Theorizing the Southeast Asian City as Text

Urban Landscapes, Cultural Documents, and Interpretative Experiences

Robbie B H Goh, Brenda S A Yeoh

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9789814486590
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Theorizing the Southeast Asian City as Text examines the ways in which culture, ethnicity, languages, traditions, governance, policies and histories interplay in the creation of the urban experiences in contemporary Southeast Asian cities. It focuses on the ways in which urban spatial forms are textual experiences, subject to interpretative strategies and the influence of other discourses. In addition it also analyzes the experiences of modernization in such cities, but also in terms of the strategies of containment, refurbishment, and loss which this has occasioned.

Contents:

• Urbanism and Post-Colonial Nationalities: Theorizing the Southeast Asian City (R B H Goh & B S A Yeoh)
• Reading the Southeast Asian City in the Context of Rapid Economic Growth (K S Tay & R B H Goh)
• “The Rise of the Merlion” Monument and Myth in the Making of the Singapore Story (B S A Yeoh & T C Chang)
• Things to a Void: Utopian Discourse, Communality and Constructed Interstices in Singapore Public Housing (R B H Goh)
• Selective Disclosure: Romancing the Singapore River (S Huang & T C Chang)
• Malaysia's High-Tech Cities and the Construction of Intelligent Citizenship (T Bunnell)
• Museum/City/Nation: Negotiating Identities in Urban Museums in Indonesia and Singapore (K M Adams)
• The Urban and the Urbane: Modernization, Modernism and the Rebirth of Singaporean Cinema (A R Guneratne)
• Benjamin in Bombay? An Asian Extrapolation (R Patke)

Readership: Undergraduates, graduate students, academics and professionals in architecture and urban planning.
Keywords:Urban Studies;Southeast Asian Cities;Society and Culture;Literature;MediaReview: “… there is much of value in the book both theoretically and empirically and it certainly deserves a readership beyond those interested in South-east Asia … this edited collection provides a good illustration of the benefits of taking the cultural turn, interpreting texts very broadly to cover anything from the built environment through museums and films as cultural artifacts to the role of the flâneur in construing rather than constructing the city.” Urban Studies
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Chapter 1

Reading the Southeast Asian City in the Context of Rapid Economic Growth

Toy Kheng Soon with Robbie B.H. Goh

Does the Southeast Asian City, with its colonial past and (more recently, and in most cases) its rapid socio-economic development under the aegis of transnational capitalism, labour under a blinkered view of itself, an ideological blind spot? Is this a specific postcolonial condition and/or is this a situation of future shock? How does one read the contemporary Southeast Asian City as an insider?

Why is it that many planners in Asia still look to the West for ideas and standards in urban design, planning and architecture while they speak of an Asian Identity, Asian Democracy and the Asian way? Even though Curitiba in southern Brazil is an excellent example of effective public transportation and excellent city planning, social planning and environmental management, why is it that few Asian planners look to it for inspiration? Is it because Brazil is by definition not an “Advanced Country” like those of the West?¹ The lessons of Curitiba have thus gone unnoticed and unrecognized in Asia even though Crutiba’s lessons are especially relevant. And so Asia doggedly labours in the shadow of the West while loudly continuing to disavow this adoptive congenital bind.

Since the trauma of the separation of Singapore and Malaysia in 1965, Singapore’s city fathers have recoiled emotionally from that very history and sense of place upon which their passion for independence was itself founded. Post-coloniality and an economy located within transnational capitalism are overlays in the development of national culture. These three principal factors in combination have marked the city indelibly. Consciousness and unconsciousness are the products of this process.

Separation from Malaysia was not only a political break. It was also a cultural break, it would seem, a break or perhaps a drift away from the formative values and sensibilities embedded in the “Malayan concept” — an aesthetic and cultural community of ideas and attitudes shared by peoples of the Malay Peninsula and the prosperous commercial island to its south, Singapore, prior to the 1960s. The Malayan dream led to independence from the British. It was to develop a national economy and a culture with relative autonomy from metropolitan monopolies. The break from Malaysia meant for Singapore also a break from “Malaya.”² Having no resources, Singapore hitched its ship to the tide of transnational capitalism. Autonomy was left behind. Architecturally and culturally, the situation was a break in values. This break was exacerbated by the fact that Singapore’s official planners and architects were trained abroad in Australia, the USA and England at a time when modernization and modernism were the faith and the form. This made it worse. Malayanism and the indigenous and authentic heritages were not strong sentiments among these planners in any case. They were too young to know. Thus, for them, the new was to be embraced and the old (representing backwardness) was to be eliminated. They were modernist zealots. Their overseas stint, at their young age, also divorced them from the ethos of place. It was thus for these planners a painless transition. They were only too eager to get on with implementing what they learnt overseas and applying these directly in the new situation in Singapore in economics as well as in city design without “the baggage of the past” to weigh them down.

