Something written by one of our forumsters' dad I met last year.
ZOOMING OUT: Re-Imagining Singapore
by Tay Kheng Soon, circa 2000
A version of this reflection was published as the afterword to NO OTHER CITY: The Ethos Anthology of Urban Poetry (Ethos Books 2000)
I sit here; a cigarette in hand with an addiction-induced sense of well being, soothed further by coffee and jazz coming over the PA. A soft rain falls; this is tropical Asia, lands of rice, bamboo and monsoon. The waitresses are arranging flowers in preparation for the after-five crowds. Baby’s breath and white carnations. A touch of class for new Asians.
Two young chaps are working in the next table, speaking animatedly in mandarin; paper scattered on table, hand phone going. Modern Jazz Quartet on weaves its spell. The piano cuts in. The guitar wends its way between the bass-line. Katapang and Buddha’s Ficus trees form a screen around the Substation courtyard; guards against the encroaching city. This is an oasis. Outside, the city’s frenetic pace pounds on relentlessly. I can hear the rumble, it says that memories and sentiments are of little use, shaped, as they are, by the imperatives of economics and political will.
On one wall, which edges one side of the space there, are graffiti paintings. A frog with its tongue skewered by a baby’s soother; the best of all gags! A large half-chomped apple flagrantly proclaims itself. Graphics on the walls are painted over and over again: expressions of young sentiments given free reign. Once there was a drawing of a naughty boy, now painted out, peeing near to or into a barrel. It could have been a beer barrel. A conscientious committee member of the Museum neighbour worried that sponsors of the Substation’s theatre may be annoyed, insisted that it be painted out. The Substation director protests the right to decide on such matters threatens resignation in protest. The ‘owner’ of the wall asserted legal rights. The potentially offensive graphic was painted out. Art on the wall however continues, the bad taste left in the mouth fades in time, as with memories. Life goes on.
Java-teak furniture gives off a warm sense in the courtyard. Another touch of class. The yellow-ochre walls cast a glow to warm young bones cold in the light of their everyday reality.
I can hear the traffic pick up. Soon, the city will empty save for the watering holes which draw in tourists and stragglers reluctant to return to cosy-land. City workers head home to their little patches of precious sky making up the new towns. Life resumes at the food centres there and then they retire to watch family-life–on the TV. Meanwhile the city is dead. Rats scurry across Shenton Way. An eerie silence settles over the CBD. There is no life. Will life ever come back? No city is just concrete, steel and glass. Cities need spirit and bodies to be alive. Where has the human spirit gone, to the new towns?
But there are pockets of life around food and shopping centres in the city but only eating and shopping, little more animate them. The Tuck Shop, MPH, char kuay teow, ngo hiang at Armenian Street. The schools have all left; trailing behind the exodus to the new towns in the thirty years since urban renewal began. Raffles Girls School, St Joseph’s, Raffles Institution, ACS (Anglo-Chinese School) Coleman Street have all gone to the suburbs. The old ACS is now the National Archives, a storehouse for the debris of time.
The Modern Jazz Quartet goes on sweetly; the mandarin voices continue to punctuate the drone of the city outside, the handphones go on, lifelines to the city’s pulse. Two Indian girls arrive, chat in the ruins of the abandoned transformer yard which is now part of the Substation. It too would have vanished without memory or trace had it not been for the vision of Kuo Pao Kun who had faith that ruins and the margins of everyday life are fertile grounds for new hope to arise. So now he sits on the T21 private sector committee to help think through a new way ahead for Singapore.
He has to find how it will be possible for art and poetry to be the cradles of creativity against the canon of hard practical truth, which is money. Money that the big spending developers of high rise office buildings will ring into the cash registers of the nation’s coffers. Meanwhile, the dead city still has to wait for human life to course through its streets and to activate its squares. Only a fundamental change in the planner’s land-use policies can bring life back to the city.
