would like to make heritage a national issue, like health and
education.
More importantly, they are for conservation to go
beyond the physical dimension to include cultural expression:
The Concept Plan should conserve more of the
built heritage and nature areas in Singapore…conservation should
embrace not just buildings from the colonial and other early
periods but also more recently developed areas which are rich in
culture and character. (The Straits Times, 24 Nov 2000)
Among the various approaches to the issue, the
draft Identity Plan released in July 2002 as a preliminary input
to the Master Plan 2003, emphatically pointed to enhancing and
retaining familiar places. It proposed include conserving local
landscapes of collective memory that are part of the Singapore
that citizens love, including to:
-
Retain
the old world charm of familiar neighborhoods: Balestier,
Tanjong Katong, Jalan Besar, Joo Chiat/East Coast Road;
-
Retain
and reinforce the existing character and scale of the
built environment;
-
Recognize and allow existing community activities to
continue and thrive.
A central issue is how to preserve a sense of place and belonging in the context of growing demands for land uses (the population of Singapore is projected to grow from the present 4 million to 5.5 million people within the next half
century). What can we do to retain the history, character, and
vitality of older urban spaces as they continue to grow and evolve?
These are not uniquely Singapore’s dichotomies. Cities around
the world face the same dilemmas in heritage conservation: ‘what
to include and what to exclude?’ ‘Well loved by whom?’ Too often
we are reminded of government-driven conservation becoming no
more than artificial replicas of the past, managed landscape
spectacles designed to impress, emptied of life and with
cultural memory lost.
In the framework of place specialization and
participatory planning, opportunities for allowing ordinary
people’s interpretations and recommendations to be voiced offers
encouragement to greater community-based processes in urban
conservation. Citizen participation allows the images and
meanings of places to develop from the bottom up. This is a
primary method for enhancing local ownership and tolerance of
urbanity. As Singapore’s Minister for National Development
explains:
All of us who have a stake here ought to
have a say in how we want this place to develop. The more we
are involved in the planning, then the more aware we are of
the constraints we face and the trade-offs we need to make
this little red dot [Singapore] livable and comfortable. (The
Straits Times, 21 Jul 2001)
A salient emphasis is on partnerships where the
public planning authorities are willing to listen, engage and work jointly
with the community in conservation efforts. As expressed by
the URA in the draft Identity Plan exhibition brochures:
We need you (the public) to play your
part. Please share your views, opinions and ideas to help
refine the plans. Based on your feedback, we will refine and
develop the…Identity Plan further. The implementation of the
ideas and possibilities will require the joint partnership
of public and private sectors with the community.
With such a strong endorsement, it is no surprise
that public consultation represented by far the most extensive
level of pre-draft consultation on conservation plans. More
significantly, it marked a significant improvement over the
government’s usual way of making plans. As the Minister of State
for National Development stated during the opening of the public
consultation and exhibition of the draft Identity Plan on July
23, 2002:
Instead of pre-determining how a place
should shape up according to our plans, we are now looking
at how what is already on the ground…can be enhanced.
The sites presented in the Identity Plan were
consolidated with help from community leaders, government
officials, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). According
to reports in the local media, ‘the feedback has been rolling in’ with
crowds coming mostly around lunch time to look at the Identity
Plan. Such self-conscious identification engenders pressure to
recognize, support, and leverage the energy and ideas of people
to enhance the cultural assets of their neighborhoods and sustain the
continuing quest of identifying whose and what heritage to
conserve. It indicates that people are interested in voicing their
views, sharing their suggestions, and fully expressing
themselves in public dialogues. More than 20,000 people from
different areas and walks of life — students, professionals,
business people, housewives — have given feedback through URA’s
website, exhibition feedback sessions, and other public
discussions in the first two months of the plan’s exhibit,
including suggesting additional places and identity nodes for
potential heritage conservation.
By the end of the three-month public exhibition,
more than 35,000 people had visited the exhibits, of which about
13,400 were online visitors. About 4,200 of these visitors
submitted their feedback through survey forms, emails, and
letters, with 97% of them endorsing the proposals in the plan. A
large majority of respondents (87%) indicated that more should
be done to retain certain trades and businesses that
characterize their neighborhoods. There appears to be a
general excitement and desire to retain place-identity, lending
legitimacy and support to the urban planners’ quest for
enhancing and expanding conservation efforts.
The planning authorities were urged to act fast
and prepare a comprehensive list of buildings for possible
safeguarding. They have proposed to study the recommended areas
in greater detail and collaborate with relevant public agencies,
the private sector, and the community to work towards complete
plan implementation by 2015. The challenge is to keep alive
familiar neighborhoods and enhance their unique heritage quality as the city continues its widespread and
fast-paced development. The reality is an increasing need to
identify and situate these traditional places within the
modernizing world. Such conserved areas can provide the
architectural grammar of local culture and history, a certain
magic of permanence and of keeping the past alive in the
present and future. A further challenge is the place-bound economics to ensure that the conserved neighborhood as a destination for tourists does not destroy what attracts residents in the first
place. Some observers have described tourists as ‘landscape
eaters’ and the tourism industry as an essentially exploitative
process.
