Category: Cities

CREATIVE©ITIES

“Creativity” is a buzzword in urban development today. Many governments are enacting master plans and policies to build a future city powered by industries offering creative products and services, and populated by open-minded and imaginative citizens. This idea of a “creative city” is built upon a triumvirate of ideas — creative city, creative economy and creative class — and it first emerged in the US during the global economic restructuring over a decade ago. It has since spread across the globe and become the new paradigm of what cities should be today.

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CREATIVE©ITIES is a project I worked on last year which mapped out 10 cities in the Asia-Pacific that are examples of the “metacity”. The maps were created by asking local designers and artists to recommend people, places and products and projects that represented their “creative city”. Despite the different cultures and languages across cities like Seoul, Bangkok, Manila, Singapore, there existed a common creative infrastructure including bookstores, cafes as well as art and design centers. Within them were content that crossed national and cultural borders, such as products, publications and art from the region. The “creative city” then is an international space of cultural production and collaboration, but it can also be a generic urban order easily imposed upon anywhere around the world. It matches a similar itinerary I’ve often taken in my overseas trips: despite visiting different cities, I’m always traveling the same map. 

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Written for Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi’s Cultural Theory class at D-Crit in response to“Introduction: Metropolis, Megalopolis and Metacity” by Brian McGrath and Grahame Shane

MH370: Uncovering how open cities are

ITN

Even as the Malaysian airliner MH370 remains missing, its disappearance has unwittingly uncovered the vast multi-city surveillance system hovering over us whenever we fly. 

It starts when we enter the immigration zone and our passports are checked against a database. The failure to check Interpol’s passport database—an international policing program—allowed two passengers to board the plane on stolen passports.

During the flight, the plane was then tracked not only by Malaysia, but also British satellite operator Inmarsat. Thailand’s military radar also detected it. However, this was revealed much later, showing how reluctant countries are to share defensive information for fear of compromising a nation’s technological powers (or lack of).

In the search for debris, several countries offered their satellite images—China, France, Thailand, Japan—again unmasking the constellation of eyes above our cities. 

How do we understand privacy as well as national boundaries with the existence of such surveillance technology today? The search for the missing plane shows how it takes one tiny disruption in the system to expose the porousness of borders between countries.

Unlike the flight’s effortless and stealth path across various territories, the search for it has been confounded with complex protocols between nations on deciding which country will lead the search and how it will be conducted. The anxiety amongst nations in this search for MH370 perhaps confirms how open cities really are today.

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Written for Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi’s Cultural Theory class at D-Crit in response to “Introduction: Enacting Modernity” by AbdouMaliq Simone

Reclaim Land: The fight for space in Singapore

BY SAM KANG LI

Singapore is just over 700 square kilometers in size and the government has often raised the specter of limited land to justify its tight control over urban planning. Every inch of the city’s development is prescribed to maintain order and efficient use.

This double-exposure image (above) juxtaposes two scenes at a the open lobby of a building in Singapore: on weekdays, office workers pass here on the way to work, but on weekends, it becomes a studio space for line dancers. This is part of a set of images from Reclaim Land: The fight for space in Singapore, a website my friends and I created for our graduation project in journalism school. We were interested in how people (consciously or not) “reclaimed land” from the state by using space in ways not originally intended for. 

Just as how Simone concludes by suggesting the “messed up city then is not simply a mess” and the need to stay open-minded, we also realised that rules on using land maintained a sense of order in the city but also prohibited the emergence of new and unexpected possibilities. This is particularly crucial for a small city like Singapore as the population is expected to grow from 5 million to 6.9 million in the coming years. How can Singapore balance a need to use land efficiently while accommodating a growing diversity of land users and users? It’s not just a question crucial to the city’s economic progress, but the cohesion of its society too.

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Written for Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi’s Cultural Theory class at D-Crit in response to “Introduction: Enacting Modernity” by AbdouMaliq Simone