Tourists arriving at Singapore are often greeted at the airport by teenagers… … studying. Whether it is at the aviation gallery, eateries like McDonalds, or empty corners of the airport, Changi Airport is home to students looking for somewhere quiet and comfortable to hit the books…
An empty piece of land is not something that will catch our eye as we go about our daily lives, but for photographer Darren Soh, it sparked his on-going project that documents the building of Marina Bay Sands. Presenting at the inaugural PLATFORM, Darren showed a full-house crowd at Sinema his “progress pictures” of the integrated resort since construction began some four years ago. The photographer, who has made several photo collections of the Singapore landscape, said this island is one big construction site and that makes emptiness in Singapore’s landscape significant and something worth documenting.
Indeed, living in a country where everything is so transient, Singapore’s landscape has been extensively photographed. However, most works on it that I’ve seen focuses on the death of landscapes and its decay. It’s become a knee-jerk reaction for photographers living here — just look at the number of photographers who have been flocking down to Tanjong Pagar Railway Station now that it’s future is in limbo. Darren’s project responds to this Singapore condition from a different time frame — its beginning and birth. More importantly, his project freezes the never-ending construction work that we are seemingly surrounded with and allows us to reflect, and even marvel, the building of Singapore.
Coincidentally, I recently had the privilege of helping do some background research for an architectural project that looks at the conditions of emptiness in Singapore. The findings of architect Thomas Kong’s project will be presented in ‘Zero’: Alternative Scenarios for Architecture in a Post-Bubble Era on 16 June in Rotterdam.
As a number, zero is neither negative nor positive but we often assign a degree of negativity despite its neutral meaning. A vacated site similarly lies in a liminal state with potentiality. However, architects have been taught that the only thing they could present to society is a building, to fill the void again. But what can they learn from the way in which individuals and groups appropriate empty sites in towns and cities? And in broader perspective, what can zero offer as we live through the Great Recession, when the myth of continuous economic growth is shattered, the assumption of ready capital for development can no longer be guaranteed and architecture students are taught only one mode of survival as a professional?
After embarking on the interesting option of publishing my final-year journalism project online last year, it was heartening to see the junior batch take their projects online too. While I love my printed newspaper, there is no doubt that the future of journalism must go online in some way. On a personal level, it’s also an excellent platform to ensure your project doesn’t get forgotten in the archives, but remains out there to be Googled on as and when the topic becomes relevant.
Kababayan: Faces of Filipinas in Singapore is a photojournalism project by Kong Yen Lin and Nura Ling that puts a new face to the Filipino women migrant community in Singapore. Long regarded as just here to work as domestic maids, Filipinas who come to Singapore today increasingly span different classes and occupations including designers, businesswomen, nurses and teachers. It is an impressive depth of work that uses multimedia slideshows and photo essays to bring you through the life of some 16 Filipinas living and working in Singapore. It would have been even more impressive with better editing though, especially in the multimedia slideshows. There’s just a bit too much going on to keep me watching till the end.
Food Waste Republic is an investigative journalism piece that looks at food wastage in Singapore through feature stories, multimedia slideshows and quotes from experts. Readers are also encouraged to interact with the project by submiting photos to the “Food Waste Police”. The team of Estelle Low, Miak Aw and Chen Wei Li have really put in a lot of effort, even going through people’s rubbish to document the extent of the problem. While surfing the website, one thing that kept going off in my mind was, where does journalism end and advocacy start? I wondered if this project is a campaign to reduce food wastage rather than a journalism piece, especially with snazzy look of the website and the attempt to ‘police’ food wastage. But then, is there a difference between the two? Shouldn’t all journalists care a lot about the topic they write for?
On this note about caring and journalism I like to point to an encouraging initiative going in my alma mater: Photojournalism@NTU. I’m not sure if it’ll become an annual event, but photojournalism students this year got a chance to showcase their works and meet fellow photojournalists and editors in the industry in this networking session. I saw a lot of great work out there — all photo essays about Singapore. The current instructor, Tay Kay Chin, has promised to continue pushing these young photojournalists to point their lenses at what’s going on here instead of exotic foreign lands. I really agree that there are too many stories untold here.
And after seeing all the work of these young journalists, I wondered why is it that our local newspapers remain so staid? Whether it is in terms of topics, or the medium, one finds it hard to consistently detect the vigour as seen in these students’ works. There is good news, especially for photojournalists. When asked about photojournalism’s place in The Straits Times during the session, its photo editor said that a micro-site was coming up soon on ST’s website that will showcase multimedia slideshows and photo essays from their photojournalists. They may accept works from the public too.
Other than that, I’m not confident anything else is really going to change. For one, the people right up there making decisions have been there for years (Sumiko Tan wrote about her jubilee at the organisation in today’s Sunday Times, and she’s not the only one, nor the longest). And, without competition here, hardly anything changes as my research on ST’s newspaper redesign has shown.