Important places and features of the Malayan Landscape, having been accorded no value, were allowed to disappear or were even actively expunged. The URA (Urban Redevelopment Authority) was demolishing old sections of the city to sell land for urban renewal. The demolition of old buildings not listed on the Monuments Board was easily justified. That the Monuments Board was slow in listing historic buildings was to be expected given the developmental ethos of the time. The general sentiment was for redevelopment, not conservation. The demolition and transformation of landmark buildings of the local banking and trading establishments centred on the Singapore River, for example, was simply regarded as necessary progress but with a vengeance. The old Chinese-style OCBC building was demolished, and the United Chinese Bank nearby changed its name to the United Overseas Bank in tune with the times. Even names were not sentimental. As the wholesale demolition of large historic areas in the city proceeded, it was accompanied by changes in the rural landscape as well. The tall swaying palms which fringed the beaches were cut down. This changed the feel of the landscape forever. Hills were leveled to fill the sea. Kampongs and the gracious bungalows of the old rich also disappeared pitilessly. The coconut tree, in particular, as a symbol of the past backwardness as were the kampong and the shophouse, also fell to the new ethos. The rapid transformation of the environment was seen merely as a casualty of progress, not as the regrettable passing away of an age and the erasure of a whole set of values.

Within the architectural community there was a general disregard for Malayan sentiments. The search for a Malayan Architecture of the 1950s was abandoned. Tropicality as a design theme was displaced by avid appropriation and, in many cases, misappropriation of the latest Western styles. Glass, steel, aluminum and concrete in the form of bland building blocks, which symbolized modernism in the 1960s to the 1980s, filled the empty spots left by old gracious buildings. The link between the so-called International Style and international corporate capitalism was not consciously noted. Modernism was confused with modernity and modernization was confused with Westernization. This was so since the May 4^th Movement.

The embracing of global capitalism and the cultural and aesthetic values it entails coloured everything. Even the discourse about architecture, urban planning and culture was and still is couched in the concepts and words of the industrial West. The aesthetics of place — local, specific, rooted — has no voice and therefore no place in the new scheme. Indeed, there is still no language with which to articulate any authentic consciousness of place and time. Consciousness was and still is largely subservient to the dictates of Western cultural and intellectual cues. Learning the aesthetics of place thus takes place in limbo. Only recently have there been some stirrings in the form of a tropical stylism and an eco-environmentalism but are these merely exotic forms of tropical Orientalism? The so-called avant-garde among architects continue to strike postures in the manner of their Western counterparts. They justify their stance in terms of freedom of personal expression and espouse “plurality” to bolster their ideology of difference and unprincipled hedonism. The so-called avant-garde, having nothing to rebel against, sound hollow. They are the academy!

Meanwhile, as most of the Southeast Asian economies grew in the past three decades (despite occasional hiccups not tantamount to derailments), changing from a more or less nationalistic economy to a more international one, the unfolding aesthetic reality moved inexorably towards the kitsch, the corny and the camp. In this process, all authentic themes were subsumed more or less within what is in vogue in the West at any given time. Encouraged by the “postmodernism” in vogue in the West, Singapore and much of Southeast Asia followed suit. The dynamics of kitsch have thus not been theorized as part of a phenomenon in the displacement of consciousness and sensibilities in the condition of rapid change and the breakdown of all values. Kitsch is simply (or perhaps simplistically) understood as plurality within a growing democracy of choice predicated on the economics of advancing production and consumption. Thus no authentic language could evolve in the frenzy of consumption and self-expression to take note of the new phenomenon and to think of a way out of it. Consciousness of place and time has now been so thoroughly obliterated.

Where words are superfluous, images dominate. The two lacks compound the prevailing unconsciousness of self and place. In the everyday subcultures where discourse is limited to banter, image is everything. Image drives the consumer culture, which buys into the plethora of products propagated by shopping and advertising media. New terms to articulate their idea of image are sometimes coined. Let us take the example of the term “obiang.” “Obiang” is a peculiarly Singaporean word derived from “Off Beat” or “OB.” “Obiang” is the term used to jeer at “bad” taste in dress and consumer preferences. While the term is an authentic invention, it should be noted that it is tied to the continuing imperative of Westernized style. So-called “good” taste is in this case inevitably founded on the unquestioned superiority of the Westernized image of what is “classy.” Interestingly though, “obiang” is never used in relation to any traditional styles. Traditional style has meantime remained frozen as emblems of identity of last resort and thus insulated from the outside influence of globalization. Since it defines place in the world, it has to remain and be kept frozen and therefore sacrosanct.

