The Singapore urban planning model is being exported to several cities across Africa by Surbana, a now-corporatised division of the Housing & Development Board, the builder of the city’s state housing. Read about Surbana’s plans for the region in a This is Africa report.
What will Singapore look like in 2030? That is the question in the minds of many Singaporeans nowadays. The government made the nation sit up and reflect on its future when it released reports in January 2013 on how the city-state could possibly change in the next decade and a half: not only would there be more people, land use would also be more intensive.
For many, it was shocking to envision such a city. How could Singapore take anymore development when signs of aging are starting to show just two years before it turns 50 in 2015?
Over the last few years, its highly reliable infrastructure broke down several times, leading to flooded streets and disrupted train services. Last year, it witnessed its first industrial strike in decades, led by bus drivers recruited from China, who have become a common sight in a city increasingly reliant on migrant workers. The once squeaky clean government has also come under scrutiny with several of its honchos facing corruption accusations. Most recently, a Member of Parliament from the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) resigned over an extra-marital affair. This triggered a by-election which saw the opposition party gain yet another seat in the government. While the PAP was the only party in power since independence for over two decades, there are now 7 elected from the opposition Workers’ Party — albeit a tiny fraction out of a total of 87 seats.
Such cases have led observers living in Singapore to go as far as to suggest that the city is living in a “new normal”. It may be premature, but it has certainly got Singaporeans thinking about possibilities. The government has even tried to harness this energy by recently initiating a “National Conversation”, promising to listen to what Singapore citizens wanted, so that it can shape its future policies.
As part of this new generation of Singaporeans who are in the 20s and 30s, I do hear murmurings from my peers who envision a different city from what we grew up in. While those before us may have emerged from the oft-told struggle in which Singapore went from Third World to First, we grew up in a city that became a global city in the ‘90s, renowned for its efficiency and roaring economic success. While we may have worshipped the Western world then and were proud to have made English our language of choice, the tides have changed two decades on. Singapore finds itself looking towards Asia for its future. We now find ourselves — grandchildren of immigrants from Asia — caught in-between our historical roots with the region and how comfortably assimilated we have become with the Western world.
The truth, perhaps, is we are rootless — disconnected from our ancestors with not much else in Singapore to latch on to either. It is perhaps why so many of my peers and I have started to mine our histories to find out who we are. Whether it is the love for all things retro or a kind of wide-eyed wonder towards anything from the past, we often seem trapped in a nostalgia for a past we never lived through, but yearn to have grown up in. Any news of the impending demolishing of an old place in Singapore becomes an opportunity for us to whip out cameras and video recorders to stake our ‘memory‘ of a city lost to the future.
This question of who we are and who is this city becomes even more pronounced as Singaporeans and Singapore become more cosmopolitan. Our insecurity and inability to say who we are shows in how xenophobic we are nowadays — a kind of refusal to reflect on who we are, but instead assert the claim that they are not us.
In these uncertain times, I find comfort in seeing other Singaporeans getting their hands dirty to create change. This city guide is an attempt to map out some of these efforts, and help us navigate the possible Singapores that are emerging. From its people, places and phenomena, there are signs of what the future holds for this city.
Nguan’s Singapore sets the tone with his pictures that captures the mood of Singaporeans as they go about their everyday lives. Two interviews with The Thought Collective and studioKALEIDO give insights to the new values and ideas that are shaping the city’s future, while August 9 Portraits by Sam & Sam reflects the wishes its citizens have for the nation as recorded on its birthday last year.
A tour of spaces in Singapore captures how the city’s landscape is changing as well. In Wide Open Possibilities, experience up-and-coming neighbourhood Jalan Besar as mapped out by local independent travel guide alter:sg, while a fictional essay from the literary magazine Ceriph, shows an aspect of the city through the eyes of a young Singapore writer.
Finally, in Anew Singapore, we explore some of the ongoing trends in the city as well as its design, magazine, food, and music scenes that hint at the values that matter to young Singaporeans today what might define their tomorrows.
When one flips back at this guide in 2030, how much of Singapore will we recognise? The journey there starts now.
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Written in 2013 for The Alpine Review as part of a proposed city guide on Singapore. The section was never published. Thanks to Nguan, Dan Koh, Shin Lin, Rebecca Toh, Iliyas Ong, Samuel He, Sam Chin, Benjamin Koh, Winnie Wu, and Amanda Lee-Koe for their help on the guide.
Giuseppe Lignano has no architect friends. When not at work, the founding partner of architecture firm LOT-EK would rather hang out with people outside the industry instead.
