Abstract
The city of Singapore has a very short history of 185 years. However, since 1972 , Singapore has been confronting significant transformations owing to different agendas and priorities of the city government. The present morphology of the city can be best described as the accumulation of different layers, carefully controlled and manipulated by the State through planning and design. Hence, the public spaces within the city are formed as a result of the interactions among these layers. The inclusion of each layer not only shapes the physical form of the public space, but also adds a newer set of meaning by adding new functional role within the existing fabric. This article is a result of the preliminary investigation of a research project that observes the urban transformation of Singapore from 1972 to 2005 within the framework of this layered morphology. It will delve deeper to discern and identify the layers that act as the main determinant for shaping the urban public spaces in Singapore.
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Notes
Refer to Jackson Plan, 1823.
The ‘civic district’ refers to a historical area in the city (near the Singapore River) where many civic buildings are situated, such as the Supreme Court, Parliament House, Victoria Concert Hall, and Victoria Theatre. It covers Dhoby Ghaut, Bras Basah Road, the area around the Padang, Empress Place, Raffles Place, Stamford Road and Penang Road. See Straits Times, 20 February, 1992, and Teo (1992, p. 181).
Jackson’s plan not only incorporated clear ‘racial and social lines’ to separate indigenous and European inhabitants, but also demarcated different ‘ethnic quarters’ of the indigenous population in order to gain strong political and economic control. (Teo, 1992, p. 165).
All maps in this article are generated by the authors’ own research projects, unless otherwise stated.
In the first Master Plan prepared under British rule and approved in 1958, the Central Area designated for renewal covered approximately 1700 acres of land around the Singapore River. Although it constituted only 1.2 per cent of the total land area of the island, it housed approximately 250 000 people with maximum gross residential densities that exceeded 640 000 persons per square mile, making it one of the world’s most congested slums. It had developed in a chaotic and haphazard manner with complete neglect of sanitation, housing and roads.The first Master Plan called for restriction of the growth of the Central City by creating a green belt and encouraging future growth through the construction of new towns and urban areas, as well as the expansion of established villages. The emphasis of the island's public housing agency – Singapore Improvement Trust – has shifted from one of providing housing for those most in need to that of resettling whole communities displaced by central city slum clearance. Two satellite suburbs, Queenstown and Tao Payoh, both within 6 km of the centre, were the first to be planned.The trend of decentralization begun at the end of British rule continued in the subsequent Plans developed after Singapore's independence. Following the 1971 Ring Concept Plan and its 10-yearly reviews, the decentralization of population to new satellite towns continued based on the government’s policies of all-island housing and utilization of reclaimed land, and the passive acceptance, if not active promotion, of the erosion of Central Area residency. By 1970, 36 per cent of the population lived in public housing provided by the Housing and Development Board. This increased to 74 and 88 per cent for 1980 and 1990, respectively, resulting in the emptying of the Central Area.
The Sale of Sites Programme was first introduced in 1967 by the Urban Renewal Department of the HDB (the precursor to URA) to allow private developers into the public tender system (Wong and Yap, 2004, p. 15).
Population in the Central Area dropped from 226 884 in 1970 to 149 895 in 1980, or a drop of almost 34 per cent, while as a whole the population of the country grew by 16.4 per cent from 2 074 507 to 2 413 507 (Singapore, Census of Population, Release No.5 – Geographic Distribution, 1980, p. 3).
From between 3 and 10 km from the city in the 1950s and 1960s, new towns begun between 1970 and 1975 were between 10 and 25 km (or an average of 14.9 km) from the city. The next generation of new towns begun between 1976 and 1979 were further away, with an average distance of 16.9 km. See Phang (1992).
See Tourism Task Force, Report of the Tourism Task Force (Ministry of Trade and Industry: Singapore, November 1984), p. 6, and Heng (2004).
The pilot demonstration project in Tanjong Pagar covers an area of 4.1 ha with 220 units of shop-houses. See URA, Skyline (Jan/ Feb 1987).
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Kiang, H., Liang, L. New Asian public space: Layered Singapore. Urban Des Int 14, 231–246 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/udi.2009.24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/udi.2009.24