And so the few active places in the city are pressured by too much of life’s diversity. How much sense do heavy-metal kids need when they want to vent their spleen in sound and fury at the Substation? How to risk a bust-up which may jeopardise everything there. That was Pao Kun’s dilemma, but he had enough faith that somehow the risk can be managed and that the hounds of public order can be kept at bay. And his handling and faith fortunately proved adequate and right. The heavy-metal kids had their fun, knew where the risks lay, now call him “uncle”.
The rain pours, this is the tropics after all. But somehow the rain does not wash away the heavy air that sits on the city’s soul. Only the pavements get cleaned. And the planners who do not know about ‘air’ are now frantically tweaking the knobs and pulling the levers to turn Singapore into a hub, a communication hub, a science hub, a knowledge hub, it is because they fear dissolution. But only free people can spontaneously reinvent themselves to face the new day. Tweaking mechanical contraptions will not prevent them falling apart when the design limits of the machine are exceeded. A leaf falls on my plate, has foreign talent arrived?
An experimental experiential house was recently built in the courtyard of the Substation. It was about living; about a new way of seeing. But the exhibition was attended only by friends and curious visitors. Life passed it by; but something is better than nothing. Have we learnt to trim avert our eyes and bind our hearts? I hope we have not learnt too well.
But to survive and prosper in material terms, we have become the generations that remember to forget. We forget what is prescribed not to remember. Sure, we tell no lies. It is only that the whole truth is omitted in the telling. When history is predicated exclusively on political imperatives, it is hard to see the reality for what it is. That is what Janadas Devan said elliptically at a forum in the Substation once.
A river must have a start and an end, but our view of the present reality has taken the form of discrete slices of disembodied time; sound bytes in the prescribed story line. Thus with eyes fixed on the ever-receding horizon, consciousness is locked into a perpetual present. We are thus cast adrift in the endless river of time where there is nothing to tie to except fictions. Many of the young have learnt to excuse their own inaction on the grounds that they are still learning and experiencing. But who has stopped? We always act on incomplete knowledge. It is the human predicament. Walls are not just walls they are contentions. Even allies take opposite sides to protect each other from each other. Flowers -- baby’s breath and carnations have become classy kitsch. They are not flowers; they are images with no fragrance.
I just wrote a piece last night. “Reinventing Singapore” to the press, I know they will not publish it. I leave for New York on Monday, to that great sponge of foreign talent! To a New York that still succeeds because it gives enough for what it takes, that is the secret of its success.
My mind wanders over the wall and through the trees into the city. It briefly settles on the MPH nearby which has become just another bookshop, a vendor. Only the initials remain of the Malayan Publishing House, the Methodist Church’s printing enterprise for bibles and other religious tracts and school textbooks. The National Library is also nearby, rendezvous for many a student, a place of fond friendships and a window to world. Now it is to give way to a traffic tunnel proposed by engineers who cannot factor-in human sentiments. The proposition that engineering might now perhaps obey public sentiment is a new idea for the new generations. But if they knew that the Library also sits on grounds formally occupied by the British Council where Art and sensibility in Malaya and Singapore was kindled they would not dismiss the Malayan period as mere nostalgia. Furthermore, if they knew that the British Council sat on the very same grounds, which was once part of Singapore’s first botanical garden, they will realise that this is truly hallowed ground, link to the neighbouring farm-lands; added reason for breaking out of the in the agenda of forgetfulness.
In the distance, my dreaming eye sees Katong’s tall swaying coconut trees (symbol of backwardness) along what was once beach, now highway. On the East Coast Park which took its place are now dwarf coconuts made legitimate in iteration of USA’s prime tropical tourism image; Hawaii. Similarly in the west coast, Pasir Panjang’s villages vanished to port expansion and condos, victims of progress. Clearly, pain has been made easier to bear when we do not remember. A long-time Malayan, Johnny Johnson, built in Pasir Panjang a resort-restaurant which conjures an ambience of outdoor tropical dining but it fell to building regulations, which demanded concrete structures and sanitation rules. Haw Pah Villa, next door, turned into an Americanised theme park. Chinatown is to be more Chinese than Malayan, Nanyang and the Vernacular. It is geared-up to be an oriental piece of orientalism for the delectation of tourists. Failing to ignite imagination, they all failed and will continue to fail miserably because there is no ring of truth to them. They too become victims of the kind of jaded progress. Only the bold and the bright re-imagine other possibilities. Even the tourists see through the sham. The in-flight Singapore is embarrassing. Old warriors have too many reflexes conditioned to fight demons to take new risks including the most challenging of all; the unconditioning their own condition.