From the
viewpoint of urban conservation, there is strong impetus
to suggest that investing in distinctiveness cannot be the lone
result of statutory action. Any ‘endeavor of identity’ must embrace the community. It is widely understood
that on an individual level, the richness of places and people’s
attachment to them grows from their everyday use of these
spaces. The richness of places in familiar neighborhoods
constitutes opportunity for a new definition of heritage assets
in the conservation inventory. Each neighborhood has its place-identity. This heritage presents active, living cultural
resources familiarized with social meanings invested in them by
the workers and residents. These are important ingredients of collective
sentiments, of the feeling that ‘this is our place’.
4.
Conclusion
Singapore’s growing conservation activities,
despite its unique conditions of development, raises wider
issues in heritage conservation and participatory planning.
Singapore clearly demonstrates that heritage conservation and
modernity are not necessarily in opposition. Rather they are
inseparably linked in what Clifford Geertz describes as the
dialectical relationship between the ‘search for identity’ which
looks back to the past, and the forward-looking modernity of
‘demand for progress’. With increasing globalization, the ‘search for identity’ may be
expected to play a larger role in urban development, bringing
both economic growth and empowerment. The appropriation of
economic benefits from conservation is a long-standing
representation of the heritage conservation movement.
Conservation planning is increasingly used to justify the appropriation of historic buildings and revitalization of urban neighborhoods as products for generating
economic growth, investment, and tourism. The attractions of
communities are an increasingly significant factor in the
spatial development of heritage tourism in many cities.
Empirically, the familiar neighborhood offers enormous
opportunities to take stock and reveal the heritage assets that
define the collective memory. Singapore’s conservation efforts
to retain the identity of neighborhoods and other
familiar places has revealed the wide appeal of heritage
conservation, both to the government and the citizens.
Despite an initial lack of emphasis, conservation
is today an integral aspect of Singapore’s urban planning. The
need for the conservation of Singapore’s local heritage sites is
as important as the need to maximize land development potential
to position Singapore as a modern 21st century
business city. The Singapore Master Plan 2003 —
Identity Plan demonstrates that locally based identities are still
highly important to most people. Perhaps, as many theorists have
recognized, collective historical memories play a strong role in
people’s sentimental attachments to places and community
identity. This role will only grow with the advance of
globalization. In an increasingly placeless and uncertain world,
urban neighborhoods can play an important part in people’s
personal and social identity.
Investigating the sense of place-identity within
communities, Singapore’s conservation planning lends support for
citizen participation in the search for local heritage.
Partnership and open communication are important components. The URA
view of the planner-community partnership in Singapore
reinforces this sense of collaboration:
The process will demand weighing
conflicting factors very carefully...Having these open
channels of communication, more than ever, is vital as we
write a new chapter on conservation. Together.
People in any community consist of diverse groups
representing a host of interests that may lead to conflicting
opinions on issues, whose views should be heard and taken.
These are tough issues with no ready answers, calling for
adequate preparation and building of mechanisms to deal with
constraints and risks. There is a wealth of literature on
strategies for community participation, including the United
Nations Development Program (UNDP) 1997 Guidebook on
Participation. The Singapore search for identity in
conservation underscores a common first principle of
participatory development: the primacy of citizenship. It is one key
strategy in the making of a distinctive city, making use of not
just quantitative analyses of the urban fabric but also people’s
personal views and feelings, to identify the underlying
qualities of the sense of place and attachment to locality.
The possibility of being involved in the
conservation planning process opens new perspectives for
strengthening the social fabric that allows ordinary people to become citizen-activists and community leaders. It is the starting point for working together to improve urban quality of life for all, especially when the public’s feedback is considered and being incorporated in the draft Singapore Master Plan 2003. Closer consideration, however, raises an important
issue inherent in heritage conservation: that what is considered
to be of heritage value is subjective and very much temporally
and contextually bound. This is because heritage has the
power to stir emotions and reinforce group identities.
Consequently, those who hold the power will often seek to shape
the landscapes and their meanings. They are able to define what
constitutes heritage and what elements of the past should be
conserved.
Notwithstanding the great potential of heritage conservation in generating new social solidarities among the population, economic prospects and urban branding and “place marketing” cannot be ignored. Singapore in its effort to construct a modern city has given increasing emphasis to conservation of urban places and familiar neighborhoods, promoting participatory planning as a way to identify and strengthen the city’s distinctiveness. Against the widening process of globalization, community participation in heritage conservation is one way of reinforcing residents’ and workers’ feelings of belonging to and identifying with the city. The URA’s current commitment to enhancing heritage conservation in
Singapore reflects an invitation to build local places together,
a basic element in the making of cities in which people truly
desire to live, work, play, and visit, and that promotes
prosperity and improves the quality of physical and cultural
life.
Planning Process of Singapore Master Plan 2003
Belinda Yuen is an Associate Professor of Urban Planning in the Department of Real Estate and the School of Design and Environment at the National University of Singapore, and a founding member of the Board of Directors of Global Urban Development, serving as President, and as Co-Chair of the GUD Program Committee on Celebrating Our Urban Heritage. Dr. Yuen’s books include Planning Singapore, Sustainable Cities in the 21st Century, Singapore Housing, and Urban Quality of Life. Return to top |
