Singapore’s Politics of Heritage: A Space Without Place?
Abstract
Given Singapore’s unique position as a cosmopolitan city-state, this article will explore how national economic interests have inadvertently constrained the organic development of culture. This has led to the value of cultural heritage being quantified by its economic utility. This article will explore this proposition by examining Singapore’s pragmatic preservation of historic districts, with a focus on built heritage. By chronologically mapping our commodified cultural landscape, this article suggests that conserving cultural heritage concerns the deeper issue of national identity. Whilst recognising competing economic needs, this article ultimately proposes for greater deregulation of creative spaces and democratisation of historical narratives to further promote cultural continuity, lest we become nothing more than a cosmopolitan placeholder of a nation – a space without place.
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The salience of heritage politics in Singapore is seen by the recent debacle regarding the Chinatown mural of a Samsui woman holding a lit cigarette. What the artist, Sean Dunston, intended to be an intimate lens into the life of a Samsui woman enjoying her leisure time, escalated into a controversial debate around cultural censorship. The mural caught the Urban Development Authority’s (URA) attention and Dunston was instructed to remove the cigarette because it was “not aligned with Singapore’s anti-smoking policy stance”. [1] The URA further cited a complaint from an unnamed member of the public who suggested that the woman looked “more like a prostitute than a hardworking Samsui woman.” [2] Responding to public outcry over historical revisionism and Dunston’s provocative defence of the mural as a historically accurate cultural artefact, the URA eventually rescinded their request. Nonetheless, the heated discourse surrounding this mural unearths deeper tensions between preserving authentic historical narratives and mediating perceptions of Singapore’s identity.
This article is predominantly concerned with how the authenticity of cultural heritage has been largely subsumed by economic national interests, exemplified by the government’s initial conservative response to the Chinatown mural. Firstly, this article analyses how rapid urban renewal following Singapore’s independence has impeded efforts to preserve most of our built heritage. By extension, this article considers how Singapore’s 21st-century utilitarian approach to culture has unwittingly commodified heritage into tourist dollars to manufacture a ‘Singapore identity’. Nonetheless, the latter half of this article recognises Singapore’s many endeavours to revive cultural heritage and redefine a more collective national identity. Evaluating these efforts, this article maintains that strategies to conserve cultural heritage can be improved, and artificially inserting heritage into Singapore’s landscape is inadequate for facilitating future organic cultural creation. Instead, this article briefly proposes greater deregulation of creative spaces and democratising Singapore’s diverse historical narratives. Without greater efforts to promote organic cultural continuity, Singapore will become nothing more than a cosmopolitan placeholder of a nation – a space without place.
Past Precedents of Urban Renewal
Singapore has been burdened by geopolitical risks and socioeconomic concerns from its very incipience, which inevitably consigned the social value of Singapore’s built heritage as secondary to establishing global significance and economic growth.
The gradual subordination of built heritage to urban renewal can be traced by the rapid actions the government took after Singapore’s independence in 1965. Singapore’s post-war period was precarious – the landscape was blighted with squatter settlements which were unsanitary, densely populated, and in grave need of restoration by any means necessary. The government thus pushed for a public housing programme to ameliorate these dilapidated housing conditions, bringing along a slew of legislations, the most important being the Land Acquisition Act (1966), empowering the government to acquire “‘any particular land’ for ‘any purpose’ or ‘any work undertaking which, in the opinion of the Minister, is of public benefit or of public utility or in the public interest’”[3]. Simultaneously, the establishment of the Housing Development Board (HDB) as a centralised regulatory power over state land further paved the way for greater state control over Singapore’s built environment, cementing political authority over the conservation or demolition of built heritage.
The Balancing Act of Progress
It is important to note that the overlooked value of heritage conservation in favour of urban renewal was a pragmatic decision made in perilous circumstances. Although this article is largely concerned with the increasing hollowness of Singapore’s heritage, it does not disregard the fragile balancing act of sacrificing less immediate concerns for the nation’s development. This conundrum was evident in the early 1960s when the UN issued a report to Singapore, emphasising “the value and attraction of many of the existing shophouses and the way of living, working and trading that produced this particularly Singapore type of architecture”[4]. Yet most of these recommendations to conserve parts of Singapore’s original landscape fell by the wayside. Indeed, Alan Choe, Singapore’s Chief Planner, encapsulates why heritage was a subordinate concern: “Unlike England or Europe, Singapore does not possess architectural monuments of international importance … [with] few buildings worthy of preservation … to preach urban renewal by conservation and rehabilitation alone does not apply in the Singapore context. There must also be clearance and rebuilding.” [5]
In the ‘Singapore context’? Certainly, Choe’s remark probes an equally valid perspective on Singapore’s heritage politics: maybe, we did not have much of a distinctive cultural landscape to begin with. Perhaps, Singapore’s rapid modernisation into a metropolis is a proud sign of progress, and we are building our cultural heritage as we speak. Furthermore, the even bigger elephant in the room is that Singapore’s culture is presently better known for intangibles like Singlish, our culture of eating at hawker centres, food, and the like - aptly compensating for our lack of built heritage sites. Indeed, Singapore is fundamentally a country with less than a hundred years of history, and most of our development has only been secured in the last fifty years of development. Should the state of our built cultural heritage and robust community life not reflect our nation’s youth?
