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EXPECTANT LAND
by Kok-Meng Tan
At first seemingly commonplace, these sites or sights in the urbanscape of Singapore reveal the afterlife of land after the operation of tabula rasa or after land reclaimation.
What happens between these two conditions: AFTER the fact of the tabula rasa (the colonisation of the existing) or AFTER land reclaimation (the colonisation of non-productive terrains) and BEFORE timely exploitation? It is a terrain between past-use and future-use: BETWEEN being released from identity or from sterility, AND future production.
EXPECTANT LAND does not fall into dis-use but rather is pregnant with great expectations, filled with promises. It is expectant because the seed of its potentiality has been sown and the bed of its hope prepared for easy conception. It is ready to conceive any well-wrought MASTERPLAN prepared for its greater posterity. As part of the strategy to RESTRUCTURE the city, it will accommodate the QUANTITIES and QUALITIES necessary for a burgeoning GLOBAL NODE: housing for an expected population augmentation; gleaming office towers for more businesses; cultural centres and leisure facilities for the consumption of both residents and expected tourists; and silicon-valley type techno-villes for dot.com type techno-preneurs. Completely masqueraded before its impending tasks, the surreal serenity of its FLATNESS hides the fact of its corpulent potential.
Characteristically flat since filled from the sea in a kind of reverse liquefaction and left in the most neutral fashion at the precisely decided level (how else?) or else bulldozed through uneven terrains including built substance if necessary, these are then often planted with some kind of greenery. Cheap cow-grass as CARPET laid across its plane, then regular rows of tree saplings or so-called "tree banks" holding GREEN CURRENCY ready to be transferred to other sites. These function to hold the land in both senses of the word. To HOLD DOWN the loose earth to prevent further natural erosion, and to HOLD OUT the land as a sign of belonging to some BODY. This notion of a body or an agency is important - it is not leftover space and thus not an unintended VOID in the urbanscape. Some agent is taking care of it; it belongs to some body. In this aspect it is the exact opposite of the TERRAIN VAGUE.
As theorised by Ignasi de Sole-Morales, terrain vagues are "(the city's) margins, lacking any effective incorporation; they are interior islands voided of activity; they are forgotten, oversights and leftovers which have remained OUTSIDE THE URBAN DYNAMIC. Converted areas that are simply, un-inhabited, un-safe, un-productive. In short, these are places that are FOREIGN TO THE URBAN SYSTEM, mentally EXTERIOR in the physical interior of the city, or appearing as its negative image as much in the sense of criticism, as in that of possible alternatives." (2)
EXPECTANT LAND, on the other hand, first is not a terrain but a LAND in the sense of its function as a fully-rationalised commodity, that are sometimes demarcated by some kind of BOUNDARY (chain-link fence or plywood hoarding, for example) but always, its area precisely surveyed, its limits precisely known and accurately documented. It is not foreign to the urban system but is the exact blueprint of it; thus integrally locked into it. It is truly incorporated, remain resolutely within the system - mentally INSIDE the perception of the city, since both its purpose and its representations (in the form of images, plans and models) are well publicised. Its future is known, it is meant to be inhabitated, used; it is safe and secured, and overwhelmingly productive.
Nonetheless, both EXPECTANT LAND and TERRAIN VAGUE are off-springs of urban restructuring fathered by Globalisation. One produced by the evacuation of redundant industries to far away nodes; the other, by the laundering of existing substance (or new substance) to accommodate the new. Like Cain and Abel, one is the alter ego of the other, what the other wish it could be. And perhaps vice versa…
Prior to its productiveness, before it is auctioned off at an opportune time, it still has another ROLE: it affords a relatively cheap way to magnify the notion of the GARDEN CITY with its coveted GREENNESS. It is perhaps what Walter Benjamin noted of Haussmann's famous (or infamous) parting of dense tenement blocks to make way for wide boulevards in19th century Paris - "strategic embellishment" of the urbanscape. The design of this embellishment is based on a serious no-nonsense approach: rationalised, objectified and specified by codes and directions available in printed official manuals.
When these artificially construed greenery take root for a number of years pending development, the process of TIME may render them almost 'naturalistic', almost TROPICAL. Something uncontrollable takes over. The reclaimed land at Marina South park at first looks almost contrastingly sublime compared to the stacks of orthogonal steel containers at the Keppel container port. But intrinsically both may stem from the exact same strategy of overdeterministic rationality.(3)
Another type of Expectant Land: before the tabula rasa, but has the look of a ground fertile for manipulation since there are no visible built-structures, thus no impediment. The Bidadari Cemetery depicted in Jodogne's work will make way for new public housing. It therefore harbours great futures for the living once the dead is removed.
Out of these hyper-rationalised operations, it can become surprisingly and strangely more real than real; in other words, SURREAL. This is also its poetic dimension. It even inspires moments of random exhilaration as the image of these youths with their scramblers in the reclaimed land primed for the future downtown shows. Most of the time out of bounds, occasionally it is trespassed by the intrepid, the curious, the youthful or the PLAY-FULL. Ironically, it is at this instance when it best resembles its sibling, the terrain vague: only when the expected programme is transgressed or misinterpreted by other "possible alternatives," if only momentarily.