In the frenzy of material progress, style is an area of increasing anxiety when there is less practical necessity to rationalize choice. And aesthetic anxiety thus seeps into every area of human expression as the country progresses materially. The architecture of today in Singapore is thus moving inexorably towards kitsch. And the kitsch project can try on any and every style including cultural or ethnic identity because in the human consciousness ethnicity is the emblem of last resort when all else fails. It therefore has to be frozen to be held in readiness.

Kitsch is a difficult term to define precisely because consciousness is concealed by the very anxiety which breeds it. Consciousness is thus used for auto-repression. But the features of kitsch are plain to anyone familiar with its sources. Kitsch is thus a cartoon, a mimicry, a mask, and a doll. It is a caricature stripped of any semblance of its origins. Like Mickey Mouse, kitsch is cuddly and sweet. It is a confection. And anything and everything can be rendered kitsch in the need for style. Even “high-technology” can be made kitsch if delivers difference and “class.” And blond hair on an Asian head is not an admission of voluntary cultural subjugation but is rationalized as a mere fashion statement! Thus consciousness is deflected.

A super-symbolic aesthetic situation comes about; it parallels the evolution of the super-symbolic economy. Thought and taste need not be in sync. Imagination and authenticity have become superfluous concepts. Thirty years of double-digit growth bought off self- and place-consciousness. In the wake of the recent economic crisis, however, a new consciousness is arising. After thirty years of deep silence, a few new young voices have suddenly emerged and they are angry at the loss of their true self. Alfian Sa’at, a young Malay Singapore poet, a voice from the racial margins, lashes out at the falsity of this life:

... tell that to the yuppie who sits in meat-markets disguised As pubs, listening to Kenny G disguised as jazz on Handphone disguised as conversation and loneliness Disguised as a jukebox.³

A few lines later he pointedly laments that “the flapping sunned linen shelters a whiff of chloroform,” a comment on the narcotized social condition.

Singapore is planning for an ultimate population of six million. Land in the central area is reserved for an imagined real-estate killing yet to come. That is why the city is left to languish without life and without vitality. In the meanwhile, the cosy housing estates creep inexorably outwards onto the rural fringes homogenizing the landscape into one great real estate playground hailed as asset enhancement. Thus there is no mixed-class urban housing in the city to any significant extent to kindle a new civic urban culture. The population is cosily housed in suburbanized new towns where life is placid, tame and conventional. This is the “heartland” of Singapore. Few think of the displacement of sense and sensibilities as a corruption of the human spirit. Thus while life in the housing estates is unspirited, concurrently, Singapore’s salubrious “high-class” bungalow areas are being devastated by monster houses greedy for floor space not primarily for a vitalizing home life but as asset accumulation. The casting aside of every authentic aspect of life is symptomatic in the rise of kitsch taste every where — “I have lost a country to images, it is as simple as that” as Sa’at says (1998: 41).

Shanghai contemplates a metropolitan population of 16,000,000. She needs 1,000,000 \new apartments in the next five years! Kitsch too is well underway. Roman villas are the ‘in’ thing now. The New Pudong commercial area across the Hwangpu River is a showcase of economic ambition and architectural exuberance of every conceivable kind. It cocks a snook at the Colonial Bund of old Shanghai — aesthetic revenge for past indignities? Though there is now no bar on Chinamen and dogs, there are still no conducive places for human conviviality, conversation and contemplation in the vast empty, uninhabitable spaces between the flanking giant buildings of Pudong. The spaces are solely for the better display of these magnificent structures, which thrust into the sky, each with its own form of loudness. Singapore’s giant hermetically-sealed interior atria in their spanking new USA-style hotels and shopping complexes also blithely turn away from the real world outside to enchant the senses with a Hollywood sort of glitter inside.⁴ Raffles City, once a symbol of modernist splendour has been “upgraded” with a veneer of kitsch. And this is not recognized as another form of de-humanization. It is but another “style.” One man’s meat, another’s poison. The tyranny of choice without discernment.

Bangkok has exhausted itself in a similar frenzy, building monster kitsch buildings. Thailand has thus broken its banks, drained the people’s savings, and left behind a city choked with smog, gridlock, and a bombed-out look. The saving grace of Bangkok, compared to Singapore, is, however, the blind tenacity of small businesses which inhabit the interstices of the city and which still display imagination and quirky humour.