When I speak of risks I include generosity. Not the dumb sort of hands-off giving but a smart new kind. One which sees the risks but is willing to face up to it with kindness. Only then will it be seen as sincere. Other risks include the growth of self-esteem that does not need to hanker after other people’s images. The young Singapore poet, Alfian Sa’at says in his published book of poems, One Fierce Hour, that he has lost his country to images, I know exactly what he means.
The sun casts a rosy tinge on the Carlton Hotel visible through the surrounding trees. As sun sets, a different mood sets in. Darkness shrinks space, rouses the senses, things lose definition. The horror of the city’s emptiness is averted, as eyes are drawn towards the tiny bright spots of life. The rest does not matter. As the night wears on, and as any night-bird knows, that in the progressing darkness senses sharpen; consciousness draws ever inward until finally sleep comes and phantoms are released to inhabit the vast void of inner space.
Surely every city is also Generic City. Not just a collection of artefacts, buildings, roads. Old cities have urbanism, new ones only urbanisation. Urbanism is manners married to space embodied in the fabric of the city. Thus urbanism, manners, memories, and ambitions are what are really important in the clarity of broad daylight. At night, urbanism is a drifting world of sense and dreams. The terrors of the day fold away. Rationality fades with the failing light. Freedom is the night; it is time to create. And in the full glare of daylight dreams fade away. But planners know little of this because they operate in statistics and imported images.
The so-called “new urbanism”, is one of these. That it is the American new middle class’s substitute for jazzed-up suburbia is not appreciated, thus it serves yet again to confuse the issue of our own urban project. That’s the problem of imported images and planning bereft of living.
Thus we must guard against imports learn how to live. When we avidly buy foreign talent and foreign ideas because we think they are chic we fail to evolve what is true to our living. Urbanism is thus about freeing up our imagination about our civic urban values. The specifics of our humanity, geography and history are the grounds for real thought and creation. The Urbanism we should make is about an authentic conviviality, which cuts across social classes, and racial barriers, which continue to divide, polarise and bore, requiring entertainment and rules and enforcement to make life tolerable. When we are true to ourselves, our urbanism will become truly universal. No need to hard sell our tourism. No need to hype the people into the 21st Century. They will get there themselves on their own wings. Our urbanism will not be made by the stick and the carrot.
While avowing communitarian values, it is too easy, too convenient to just place a higher value on blood and kinship ties. We need to look beyond the inner circle, to the wider civic urban values. Only modern societies strive to internalise public morals into private lives within the abstract ideal of a generalised civility. Our ethnic values is thus something we need to re-look at because it is the source of our anxieties; a brake on our urbanism. People who are fearful of the unknown, and in want of hero-leaders, group and gravitate towards collective ideologies. They are amenable to authoritarian leadership. They thus can move mountains through hard-work and cognitive rigidity when the leadership is able. When it is not, the situation festers. Fear of being disadvantaged, looked down upon, losing-out however dominate our imagination even as we grow materially. When the material goal has been reached, the plateau is much more difficult to climb out of without the modernisation of the culture of everyday life. We need a lively civic urban culture to reach a new level. The grip of fear is loosening especially among the young because they are bored by the constant drum of threatening scenarios. It is time for a new imagination and a new socialisation of responsible autonomy to grow because as the young acquire smart-work and flexible imagination, they will dream of being in other more conducive places. Only when we learn new ways of seeing and feeling, then will we engage our young and the talented in the unfolding new world.
Making living creative and making the city liveability is the new challenge for Singapore. Accompanying this must be real choices in the live-styles. The cosmopolitan centre and the conservative fringe must be allowed their differences; as it is, there is too much sameness. If a million people live in the city, Singapore will never be the same again. It is possible to kick-start the New Singapore. This is Singapore’s predicament to be solved -- equality and sameness never created creativity. This is Singapore’s success story gone wrong.