Nonetheless, this article aims to bring import to future concerns. By mapping Singapore’s historical urban renewal project, this article reveals that this balancing act of progress requires long-term discourse around cultural creation. As Singapore reaches its 60th birthday this 2025, we must give even greater credence to two interlinked questions: i) where do we draw the line when demolishing our cultural landscape for economic growth; and ii) who gets to qualify what cultural heritage is ‘worthy’ of preservation?
In Singapore’s early years of independence, these questions were much easier to answer. Now, juggling the complexities of 21st-century international order and retaining our nation’s distinctiveness, we must be more reticent of our increasing urban anonymity as a global city. The conservation of cultural heritage is not a project that can be executed in a few years, but a master plan carried across centuries. As such, the discourse around heritage and culture is far from meaningless, as the quest to retain Singapore’s identity must be strategically addressed to protect and cultivate the cultural heritage we are creating today.
The Commodification of Cultural Heritage
Pulling back to the main concern of this article and tracking historical developments for greater context, the two aforementioned questions on the development of cultural heritage were only spotlighted in political discourse in the 1980s when heritage conservation was operationalised as an economic endeavour for tourism. Firstly, there was the growing sense by politicians and citizens alike that rapid modernisation had somewhat made Singapore “too ‘Western’... and there was a need to reclaim our Asian identity and history” [6]. Secondly, Singapore’s quest to become a cosmopolitan city was not simply a domestic crisis of national identity, but also came with the cost of losing its ‘oriental mystique’; this lack of a distinctive cultural landscape reduced its attractiveness as a tourist destination, with tourist arrivals falling for the first time by 3.5% in 1982 [7]. This scramble to regain global significance provided the impetus for stronger heritage conservation efforts, like the Tourism Product Development Plan of 1986, which aimed to redevelop ethnic enclaves like Chinatown and Little India. Among others, plans were set for the “redevelopment” of Fort Canning, the “restoration” of Emerald Hill (notable for its Peranakan architecture), and the “recreation” of Bugis Street (famous for its street life and local food) [8]. Nonetheless, the destruction caused by the urban renewal in the 1960s led to heritage becoming an economic project, requiring the careful curation of Singapore’s cultural features. Indeed, much literature on heritage has criticised Singapore’s repackaging of cultural landscapes by superimposing consolidated themes onto specific historic districts [9]. If places like Bugis Street were demolished and ‘recreated’ decades later, are these heritage sites more akin to falsified narratives of the past?
Artificial Heritage & Manufactured Authenticity
The problem with monetising heritage is epitomised by the anthropologist, Christoph Brumann: “Attempts to derive legitimacy from past precedent are as old as humanity, and ever since the rise of the modern nation-state, the imagination of ethnic and national communities has been underpinned by the construction of a suitable shared past and the increasingly professionalised preservation of its glorious relics.[10]”
Indeed, the politics of professionally restoring heritage to lend a nation historical precedence and attract tourist dollars has indirectly constrained cultural creation. The Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) mandates that little to no modifications can be made to the interior and exterior of built heritage, which is a stark contrast to “cultural precincts in other cities where artists are allowed to rework their environment as part of cultural adaptation. [11]” Businesses and artists who move into these restored historic districts face the frustration of adhering to strict urban planning laws that aestheticise these districts at the cost of spontaneous cultural activity. These districts, which people should be free to transform, instead feel encased in glass, constrained by regulations opposed to creative modification. Whilst it is by no means easy to balance heritage preservation and cultural conservation, spotlighting these restrictions suggests clear ways to loosen public policy without compromising heritage preservation.