For me, the saddest part about all this is not that I may never get to read a great Singaporean newspaper. But, I may never see these young journalists’ byline beyond their final-year projects because they gave up chasing stories for a paper that will never showcase them in a manner that they truly deserve.
Photo by Sam Kang Li
In his 2005 National Day Rally, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong outlined plans to develop the public park above Orchard MRT station that Filipino maids working in Singapore used to picnic at and knew as ‘Golong Golong’. “I think it’s a prime site and we’d like somebody to develop it, a new focal point with space for events and an observation tower,” he said. “And we’ll make Orchard Road one of the great streets in the world, a place to see and be seen, a place for all to enjoy.”
The sale of the site fetched a cool $1.38 billion dollars and the mall built upon it, ION Orchard, is packed with over 300 retail outlets and fronted by Louis Vuitton, Dior, Dolce & Gabbana, Prada and Giorgio Armani . It is hard to disagree when Evalyn, a maid who like most here earns only about $400 a month, calls ION “a rich person’s place”.
Come 2013, the mall will be crowned with Orchard Residences, the district’s tallest building in the form of a 56-storey tower of luxurious residences. And it will mark the conversion of a place the maids used to relax in to a place of work instead.
To make Orchard Road “A Great Street”, the chairman of the Orchard Road Business Association recently expressed, in a Straits Times (ST) interview, her desire to clear beggars, flyer distributors and street buskers off the shopping street because they are unsightly.
Both developments make it difficult to reconcile with PM Lee’s promise to make Orchard Road a “place for all to enjoy”. In fact, a recent letter to the Straits Times Forum also showed how they have influenced the public’s definition on who should get to enjoy Orchard Road.
The writer questioned the Filipino enclave, Lucky Plaza Shopping Centre’s, place in Orchard Road and suggested it be moved next to the Thai enclave of Golden Mile Complex because they are “like peas in a pod”. The letter then went on to suggest that in its place “should be a building comparable to the new malls coming up on Orchard Road”.
Such a view explains why Lucky Plaza and the surrounding properties try hard to keep Filipino maids on its edges come Sundays with unwelcoming signs and regular security patrols. Their continued existence along Orchard Road hangs on whether it can remain relevant to what it will become…
One of the great streets
(exactly like the rest of) the world,
a place to see
(only what you want to see)
and be seen
(only if you are allowed to),
and a place for (m)all(s) to enjoy.
—
The post above is adapted from my article of a similar title about Filipino maids and the fight for space in Singapore that was first published in Singapore Architect #253. It has since been reworked to feature as a story, Home maid picnics, in my project, Reclaim Land: The fight for space in Singapore.
At just over 700 square kilometres, the small size of Singapore has been one of its biggest challenges. Land is so scarce a commodity that every inch of it must come under the ideological makeover of the city-state’s urban planners, so much so that architect Rem Koolhaas once described it as such in his book S, M, L, XL:
“It is pure intention: If there is chaos, it is authored chaos; if it is ugly, it is designed ugliness; if it is absurd, it is willed absurdity.”
This desire of our urban planners to fashion by sheer will a First World city after others like New York and London have led to the relentless pursuit of urban renewal and countless grandiose master plans. The Garden City, public housing, a hub for business, education and healthcare… it is easy to lull into the belief that we, the people, are nothing more but a population detail in this city’s plans.
Yet, as minor as details are, it is the people who make up a city. And when we look at the individuals around us, as Michel de Certeau did in The Practice of Everyday Life, we start to see how this city is not simply a product of its planners. Just like how the state has turned to land reclamation to overcome the lack of space, its people have done the same, creating their own spaces in this over-determined red dot.
Surviving in the small spaces
With just a mirror on the back of a grey shophouse, a maroon leather chair from his old salon and a large green canvas sheet that shields both from the afternoon sun and the gaze of the modern skyscrapers towering over, Mr Lee Yoon Tong has set up his barber salon at this back alley on the fringes of the city’s financial district for the last seven years.
No larger than two motorcycle parking lots, his salon is hidden amidst a neighbourhood of shophouses at Tanjong Pagar occupied today by design agencies, investment firms and posh restaurants — businesses that can afford the high rent that had led Lee to be evicted from a similar shophouse around the corner.
But the move out to the streets was a blessing in disguise. Lee’s earnings have dropped, but his costs have fallen even more — no utilities, no taxes and most importantly, no rent. Ironically, while the subsequent tenants of his former shophouse have changed hands several times since he left, Lee’s salon has survived.
This is in spite the public’s view that street hawkers like Lee are unsightly and an obstruction for a modern city, and are too small to survive in an economy dominated by global corporations. Thus, while street hawking was a way of life in the past, they have become a rare sight today due to strict regulation on where, when and what they can sell.