There should be spatial distinctions or zones where natural differences are manifest. This is all the more necessary in a small place where even-handedness has resulted in sameness at the hands of the centralised agencies. It is time to decentralise the administration for the sake of creativity. The trick is to ensure that each zone should be administered and actioned separately whereby each zone can naturally respond to and therefore provide distinctive styles of life and have environmental characteristics in sync with each particular locale. Indeed, differences can only come about when the milieu of each zone is different. The special qualities of Holland Village is just such an example where a unique social milieu which supports it has resulted in the special ambience. But this was achieved by fluke. In a different social milieu in which we are free to gravitate to areas conducive to them, then Singapore will naturally have many different ambiences. And life will have some sparkle to it.
The city core is that special place where this can happen and needs to happen. Let people then chose where they want to live, to have their children educated, to work and to play. The City can become the crucible of the new creativity. It takes a smart, light touch to make it happen. Sameness is to be dreaded at all costs, it deadens. And the antidotes to wealth induced degradation are art, scholarship, philanthropy. Otherwise, wealth merely feeds wants. When people want what others have in terms of tangible symbols and things, there will be sameness and intolerance towards difference. There are thus risk investments to be made with power, wealth and culture.
Boston, same size as Singapore has 50 universities within a 50-mile radius, the Gardner Museum shines its generous spirit despite its record of scandal. Isabella Steward Gardner lived above her Museum; an heiress who knew how to live; worked to prevail against the degradation and dissolution produced by wealth. She knew that the human spirit’s tendency towards corrosion and art, intellect, scholarship and philanthropy and the feeling that duty towards others must first be gained through duty towards oneself as these are the only things that can mitigate meanness and greed. Then a community of spirit will arise to give rise to a true spirit of community not needing inducements, punishments and mobilising to act in the common good despite differences. The vitality of Route 128 in Boston, a rival to Silicon Valley, testifies that scientists and engineers are not mono-dimensional creatures, they too need to breath the fragrances provided by art and the humanities to inspire their creativity and their inventiveness.
A bit of discipline helps bolster a creative society. Discipline without sensibility confirms a society to uncreativity. Mayor Guiliani, New York’s Lee Kuan Yew, puts in the discipline of late, it does good, makes the place better. New York re-invents itself once again.
Seeing ourselves is easier from a distance. We travel to see ourselves afresh. Many people however, travel in a hermetically sealed bubble to confirm their prejudices. They see New York for its mess not its vitality. Here I am in New York City. Peeling away the images that make up our Singapore reality is like tearing away at a life of habitual thinking. But we need to start with the here and the now and then zoom out to a different vantage. Zooming to the past is to realise the tapestry of our time; the construction of the collage of our life, its shoring and gummed-up seams, colours, fragrances and wounds. There is so much debris and unfinished business and it will make you want to do something about it, not just soak in it. We can drown in your own consumption and our self-made iterations made bigger, brighter, louder and more.
Finally, the development of language is crucial and should be in tandem with our process of modernisation. Unless there is language to shape thought, realisations will remain vague urgings. Diction is an indicator of content in language. From the disparate peoples who gravitated to this place, a Malayan culture came about, and with it, a new voice -- the Malayan voice. This voice embodied thoughts and sensibilities grown from the land inspired by a universalistic modernity, even though one part of it was focused on China, the other on the West. Nevertheless, a new sensibility arose from the rootedness in the land.
Unfortunately, as rapid modernisation took over Malayan modernity, the mechanisation of language in the nation-building years, especially in Singapore cut off the roots of its own modernity and its aesthetic of place. Thus, Singlish is the orphaned child of displaced Malayanism. And so our newscasters feign an American twang. The prattle of everyday speech is cosy but unedifying -- it contains no ideals.
Soon, night will fall again over the Substation courtyard and human perception draw inwards. Will the Substation be absorbed into the Singapore night where phantoms stalk? When the Singapore Management University (SMU) campus takes its place in the city, will this bring new illuminate or just add only more clamour? Will the peace be drowned out by bigger, louder, brighter and more because we need to know what is “better”?