More broadly, with competing economic issues like increasing population size and urban expansion, Singapore has continued to zone our limited natural heritage for further infrastructural development. The community petitions negotiating for greater protection of our rich biodiversity in zoned forested areas like Tengah New Town or Dover Forest highlight that we still have physical heritage sites of ecological significance, and worth fighting to keep. Singapore’s current strategy to weave nature into our residential areas must be backed by the community’s recognition of the importance of all sources of cultural heritage that brand this ‘City in a Garden’, leaving more to be done by local communities to voice protection for these heritage sites.
Furthermore, a stark example of Singapore’s built heritage being overshadowed by economic motives is seen by comparing Bukit Brown Cemetery and Gardens by the Bay as two culturally significant areas. The famous Singaporean architect, William Lim, conceived Bukit Brown as a “space from which national narratives may be drawn” from the Chinese cultural decorations adorning the graves, whilst Gardens by the Bay “encapsulates the hallmarks of the global city – expensive, artificial, decontextualised…primed for the tourist gaze” [12]. While both sites in some way contributed to reifying Singapore’s national identity, half of Bukit Brown cemetery was demolished to make way for an eight-lane highway in 2015. Bukit Brown’s demolition undergirds Singapore’s rather commodified approach to heritage. Against the backdrop of the state’s nation-building project, Singapore still lacks a sense of historical precedence and cultural continuity.
In a few decades, what of Singapore will we have left? What emotional attachment can we have to this landscape’s high-rise glass edifices?
The Political Memory of Heritage
Nevertheless, Singapore has attempted to renew our hollowed cultural heritage landscape. Acknowledging that Singapore’s historical urban renewal project laced heritage conservation efforts with a lingering sense of artificiality, Lee Kuan Yew wrote ‘The Singapore Story’ in 1998. The narrative of ‘The Singapore Story’ centres on the People’s Action Party’s (PAP) socioeconomic and political struggles in the 1960s, and how they led Singapore to its current economic prosperity. This narrative is reflected in the history textbooks of the Singapore curriculum, evoking patriotism for the nation’s rapid industrialisation. Yet, similar to the artificiality of touristy historic districts, ‘The Singapore Story’ arguably does not effectively engender strong historical nostalgia and patriotism in Singaporean youth who simply did not live through Mr Lee’s era, and struggle to find this narrative personally resonant. Arguably, ‘The Singapore Story’ is somewhat hegemonic in narrating the nation’s history, as its prominence inevitably sidelines the significance of alternative narratives that may capture a more holistic, diverse understanding of Singapore’s history – as experienced by a community instead of narrated by one.
To be fair, Singapore has embraced more diverse views to regain a more emphatic sense of our heritage through the digital space. In celebration of Singapore’s 50th anniversary of independence, the National Library Board launched the Singapore Memory Project (SMP), aiming to collect five million digital memories of Singapore. The website allowed Singaporeans to upload photographs and videos of any sites and activities that imbued their daily life – memories of buildings now demolished, schools, ethnic celebrations – anything from the remarkable to the mundane. Yet, the degree of nostalgia and emotional resonance evoked by this heritage project is ambiguous. Gene Tan, the director of the project, expressed that they initially started this project with the aim of “trying to create a stage in which all memories will come together, and you will see a grand narrative”, evolving into a fascination of capturing “the messiness of it all” [13]. This ‘messiness’ may imply the acceptance of diverse views of the community and embracing cultural spontaneity. On the other hand, some argue that the “decontextualised memories of the past [do not] constitute histories”, and the amalgamation of atomised digital media from individuals on the SMP did not synthesise more diverse historical memories that could move beyond ‘The Singapore Story’ [14].
Overall, the efficacies of Singapore’s quest to revive an authentic sense of cultural heritage remain tenuous. With our increasing population size and how young the nation is, it is unsurprisingly difficult to engender a collective, yet diverse and lived sense of ‘the Singapore experience’.
Democratising Heritage
The accumulated controversy over Singapore’s utilitarian heritage conservation surfaces the pressing need to confront this fleeting sense of our authentic national identity. Upon evaluating Singapore’s approaches to heritage, I briefly propose greater democratisation of cultural heritage efforts. Specifically, the local community must be i) given greater freedom to develop diverse narratives of history; ii) granted greater control over heritage conservation efforts; and iii) to integrate historic districts with contemporary cultural life, with more unplanned or unregulated spaces to facilitate this social process. After all, if heritage is defined as cultural relics inherited from the past and reinterpreted into the present, historic districts should embrace the transformation brought by contemporary social activity.