Yet, it is precisely by being small that they have continued as a means for people with little capital to make a living, especially in these tough economic times. To a street hawker, walkways, shop fronts, back alleys – spaces too insignificant for landowners to rent out – is all they need for their table of wares, be it a cobbler, newspaper vendor or ice-cream seller.
Thus, street hawking is a great way to nurture entrepreneurship, “It is not because people don’t have ideas,” says urban studies professor Ho Kon Chong “but because the cost of land is too expensive, the rent does not allow for failure.”
However, Lee’s insistence on staying near his old salon is not just a matter of economics. “I wanted to serve my old customers, they still look for me.” the 70-year-old said in Mandarin. In this city that often limits the diversity of land use by thinking only of its economic returns, we forget that a shop space is also a container for memories.
Allowing people to grow a place
It was the persistent memories of their kampong near Sixth Avenue that led a group of old folks to this once-empty plot of land in Clementi. Bounded by the winding Malaysian railway track, a bustling expressway and shielded by the neat rows of HDB flats, Kampong Sungai Pandan is a fragmented collection of farm plots scattered with fruit trees like papayas and sugar canes, and a makeshift hut that is the central meeting point for the community.
But this is not a nostalgic reproduction of their lost kampong in a highly built Singapore, no one stays here, rather, an organic development of a community place for this group who were resettled to the surrounding flats in the 1980s. In a way, the community is fortunate that the land they have claimed sits in the middle of an on-going dispute between the Singapore government and the Malaysian railway. This has allowed them to ride on the ambivalence of either side, until they decided to make their presence more permanent.
Pooling together money, Mr Cai and rest of the community had built a comfortable gathering spot with carpet grass, potted plants, stone furniture and even a zinc-roof hut. It was not long after that the state came by and tore down the unauthorised structure over fears of mosquito breeding and suspicions of illegal activities like gambling. Today, the carpet grass has again given way to mimosa and weeds, and a canvas sheet shields them in place of the zinc roof as the community, uncertain of its place, have chosen to let the place stay dilapidated instead. It will be less painful when they are eventually chased out.
Such conditions are not only ideal for breeding mosquitoes and pests, often the authorities’ biggest concern, but it aids the growth of apathy amongst residents. Denied from taking ownership over spaces such as common corridors and void decks, residents use but not care for them.
This lack of participation is a major problem in our residential dwellings says Professor Ooi Giok Ling, who has written about the management of such spaces in The Future Of Space. “We need to work out how we are going to manage as a group all this shared property, all this communal work. But because we never get the opportunity to, we just lift a phone and call (the authorities).”
The culture of dependency on the state to solve our problems is why our spaces are so dominated by their imagination rather than the people who use it. Thus, one can hardly tell the difference between living in Jurong or Pasir Ris because the same housing plans are repeated with little input from the residents.
And in an age where it is so easy to move from one city to another, what will differentiate this place from the rest? Only by allowing people to participate, to build their own environments, can they be rooted to this land. After all, how can one make a home in a place where homes are already planned for you?
This city is possible
As skater Lee De Ming aka King Ming says, “What you can find in the park, you can find in the streets, but what you can find in the streets, you can’t find in a park.” This is why Lee and his group of skaters still enjoy the thrill of taking on the city despite the skate parks built to house a sport seen as a nuisance to many.
Aided by the cover of the night, the twenty skaters leave their day “home” at the atrium of a block of ageing HDB flats at Margaret Drive in search of “liquid waves” in the city’s architecture. Skateboarding is after all based on the Californian surfing culture of the 1950s that wanted to extend the sport to the urban environment by adding wheels to a surfboard.
It is almost midnight when they finally find the spot — “Four Stairs”. In the skater’s eyes, a flight of four steps, each 30 centimetres tall, at the deserted corner of Golden Landmark Hotel becomes their performance stage as the skater’s cheers and jeers transforms the place into their home, a stadium of energy, if only for a while.
It is these skaters’ sense of possibility with just a little imagination that could actually inspire a city that plans to house more than the existing 4.8 million already living here. Even Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew has his doubts. “I have not quite been sold on the idea that we should have 6.5 million,” he said last year when he discussed Singapore’s population projections by 2030.
Moreover, it is not just a lack of space, but also the right kind of space. And it becomes a massive problem for urban planners when one realises that people have a million uses of spaces, so how can any master plan meet all the diverse needs of its growing population? The street hawker, the elderly community and the skaters have shown how this city is possible for them when the state allows them to participate and decide how to use the space.
It is in their act of reclaiming space that we transcend the limitations of a small city so tightly regulated by the state, and re-imagine a new geography of Singapore, one of our own, one that gives birth to the question: Whose city is it anyway?
— — —
This article was first published in Singapore Architect #249 and is part of my final-year project, Reclaim Land: The fight for space in Singapore.
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