ZOOMING OUT: Re-Imagining Singapore
by Tay Kheng Soon, circa 2000
A version of this reflection was published as the afterword to NO OTHER CITY: The Ethos Anthology of Urban Poetry (Ethos Books 2000)
I sit here; a cigarette in hand with an addiction-induced sense of well being, soothed further by coffee and jazz coming over the PA. A soft rain falls; this is tropical Asia, lands of rice, bamboo and monsoon. The waitresses are arranging flowers in preparation for the after-five crowds. Baby’s breath and white carnations. A touch of class for new Asians.
Two young chaps are working in the next table, speaking animatedly in mandarin; paper scattered on table, hand phone going. Modern Jazz Quartet on weaves its spell. The piano cuts in. The guitar wends its way between the bass-line. Katapang and Buddha’s Ficus trees form a screen around the Substation courtyard; guards against the encroaching city. This is an oasis. Outside, the city’s frenetic pace pounds on relentlessly. I can hear the rumble, it says that memories and sentiments are of little use, shaped, as they are, by the imperatives of economics and political will.
On one wall, which edges one side of the space there, are graffiti paintings. A frog with its tongue skewered by a baby’s soother; the best of all gags! A large half-chomped apple flagrantly proclaims itself. Graphics on the walls are painted over and over again: expressions of young sentiments given free reign. Once there was a drawing of a naughty boy, now painted out, peeing near to or into a barrel. It could have been a beer barrel. A conscientious committee member of the Museum neighbour worried that sponsors of the Substation’s theatre may be annoyed, insisted that it be painted out. The Substation director protests the right to decide on such matters threatens resignation in protest. The ‘owner’ of the wall asserted legal rights. The potentially offensive graphic was painted out. Art on the wall however continues, the bad taste left in the mouth fades in time, as with memories. Life goes on.
Java-teak furniture gives off a warm sense in the courtyard. Another touch of class. The yellow-ochre walls cast a glow to warm young bones cold in the light of their everyday reality.
I can hear the traffic pick up. Soon, the city will empty save for the watering holes which draw in tourists and stragglers reluctant to return to cosy-land. City workers head home to their little patches of precious sky making up the new towns. Life resumes at the food centres there and then they retire to watch family-life–on the TV. Meanwhile the city is dead. Rats scurry across Shenton Way. An eerie silence settles over the CBD. There is no life. Will life ever come back? No city is just concrete, steel and glass. Cities need spirit and bodies to be alive. Where has the human spirit gone, to the new towns?
But there are pockets of life around food and shopping centres in the city but only eating and shopping, little more animate them. The Tuck Shop, MPH, char kuay teow, ngo hiang at Armenian Street. The schools have all left; trailing behind the exodus to the new towns in the thirty years since urban renewal began. Raffles Girls School, St Joseph’s, Raffles Institution, ACS (Anglo-Chinese School) Coleman Street have all gone to the suburbs. The old ACS is now the National Archives, a storehouse for the debris of time.
The Modern Jazz Quartet goes on sweetly; the mandarin voices continue to punctuate the drone of the city outside, the handphones go on, lifelines to the city’s pulse. Two Indian girls arrive, chat in the ruins of the abandoned transformer yard which is now part of the Substation. It too would have vanished without memory or trace had it not been for the vision of Kuo Pao Kun who had faith that ruins and the margins of everyday life are fertile grounds for new hope to arise. So now he sits on the T21 private sector committee to help think through a new way ahead for Singapore.
He has to find how it will be possible for art and poetry to be the cradles of creativity against the canon of hard practical truth, which is money. Money that the big spending developers of high rise office buildings will ring into the cash registers of the nation’s coffers. Meanwhile, the dead city still has to wait for human life to course through its streets and to activate its squares. Only a fundamental change in the planner’s land-use policies can bring life back to the city.
And so the few active places in the city are pressured by too much of life’s diversity. How much sense do heavy-metal kids need when they want to vent their spleen in sound and fury at the Substation? How to risk a bust-up which may jeopardise everything there. That was Pao Kun’s dilemma, but he had enough faith that somehow the risk can be managed and that the hounds of public order can be kept at bay. And his handling and faith fortunately proved adequate and right. The heavy-metal kids had their fun, knew where the risks lay, now call him “uncle”.
