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