The finer sensibilities and refined habits of life are being concurrently obliterated by an induced and self-imposed amnesia. The thesis of Devan and Heng (1994) is that Singapore suffers no pain of loss because it is forever predicated on forgetting its past as it chases the ever-receding horizon of progress — they thus speak of “forgetting to remember” as a permanent Singapore condition. I should add that there is an equally powerful compulsion to remember to forget. This is the greater sin, a sin of commitment, a sin of the “patriot(s) of the will” to appropriate a phrase from Lee Tzu Pheng’s poem “My Country and My People.”⁵

There is thus a powerful consensus between the individual and the state, who aid and abet each other to brush aside authentic values in order to embrace globalism as a means of survival by bread alone. Conservation of historic areas is now in vogue by virtue of the economics of tourism. But where the politics of memory is manufactured and images are fleeting, heritage, like style, can easily be appropriated for other purposes despite strenuous efforts otherwise. History, like everything else, can be made into kitsch. Emblems of the past can be useful too to spice up the blandness of the present. In Singapore, we dredge up ancestral identities to fill the void of our own making, but we have first emptied them of their troublesome contents. We have made ethnicity, the most primal identity of human sentiments, a vessel for desiccated contents. In this way we make it amenable to our politics and purposes. The taming process succeeds best when ethnicity finally becomes freeze-dried, made available for application as kitsch. Thus we have historic conservation of ethnic historic areas, not for the real and troublesome histories they contain, but for the entertainment value they provide for locals and foreigners alike. Thus history can be a narcotic too. The problem is that the strategy may actually succeed in Singapore, at least as part of the global enterprise into which it is set. And in its success, the city arrives at a new kind of crisis. These is nothing left, no vitality left to reinvent itself so as to match the rapidly changing times for Singapore to thrive and be a place for the mind and the heart.

The crux of the matter is the nexus between history and homegrown modernity. In the contestation between modernization and modernity within the imperatives of political economy, the incipient modernity which sprouted in Malaya was sadly truncated by the impossibility of managing ethnic imaginations without a strong referee. Ideas of the modern could not be consciously articulated but were lived through the vectors of language and ethnicity; and modernity being sequestered from consciousness was therefore ambivalent. But for a small strategic English-educated elite in Malaya, modernity could not be articulated at all. Thus, this group saw that a certain adherence to the principle of meritocracy applied to racial equality, fair play, the autonomy of reason, a critical spirit etc, could be made to work despite the passions of the time. The Chinese-educated were not devoid of these values though the divide between the two main linguistic-racial groups tended to emphasize differences in their values and ignored their similarities given their uneven treatment under the British. The Chinese intelligentsia was also developing an aesthetic of place in the growing output of works of Chinese artists and writers. The obsession with China was at last being matched by an affinity (though not yet allegiance) to the adopted land. The tragedy is that political events prevented the growth of this new sentiment and in the independence movement and post-independence ideological struggles for political dominance, the tragic fault lines were drawn in such a manner that a shared modernity was impossible. Thereafter, solidarity was based on an arithmetic of proportional representation and not on the praxis of integration on shared modern principles which transcend language and race. In Malaysia, politics gravitated to its present Multi-Racial form with Malay dominance enshrined constitutionally, and in Singapore, the People’s Action Party provided the only viable role of the political middle ground and referee.

Though demographically Malayans are a diminishing group by the attrition of time, their cosmopolitan Samaritan spirits, their multi-cultural sensibilities, and love of the land are still alive in the substrata of every Malaysian and Singaporean to a greater or lesser degree. These lie dormant in the institutions and the constituencies within the respective national cultures. If this incipient modernity could be made conscious in the shared heritage, Malaysian and Singaporean consciousness of their shared modernity can still grow. But the heartlanders of Singapore and the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halfitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Urbanism and Post-Colonial Nationalities: Theorizing the Southeast Asian City
• Chapter 1: Reading the Southeast Asian City in the Context of Rapid Economic Growth
• Chapter 2: “The Rise of the Merlion”: Monument and Myth in the Making of the Singapore Story
• Chapter 3: Things to a Void: Utopian Discourse, Communality and Constructed Interstices in Singapore Public Housing
• Chapter 4: Selective Disclosure: Romancing the Singapore River
• Chapter 5: Malaysia’s High-Tech Cities and the Construction of Intelligent Citizenship
• Chapter 6: Museum/City/Nation: Negotiating Identities in Urban Museums in Indonesia and Singapore
• Chapter 7: The Urban and the Urbane: Modernization, Modernism and the Rebirth of Singaporean Cinema
• Chapter 8: Benjamin in Bombay? An Asian Extrapolation