For example, Peace Centre was a 47-year-old mall, slated for demolition in late 2023. However, being one of Singapore’s pioneer shopping centres, the community seized the opportunity to celebrate its historic significance. A pair of creatives founded the social movement, PlayPan, convincing the building’s owners to support their social engagement movement which would allow small local businesses and other creatives to set up shop in Peace Centre, rent-free. During its six-month extended lease, the mall’s vestiges as a historic place for independent businesses enthralled creative youth, who embraced its culture of entrepreneurship and turned it into a creative hub. In its last moments, this run-down mall metamorphosed into a graffiti-lined artistic space – full of trendy thrift stores, vintage bookstores, and art exhibitions; an unplanned space that conserved cultural heritage whilst transforming its significance [15]. The shopping mall acted as a rare third space, allowing youth to wander and drift to create an authentic cultural experience. Perhaps the local community should be given more free rein to incorporate such dérive into our scape, inspiring creativity.
Likewise, there must be greater deregulation of cultural activities in historic districts. Kyoto, similar to Singapore, has strict urban planning laws which force businesses to adhere to traditional colour schemes. Yet, unlike Singapore, Kyoto embraces the transformation of its landscape, with businesses physically transforming the historic streets by making slight additions to shophouses’ exteriors to advertise their brands in a way that blends in yet modifies the landscape. Similarly, Singapore could give more leeway to allow artists and businesses to make more functional changes to traditional shophouses. Moreover, greater funding could be given to “subsidise owners of heritage properties who will not benefit from the windfall of [commercial] sales”, protecting less well-known historic architecture [16]. After all, market forces should not solely determine what cultural heritage gets to survive. Greater deregulation acknowledges that heritage, like culture, is not static, but fluidly transforms with modern social life.
The Future of Our Past
So, what now? Singapore’s forced oscillation as a nation-state and a cosmopolitan city has left it in a cultural limbo. Nonetheless, this article has outlined increasing efforts and greater engagement in cultural heritage, leaving hope for the future of our past. With Singapore’s survival hinged on its ability to function as a dynamic cosmopolitan city and a distinctive nation-state, efforts to conserve cultural heritage must be pushed into the public consciousness. I hope readers are left with a renewed agency to enact social change by conceiving heritage as a fluid, interactive concept. In the words of the anthropologist, Tim Ingold: “To perceive a landscape is to carry out an act of remembrance, and remembering is not so much a matter of calling up an internal image, stored in the mind, as of *engaging perpetually with an environment that is itself pregnant with the past.* [17]”
Ingold asserts that the effort put towards conserving heritage is not an effort to petrify ideas of history, but rather, to engage with heritage as a cultural product of the present. Poignantly, landscapes only take shape when there are people to dwell and interact in and with the place. As historic districts are lined with traditional shophouses and rejuvenated by the buzz of businesses and creatives, as people traverse the city and its attractions, we are perpetually altering our landscape through our very existence in them. Our task is to transform this Little Red Dot’s vestiges of the past and to transfigure its cultural significance into the present. To engage with the politics of heritage is a search for our authentic national identity; to confront and discover what makes Singapore “home, truly”.
Footnotes:
[1] URA to Re-Evaluate Stance over Chinatown Mural Featuring Smoking Samsui Woman after Public Feedback
[2] Ong Whee Teck, Commentary: The Controversy over the Samsui Woman Mural Is Not Just about Art.
[3] Kevin Tan, The Business of Heritage in Singapore: Money, Politics & Identity, p.592.
[4] Lim Tin Seng, To Wreck or to Recreate: Giving New Life to Singapore’s Built Heritage, p.48.
[5] Kevin Tan, Fighting for and about Heritage: State-Society Engagements in Singapore, p.11.
[6] The Business of Heritage in Singapore, p.598.
[7] Teng Chye Khoo, Planning for Tourism: Creating a Vibrant Singapore, p.41.
[8] The Business of Heritage in Singapore, p.599.
[9] TC Chang and Brenda SA Yeoh, ‘New Asia – Singapore’: Communicating Local Cultures through Global Tourism, p.108.
[10] Christoph Brumann, Outside the Glass Case: The Social Life of Urban Heritage in Kyoto, p.276.
[11] TC Chang, ‘New Uses Need Old Buildings’: Gentrification Aesthetics and the Arts in Singapore, p.535.
[12] William Lim, Public Space in Urban Asia, p.37.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Kevin Blackburn, The ‘Democratization’ of Memories of Singapore’s Past, p.445.
[15] Christie Chiu, ‘It’s Hard to Find Another Place like This’: Peace Centre to Close after Jan 28.
[16] The Business of Heritage in Singapore, p.606
[17] Tim Ingold, The Temporality of the Landscape, p.153.