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The Asian side of the world - II

 | 
Jean-François Sabouret

Part One. Regional dynamics and globalization

Singapore: Emblematic projects for a singular metropolis

Charles Goldblum

Texte intégral

1November 2013

2On 20 May 2013, Lee Hsieng Loong, the Prime Minister of Singapore, officially opened the Marina Bay Financial Centre, which, with its three towers, has doubled the office space of the business centre at Raffles Place. Responding to the development needs of a banking and finance sector representing 12% of the city-state’s GDP, this centre is part of Marina South, a major city-centre extension project using land reclaimed from the sea. Marina South is overseen by the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA), the powerful government body in charge of redevelopment and territorial planning, and the enormous Marina Bay complex is its flagship component. Designed by the internationally famed architect Moshe Safdie, the 20-plus hectare project is home to the 5-star Marina Bay Sands hotel, whose three 55-floor towers are topped with a one-hectare terrace and a swimming pool; among its other exclusive components are the lotus-shaped ArtScience Museum, a luxury shopping mall with a canal network designed to mimic Venice, but of the Orient, and a vast casino, whose controversial programme defies the consciously moralistic credo of a state that sees itself as a standard-bearer for “Asian values”. Carried out the by the private company, Las Vegas Sands, winner of a public call for tender, the project was the outcome of a sovereign decision taken at the instigation of Minister Counsellor Lee Kuan Yew, founder of the People’s Action Party, Singapore’s ruling political party. This project, distinguished by its size, cost – 8 billion Singapore dollars – and level of technical prowess illustrates the state’s determination to further advance in its development after the “Asian crisis” in 1997.

3Town planning in Singapore is marked by an institutional division of labour and there seems to be a reflection of Marina Bay in the creation by the Housing and Development Board (HDB – responsible for housing estates and new towns) of a complex of seven 50-storey towers – The Pinnacle@Duxton – a kilometre or so from Marina Bay Sands. Among the features that the projects have in common are the procedures of an international architecture competition (as opposed to the HDB’s usual in-house design monopoly), and physical interconnections via planted terrace-walkways (500 metres long at the 26th and 50th levels). Containing 1,848 housing units, the atypical The Pinnacle@Duxton estate is evidence of the public sector’s determination to promote the city-centre residential function through new forms of land development. Completed in 2009 to replace two 10-storey rental slab blocks built by the HDB and inaugurated in 1964 by Lee Kuan Yew, who was Prime Minister at the time and now the inspirer of this new project, the venture conjures up the history of the site – the Tanjong Pagar nutmeg plantations, the port extensions, the various developments of Chinatown and the pioneer HDB apartment blocks and their demolition – in the Heritage Garden at the foot of the towers: a focus on local identity that enhances the site’s tourist interest.

4The exceptional nature of these projects should not obscure the fact that the highly individual hypercentre that they are helping to shape is part of the comprehensive strategic approach the Concept Plan has been implementing since the early 1970s, the overall aim being to make the citystate a distinctive territory in its own right. Major port and airport facilities, industrial and research centres and new towns housing the greater part of some 5 million inhabitants are the major components of this territorial structure. In terms of land use, the city core is the matrix, with the rest of Singapore functionally integrated by motorway and public transport networks. In this respect, the remodelling of the centre of Singapore and its rescaling as part of a global metropolis reveal the special role of urban planning and development under the international status of a micro-state of scarcely 700 square kilometres, including its small islands.

5During the pioneer years of accession to independence (the 1960s) and the launch of the first Concept Plan (the 1970s), Singapore’s physical and territorial forms of development – the creation of the Jurong free port and industrial zone, a new-cities policy necessitating an enormous operation to free up central land for new international service functions – and the links that its “global city” set up between these facilities and its economic receptivity to the world market, seemed destined to widen the gap between the city-state and the neighbouring capitals. Other cities were certainly undertaking prestige operations – Phnom Penh’s “Olympic” Stadium neighbourhood, Jakarta’s triumphal Jalan Thamrin axis – or adapting to changing economic and urban functions: the Silom-Sathorn retail and business centre in Bangkok, for example, and the satellite city of Petaling Jaya in Kuala Lumpur; but in the face of signs of urban crisis – uncontrolled population shifts, slumification of retail centres, expansion of shantytowns – they failed to implement an overall planning approach, either because of property speculation (Bangkok and the Litchfield, Whiting and Bowne master plan) or because of the outbreak of war (Saigon and the Doxiadis plan).

6Since the late 1980s, however, the massive change in urban forms triggered by the economic rise of eastern Asia and the contributing role of the region’s large cities is being demonstrated through major projects. An evident feature is the urbanistic vocabulary “codified” by Singapore: firstly, that of the new centrality, now to be seen taking shape in Sukhumvit/Asoke in Bangkok, with its vertical triptych of international hotels, office towers and shopping complexes rounded off by condominiums and serviced by air routes and underground lines. Secondly, that of large-scale developments such as the Multimedia Super Corridor in Kuala Lumpur, incorporating the new central business district, the new administrative city/new technology city pairing (Putrajaya/Cyberjaya), together with the new international airport, in an overt attempt to compete with Singapore. Drawing directly on foreign investment, this project-based urbanism is gaining the large metropolitan areas of former socialist countries now receptive to the globalised market economy, as evidenced by the reclamation of new central spaces – the Thu Thiem peninsula in Ho Chi Minh City, the former Beng Kak lake in Phnom Penh – and their conversion to the new scale and vocabulary of metropolisation; the development of new towns and neighbourhoods such as Camko City (a South Korean development) in Phnom Penh, Ciputra (an Indonesian development) in Hanoi, and Saigon South (Taiwanese investments) in Ho Chi Minh City being another expression of this trend. All of these initiatives bear the stamp of the internationalisation of urban production to which Singapore contributes with its experience and its capital, and for which it is, in many respects, the front-runner.

7In terms of its variety of urban forms, not to say the scale of its projects, Singapore casts useful light on new trends in neighbouring cities; there are good grounds for believing that when it comes to comparing the geographical advantages that underpin the economic attractiveness and influence of this major port at the end of the Strait of Malacca, these concurrent developments demonstrate what seems Singapore’s compulsion to impose its progressive image – as a financial and business platform of the first rank, and a high-tech’ industrial hub – by an on-going enhancement of an urban system fortified by exceptionally tight control of land use and the institutions involved. Singapore, then, appears to be facing the future of permanent remodelling implicit in the planned extension of Marina Bay and the replacement of the old Tanjong Pagar port facilities with the new Waterfront City project. A way, in short, of warding off Arnold Toynbee’s prediction that the city-state of Singapore had only a limited future in the era of large national entities.

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