The rain pours, this is the tropics after all. But somehow the rain does not wash away the heavy air that sits on the city’s soul. Only the pavements get cleaned. And the planners who do not know about ‘air’ are now frantically tweaking the knobs and pulling the levers to turn Singapore into a hub, a communication hub, a science hub, a knowledge hub, it is because they fear dissolution. But only free people can spontaneously reinvent themselves to face the new day. Tweaking mechanical contraptions will not prevent them falling apart when the design limits of the machine are exceeded. A leaf falls on my plate, has foreign talent arrived?
An experimental experiential house was recently built in the courtyard of the Substation. It was about living; about a new way of seeing. But the exhibition was attended only by friends and curious visitors. Life passed it by; but something is better than nothing. Have we learnt to trim avert our eyes and bind our hearts? I hope we have not learnt too well.
But to survive and prosper in material terms, we have become the generations that remember to forget. We forget what is prescribed not to remember. Sure, we tell no lies. It is only that the whole truth is omitted in the telling. When history is predicated exclusively on political imperatives, it is hard to see the reality for what it is. That is what Janadas Devan said elliptically at a forum in the Substation once.
A river must have a start and an end, but our view of the present reality has taken the form of discrete slices of disembodied time; sound bytes in the prescribed story line. Thus with eyes fixed on the ever-receding horizon, consciousness is locked into a perpetual present. We are thus cast adrift in the endless river of time where there is nothing to tie to except fictions. Many of the young have learnt to excuse their own inaction on the grounds that they are still learning and experiencing. But who has stopped? We always act on incomplete knowledge. It is the human predicament. Walls are not just walls they are contentions. Even allies take opposite sides to protect each other from each other. Flowers -- baby’s breath and carnations have become classy kitsch. They are not flowers; they are images with no fragrance.
I just wrote a piece last night. “Reinventing Singapore” to the press, I know they will not publish it. I leave for New York on Monday, to that great sponge of foreign talent! To a New York that still succeeds because it gives enough for what it takes, that is the secret of its success.
My mind wanders over the wall and through the trees into the city. It briefly settles on the MPH nearby which has become just another bookshop, a vendor. Only the initials remain of the Malayan Publishing House, the Methodist Church’s printing enterprise for bibles and other religious tracts and school textbooks. The National Library is also nearby, rendezvous for many a student, a place of fond friendships and a window to world. Now it is to give way to a traffic tunnel proposed by engineers who cannot factor-in human sentiments. The proposition that engineering might now perhaps obey public sentiment is a new idea for the new generations. But if they knew that the Library also sits on grounds formally occupied by the British Council where Art and sensibility in Malaya and Singapore was kindled they would not dismiss the Malayan period as mere nostalgia. Furthermore, if they knew that the British Council sat on the very same grounds, which was once part of Singapore’s first botanical garden, they will realise that this is truly hallowed ground, link to the neighbouring farm-lands; added reason for breaking out of the in the agenda of forgetfulness.
In the distance, my dreaming eye sees Katong’s tall swaying coconut trees (symbol of backwardness) along what was once beach, now highway. On the East Coast Park which took its place are now dwarf coconuts made legitimate in iteration of USA’s prime tropical tourism image; Hawaii. Similarly in the west coast, Pasir Panjang’s villages vanished to port expansion and condos, victims of progress. Clearly, pain has been made easier to bear when we do not remember. A long-time Malayan, Johnny Johnson, built in Pasir Panjang a resort-restaurant which conjures an ambience of outdoor tropical dining but it fell to building regulations, which demanded concrete structures and sanitation rules. Haw Pah Villa, next door, turned into an Americanised theme park. Chinatown is to be more Chinese than Malayan, Nanyang and the Vernacular. It is geared-up to be an oriental piece of orientalism for the delectation of tourists. Failing to ignite imagination, they all failed and will continue to fail miserably because there is no ring of truth to them. They too become victims of the kind of jaded progress. Only the bold and the bright re-imagine other possibilities. Even the tourists see through the sham. The in-flight Singapore is embarrassing. Old warriors have too many reflexes conditioned to fight demons to take new risks including the most challenging of all; the unconditioning their own condition.
