"Singapore Songlines" by Rem Koolhaas

Koolhaas has argued that Singapore has totally become a new town, the city now represented the ideological production of the past three decade in its purest form, it is managed by a regime that has excluded accident and randomness: even his nature is entirely remade. Singapore has become incredibly “western” for an Asian city; it is like an apparent victim of an out of control process of modernization. The refusal to read Singapore on its own term is frivolous; our most sophisticated reflections on the contemporary condition of the city are completely disconnected from the operational; our incapacity to “make” the city, internalized to the point where any evidence of its fabrication is by definition suspect and unbelievable. Koolhaas feel that Singapore is a paroxysm of the operational, therefore inaccessible to his imagination and interpretation. Furthermore, Singapore is clearly not free and it stands out as a highly alternative in a landscape of near pessimism about a marketable future, a pertinent can-do world of clearly defined ambitions, long term strategies, a ruthless determination to avoid the debris and chaos that democracy leaves in its wake elsewhere.

In 1985, years after Queenstown was constructed, HDB admits that in the first stage of public housing development, urgency to find a solution to the problem of housing shortage in Singapore did not allow time for research. The transition from the English slum to the estate was traumatic, the leap from the Chinese shop house- topology that packs store, factory, family living quarters together in a single block around a courtyard – to Singapore’s high-rise containers is even more merciless, not only in term of material difference; from the Asian to the Western; but because the new inhabitants begin cut off from the connective network of family relationships, tradition, habits, are abruptly forced into another civilization.

In 1959, Singapore – a British Colony – become a self govern ate country, with Lee Kuan Yew to power with his People’s Action Party (PAP). Singapore during that time was in a mess: clumps of stylish colonial enclave, shabby military bases, a port, embedded in a huge, overcrowded Chinatown with a neglected hinterland of marsh, jungle, incidental farming, largely covered by squatter encampments. To overcome this situations, polices have been structuring and rationalizing to help in Singapore’s survival. The result was, and continues to be, an ideology that embodies a vigorous development orientation that emphasize science, technology, and centralized public administration as the fundamental basis for an export oriented industrialization programs, financed largely multinational capital.
In 1963 three experts came to Singapore and they have prepared a report to the government of Singapore; subject of the mission is “the general development of the island… with the specific objective of recommending the right strategy for Urban Renewal. They then articulate Singapore’s dilemma which was clearly a dilemma in the 1964; the question that an urban renewal programme must face and resolve is whether to make a commitment to the retention of some of its area or to raze them and create something different in their place.
First they identify Singapore as the “the first Asian city to embark on a programme of Urban Renewal. This programme is not intended to be an exercise in conversation or restoration but a bold attempt to modernize and develop the city.

In 1960s, Housing and Development board was formed, within month’s construction of Queentowns begun. 160,000 inhabitants lived in it, Queenstown can be said to be “lived in”
In 1966, a second new town was launched. This time round the city is for 180,000 people but still it is not perfect reasons is simple, that is one can easily detect that HDB was still struggling in its experiment.
During the period of just 20 years, from 1965 to 1988, well over 1200 sites were selected for expropriation and nearly 270000 families were displaced; i.e about one third of the country’s population. The redistribution of inhabitants, which turns the entire island into a modernistic, dismantled Chinatown, proceeds to plan too. In 1959 less then 9% of the population was sheltered in public housing, by 1974 nearly 43% of the population lived in HDB flats and by 1989 the proportion was 87% (2.3 million persons). To be precise, twenty New towns encircling the original urban core over 16000 hectares, or a quarter of the national territory.

Sadly there is no space for poetry and dreams in Singapore city as the government force all others, especially those handicapped by a need for reflection into a different degree of more or less humiliating passivity or complicity.

Our young architects, trained in Europe and America and ideological still in their third world/ developing country phrase, underestimate both the determination and the ability of the regime. Their skepticism now will disqualify them later from full participation on anything but the regime’s terms which is something that offends their sixties sensibilities. As quoted from “Investigation in Collective Form” by Fumihiko Maki 1964; “There is nothing less urban, nothing less productive of cosmopolitan mixture than raw renewal, which displays, destroy, and replaces, in the mechanistic order.” It has becomes the new republic’s blueprint, its dystopian program: display, destroy, replace.