School teachers, businessmen, chefs and even housewives — his love for meeting people from diverse backgrounds and cultures mirrors the industrial bricolage his studio has become famous for. While most architecture firms design buildings to be made of glass, concrete and steel, LOT-EK has used kitchen sinks as cabinets, petroleum trailer tanks as bedrooms, and stainless steel truck bodies as homes. Over the last two decades, the studio Lignano started with his long-time collaborator, Ada Tolla, has been turning non-traditional architecture elements into standout designs.
“I like to be more of an outsider in everything I do,” says Lignano, looking smart in a fitting blue shirt and dark denim jeans. Even the clothes on the 50-year-old reflect how the gay man has always seen himself outside of New York city’s straight “white-male dominated” architecture industry with “their all black outfits”.
Lignano first came to the United States with Tolla after they graduated from architecture school in Italy. Bowled over by how modern New York was compared to their hometown in Naples, the duo moved to Manhattan for a postgraduate fellowship at Columbia University in 1990. Three years later, they set up LOT-EK to pursue their fascination with the city’s industrial landscape, which has defined their design vocabulary ever since.
Fire escapes, airplane fuselages, steel ducts and other detritus of the industrialized society are examples of the “Roman aqueduct now seen in the making,” says Lignano, proof of how we live today when archaeologists dig up the ground in 2,000 years time. But rather than leave them to waste till then, he sees the perfect building blocks for design.
“As a civilization, we would feel much less guilty if we had the ability of looking at what we make with enthusiasm and say we could do this with this, instead of just freaking out that we are accumulating millions of containers,” he says. “I think it would be a great thing, a really beautiful thing not only in architecture.”
This palpable love for human creativity — measured by his distinct left eyebrow that arches upwards whenever the grey bearded Lignano speaks excitedly — can be traced back to when he decided to become an architect. Barely ten years old, he had visited his uncle’s newly renovated apartment, and was blown away by how the architect had transformed the space. Uncle Franco became a huge inspiration in Lignano’s pursuit of wild and imaginative designs, which went so far that even the mentor said his nephew’s works were “completely crazy” and unacceptable to the world.
From turning an airplane container cargo into a personal workstation and using a cement mixer as a cocoon for watching television and playing video games, LOT-EK has gone from designing such installations for art galleries and museums to building architecture, most notably with the shipping container. The studio has converted them into mobile retail stores for PUMA and Uniqlo and will be inserting into New York’s Pier 57 some four-levels of containers filled with — not goods, but — a market, restaurants, and studios for artisan businesses that will turn the former shipping hub into a cultural and civic center.
More recently, LOT-EK has also gone beyond repurposing the shipping container to building with them. Lining one side of its container-like second-floor studio along Chrystie Street are various architecture models that are as arresting as the neon yellow and grey interiors. What looks like New York’s winding Guggenheim museum turned on its side is a proposal for a public library design consisting of 170 containers sliced, carved and stacked to create seven wheel-like structures joined together. Another model resembling a floating spaceship is actually an art school built in South Korea where LOT-EK sheared eight containers along a 45-degree angle, assembled them in a fishbone pattern, and elevated the entire structure.
These works are more than just futuristic-looking. Lignano takes down each model to explain how LOT-EK is “creating space by removal,” working like “skillful butchers” to cut open rectangular containers to different shapes, and combining them to make out-of-the-box buildings and spaces. This radical approach has gained LOT-EK media attention and helped it win prizes, including being a finalist for the National Design Awards in 2008. But up till today, the studio still struggles to get clients.
“A lot of people that have started much later than us have completely gone so much more than we have from a business point of view,” says Lignano. “The hardest part has been the fact that there is a lot of people they call because they think this is a very cheap way of building. So in a way they call for the wrong reasons. Because we don’t do this because it is cheap, we do this because it is smart for what it is.”
But beyond an ecologically smart way of design, or what it now markets as “upcycling,” Lignano believes in his approach because of how creative it is. It is what has kept him going for so long despite the lack of major commercial success until recently. This belief has helped LOT-EK grow from just Tolla and him working by day and waiting tables at night, to a team of 15 now serving clients in the US, Holland, Japan and China.
In that twenty years, New York city has also grown up as polished skyscrapers now overshadow its once chaotic industrial landscape. Even as his sources of inspiration are cleaned up, Lignano sees opportunities for LOT-EK’s works which has “more grit, more personality,” unlike the “boring” New York architecture scene which he likens to Wall Street.
In this sense, Lignano is no outsider. LOT-EK’s diverse, layered and a little rough around the edges architecture is exactly what New York city is — once you’re on the inside.
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Written for Adam Levy’s Art of the Interview class at D-Crit.