When I speak of risks I include generosity. Not the dumb sort of hands-off giving but a smart new kind. One which sees the risks but is willing to face up to it with kindness. Only then will it be seen as sincere. Other risks include the growth of self-esteem that does not need to hanker after other people’s images. The young Singapore poet, Alfian Sa’at says in his published book of poems, One Fierce Hour, that he has lost his country to images, I know exactly what he means.
The sun casts a rosy tinge on the Carlton Hotel visible through the surrounding trees. As sun sets, a different mood sets in. Darkness shrinks space, rouses the senses, things lose definition. The horror of the city’s emptiness is averted, as eyes are drawn towards the tiny bright spots of life. The rest does not matter. As the night wears on, and as any night-bird knows, that in the progressing darkness senses sharpen; consciousness draws ever inward until finally sleep comes and phantoms are released to inhabit the vast void of inner space.
Surely every city is also Generic City. Not just a collection of artefacts, buildings, roads. Old cities have urbanism, new ones only urbanisation. Urbanism is manners married to space embodied in the fabric of the city. Thus urbanism, manners, memories, and ambitions are what are really important in the clarity of broad daylight. At night, urbanism is a drifting world of sense and dreams. The terrors of the day fold away. Rationality fades with the failing light. Freedom is the night; it is time to create. And in the full glare of daylight dreams fade away. But planners know little of this because they operate in statistics and imported images.
The so-called “new urbanism”, is one of these. That it is the American new middle class’s substitute for jazzed-up suburbia is not appreciated, thus it serves yet again to confuse the issue of our own urban project. That’s the problem of imported images and planning bereft of living.
Thus we must guard against imports learn how to live. When we avidly buy foreign talent and foreign ideas because we think they are chic we fail to evolve what is true to our living. Urbanism is thus about freeing up our imagination about our civic urban values. The specifics of our humanity, geography and history are the grounds for real thought and creation. The Urbanism we should make is about an authentic conviviality, which cuts across social classes, and racial barriers, which continue to divide, polarise and bore, requiring entertainment and rules and enforcement to make life tolerable. When we are true to ourselves, our urbanism will become truly universal. No need to hard sell our tourism. No need to hype the people into the 21st Century. They will get there themselves on their own wings. Our urbanism will not be made by the stick and the carrot.
While avowing communitarian values, it is too easy, too convenient to just place a higher value on blood and kinship ties. We need to look beyond the inner circle, to the wider civic urban values. Only modern societies strive to internalise public morals into private lives within the abstract ideal of a generalised civility. Our ethnic values is thus something we need to re-look at because it is the source of our anxieties; a brake on our urbanism. People who are fearful of the unknown, and in want of hero-leaders, group and gravitate towards collective ideologies. They are amenable to authoritarian leadership. They thus can move mountains through hard-work and cognitive rigidity when the leadership is able. When it is not, the situation festers. Fear of being disadvantaged, looked down upon, losing-out however dominate our imagination even as we grow materially. When the material goal has been reached, the plateau is much more difficult to climb out of without the modernisation of the culture of everyday life. We need a lively civic urban culture to reach a new level. The grip of fear is loosening especially among the young because they are bored by the constant drum of threatening scenarios. It is time for a new imagination and a new socialisation of responsible autonomy to grow because as the young acquire smart-work and flexible imagination, they will dream of being in other more conducive places. Only when we learn new ways of seeing and feeling, then will we engage our young and the talented in the unfolding new world.
Making living creative and making the city liveability is the new challenge for Singapore. Accompanying this must be real choices in the live-styles. The cosmopolitan centre and the conservative fringe must be allowed their differences; as it is, there is too much sameness. If a million people live in the city, Singapore will never be the same again. It is possible to kick-start the New Singapore. This is Singapore’s predicament to be solved -- equality and sameness never created creativity. This is Singapore’s success story gone wrong.
