Geography on Your Doorstep- A Local Perspective

In today’s post, I want to talk about the more practical aspects of the Geography modules that I have studied so far this year. The four modules I have taken this semester are:

• Changing Landscapes of Singapore
• Geographies of Social Life
• Geographies of Development
• Globalisation and Asian Cities

The thing that has struck me is the scale of the cases that are used as examples on these courses. While in the UK, the modules have drawn on case studies from all over the world. In Urban Geography, examples come from a variety of regions such as North and South America and South Asia, while in Globalisation & Asian Cities the majority of real life examples that have been used have come from the Asian region. In Development Geography (at UCL), there was more of a focus on Sub Saharan Africa and Latin America whereas in Geographies of Development (at NUS), there was a strong interest in Asia's progress, in particular, the 'Asian Miracle'. This links back to my first blog post on how academics are wanting to contribute perspectives from under-studies regions to existing theories that centre on the West.

On the practical side, the tendency to base modules on more local geographical phenomena has resulted in courses that require us to venture out into the field more than I have done at UCL. For the Geographies of Social Life module, I was required to create a fieldwork journal analysing one social group in a neighbourhood of my choice. I decided to visit an area called Tiong Bahru (a well-known area undergoing gentrification) to examine how its newfound popularity with the younger generations has affected the elderly population. In Changing Landscapes of Singapore, I had two fieldwork-based assignments. One involved us exploring the arts landscape in Little India. The second gave us more freedom- we were allowed to choose any location, as long as the project was based on heritage tourism. Our group chose to visit the last remaining kampong (rural village) in Singapore which is unknown even to many Singaporeans. Considering Singapore’s remarkable urbanization journey of the last few decades, it was fascinating to get a glimpse of what life used to be like on this island.

From a geographer’s perspective, I believe these are really good exercises for encouraging us to apply what we learn in lecture theatres to our surroundings, and vice versa. It has also encouraged me to engage more with the people in these landscapes as well (because for some projects, mini-interviews were required). From an exchanger’s perspective, this aspect of the courses is great as it allows me to discover neighbourhoods that I would not otherwise have visited. It also forces me to enter these landscapes with a geographical frame of mind, whereas on a day-to-day basis, this would not necessarily be the case. With any luck, the modules next term will continue to allow me to discover new areas of Singapore.

Urban Planning in Singapore

This week, I am going to look at urban planning in Singapore. Two modules that I take (Changing Landscapes of Singapore and Geographies of Social Life) were not two that I had imagined being so closely linked before I began the course. Because of the spatial restraints that Singapore faces (it is an island smaller than London) teamed with a growing population which is set to rise to nearly 7 million by 2030, the state has to be much more aware of planning than other nations may need to be. To solve this problem, the Urban Redevelopment Authority was created, which is the government authority in charge of all land planning on the island. This has led to a hegemony in the landscape, where the state is able to naturalize certain values and construct them as the norm, through the manipulation of the built environment.

One manifestation of this can be seen in the state’s quest to climb up the global city rankings. By creating impressive skyscrapers such as the world famous Marina Bay Sands, they are projecting urban  power, making people want to work in the Central Business District and to show the population that this is a city that can compete with the likes of New York and London.  Two strategies that have been used in this process of creating a global city are ‘worlding’ and ‘inter-referencing’. Worlding is the process where other cities are looked to for inspiration for urban planning. This can be seen with the Singapore Flyer drawing inspiration from the London Eye and Marina Bay modelled on Sydney Harbour (Huang, 2013). By having this association with some of the most iconic urban landmarks in the world, the hope is that some of this prestige will rub off on Singapore, and raise it’s profile.

Model (in the URA Gallery) showing the city centre and future development plans

Another perhaps more unsavoury aspect of this control can be seen in the Housing Development Board. This is the authority that is responsible for public housing in Singapore, which accounts for 80% of the city’s housing. It is an extremely important and successful aspect of the city-state as it is used as a nation-building tool- home ownership symbolizes the success of the state. However, there are strict rules that surround the allocation of HDB flats. Oswin (2010, 264) suggests that these give the state the ‘ability to manipulate family size through public housing’. For example, you are not allowed to buy a house until you have created the ‘proper family nucleus’ of a man, a woman, children (if any) and parents of the adults (if any). This is how a normative family ideology is created. In addition, it promotes (or arguably enforces) values that do not accommodate homosexuals (in line with the statute that criminalises ‘gross indecency’ between men (Oswin, 2010)) as two men are not allowed to purchase a flat together.

These two modules together have drawn my attention to the ways in which social and urban geography can intersect. In Singapore, planning is more than just a manipulation of the physical landscape; it can be used as a tool for the control of society on a much larger scale.

References

Huang, S. (2013) ‘The Heart of a Global City’ in Ho, E.L.E., C.Y. Woon and K. Ramdas (eds) Changing Landscapes of Singapore: Old Tensions, New Discoveries. Singapore: NUS Press

Oswin, N. (2010) ‘The modern model family at home in Singapore: a queer geography’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35, 2, 256- 268

Studying from ‘The Other’ side of the world

For my year abroad, I decided that I wanted to study Geography at the National University of Singapore. The main factors in this decision were that it was geographically a long way away from the UK, allowing me to explore new regions of the world, and that it is a highly regarded university worldwide with a very strong Geography department. I knew that the teaching would be different here, but because of Singapore’s reputation for  being a fairly Westernized state, I thought that ultimately there would not be too much of a difference between the Geography taught in the UK and the Geography taught in Singapore.

I was wrong. I have found that much of what I have been learning and reading about has been a critical reflection of the perspectives I have developed in the first two years of my studies. This is not to say that my studies so far have been without critical reflection.  Now, however, I am living and studying in a region that, until recently, had largely been ignored in academic literature and I have noticed that there is a much larger emphasis on developing new perspectives.

One area of the discipline where this observation has been the most pronounced in is urban geography. Owing to the fact that, until recently, much of urban theory has come from the West, particularly the United States and the UK, understandings of the functioning and roles of cities have been Western-centric. Cities such as Singapore have only really entered the global picture in the last 40 years, and so have gone through very different transformations due to their rapid development and different political situations. One interesting research project I am currently undertaking is questioning Sassen’s conception of a ‘global city’. Her definition of what makes a city ‘global’ is based on how they are control centres in the global economy (Tyner, 2000), exhibiting characteristics such as large concentrations of finance and service corporations, and advanced producer services. By looking at the concept of global cities, but from the perspective of Asian cities, it can be argued that cities do not necessarily have to fulfil these restrictive categories in order to be considered global. Some particular examples that have come up are Phnom Penh, which is a centre for international NGO activity, and Manila, which is an exporter rather than receptor of global labour. Although these may not link the cities into the global network in the traditional way, it can be argued that they are important drivers of the network at a different level.  

This way of looking at theory is what Jacobs refers to as ‘subtraction’ (Jacobs, 2012). Rather than saying that new cases (ie. Asian cities that have recently come onto the geographical radar) add to urban theory, she believes that they we should celebrate urban difference rather than using new insight as ‘evidence of an evolutionary trajectory of urban development that [culminates] in Western European urban forms’ (Jacobs, 2012, 906).

Although I am still at an early stage in my year abroad, I hope that the rest of the modules that I take continue to approach geographical issues from a less Western perspective as I believe that it has already significantly broadened my views of Geography.

References

Jacobs, J. (2012) ‘Commentary- Comparing Comparative Urbanisms’, Urban Geography, 33,6, 904-914

Tyner, J. (2000) ‘Global Cities and Circuits of Global Labour: The Case of Manila, Philippines’, Professional Geographer, 52, 1, 61-74