There should be spatial distinctions or zones where natural differences are manifest. This is all the more necessary in a small place where even-handedness has resulted in sameness at the hands of the centralised agencies. It is time to decentralise the administration for the sake of creativity. The trick is to ensure that each zone should be administered and actioned separately whereby each zone can naturally respond to and therefore provide distinctive styles of life and have environmental characteristics in sync with each particular locale. Indeed, differences can only come about when the milieu of each zone is different. The special qualities of Holland Village is just such an example where a unique social milieu which supports it has resulted in the special ambience. But this was achieved by fluke. In a different social milieu in which we are free to gravitate to areas conducive to them, then Singapore will naturally have many different ambiences. And life will have some sparkle to it.
The city core is that special place where this can happen and needs to happen. Let people then chose where they want to live, to have their children educated, to work and to play. The City can become the crucible of the new creativity. It takes a smart, light touch to make it happen. Sameness is to be dreaded at all costs, it deadens. And the antidotes to wealth induced degradation are art, scholarship, philanthropy. Otherwise, wealth merely feeds wants. When people want what others have in terms of tangible symbols and things, there will be sameness and intolerance towards difference. There are thus risk investments to be made with power, wealth and culture.
Boston, same size as Singapore has 50 universities within a 50-mile radius, the Gardner Museum shines its generous spirit despite its record of scandal. Isabella Steward Gardner lived above her Museum; an heiress who knew how to live; worked to prevail against the degradation and dissolution produced by wealth. She knew that the human spirit’s tendency towards corrosion and art, intellect, scholarship and philanthropy and the feeling that duty towards others must first be gained through duty towards oneself as these are the only things that can mitigate meanness and greed. Then a community of spirit will arise to give rise to a true spirit of community not needing inducements, punishments and mobilising to act in the common good despite differences. The vitality of Route 128 in Boston, a rival to Silicon Valley, testifies that scientists and engineers are not mono-dimensional creatures, they too need to breath the fragrances provided by art and the humanities to inspire their creativity and their inventiveness.
A bit of discipline helps bolster a creative society. Discipline without sensibility confirms a society to uncreativity. Mayor Guiliani, New York’s Lee Kuan Yew, puts in the discipline of late, it does good, makes the place better. New York re-invents itself once again.
Seeing ourselves is easier from a distance. We travel to see ourselves afresh. Many people however, travel in a hermetically sealed bubble to confirm their prejudices. They see New York for its mess not its vitality. Here I am in New York City. Peeling away the images that make up our Singapore reality is like tearing away at a life of habitual thinking. But we need to start with the here and the now and then zoom out to a different vantage. Zooming to the past is to realise the tapestry of our time; the construction of the collage of our life, its shoring and gummed-up seams, colours, fragrances and wounds. There is so much debris and unfinished business and it will make you want to do something about it, not just soak in it. We can drown in your own consumption and our self-made iterations made bigger, brighter, louder and more.
Finally, the development of language is crucial and should be in tandem with our process of modernisation. Unless there is language to shape thought, realisations will remain vague urgings. Diction is an indicator of content in language. From the disparate peoples who gravitated to this place, a Malayan culture came about, and with it, a new voice -- the Malayan voice. This voice embodied thoughts and sensibilities grown from the land inspired by a universalistic modernity, even though one part of it was focused on China, the other on the West. Nevertheless, a new sensibility arose from the rootedness in the land.
Unfortunately, as rapid modernisation took over Malayan modernity, the mechanisation of language in the nation-building years, especially in Singapore cut off the roots of its own modernity and its aesthetic of place. Thus, Singlish is the orphaned child of displaced Malayanism. And so our newscasters feign an American twang. The prattle of everyday speech is cosy but unedifying -- it contains no ideals.
Soon, night will fall again over the Substation courtyard and human perception draw inwards. Will the Substation be absorbed into the Singapore night where phantoms stalk? When the Singapore Management University (SMU) campus takes its place in the city, will this bring new illuminate or just add only more clamour? Will the peace be drowned out by bigger, louder, brighter and more because we need to know what is “better”?
