BACK
AFTER THE TABULA RASA: NODAL CITY SINGAPORE
by Kok-Meng Tan
I SINGAPORE
Since the 1995 Rem Koolhaas exposé in S,M,L,XL(1), Singapore became notoriously known to the architectural world as a Potemkin metropolis which had undergone "thirty years of tabula rasa." The typical Singapore story recounted is that the former British colonial city had been scraped clean and replaced by the iconic gestures of a generic modern city -- skyscrapers, high-rise housing blocks and shiny shopping malls interspersed with overdetermined, regularly spaced tropical greenery. But one particular urban model borrowed had in the meantime been developed within the specificities of the local context into a highly refined system that supports teeming urban life. The Nodal City or an extended mini city-within-a-city at the node of a transportation network had over the years embodied the stages of willful cannibalistic metabolism that the city underwent. Yet it proves to be capable of offering real urban qualities, providing rich and indeterminable possibilities.
Metabolised City
The British started the decolonisation process of its Crown colonies Singapore and Malaysia back in 1960, the year that the Japanese Metabolists announced their ideas through Kenzo Tange's Tokyo Bay project at the World Design Congress in Tokyo. Five years later, right after its independence in 1965, Singapore embarked on a frenetic pace of urbanisation and modernisation in tandem with the more abstract notion of nation building. Modernisation became a justification to rid itself of its past colonial identity.
The city centre then was characterised by a fine texture of streets lined with adjoining two to three-storey shop-houses, a hybrid urban type which is a shop at street level with residences above. One typical shop-house could sometimes accommodate up to 10 families or 50 people in cramped conditions. Often, this urban system included a continuous five-foot wide verandah space at street level in front of the shops such that people could walk sheltered from the harsh sun or tropical rain along this public corridor. Racks of merchandise, cobblers, barbers, eating spaces and itinerant food-sellers would share this sheltered corridor at different times of the day. When there were open spaces in the city, for instance open carparks, these would be converted by night into boisterous food centres with temporary stalls on wheels serving customers on timber stools, lit by briskly strung lights. Partly because of the small living spaces indoors, life was generally conducted outdoors. Roads because narrow, were perpetually jammed with cars and buses. Monsoon rains perennially brought floods into the badly-drained city that flushed out rats, cockroaches and garbage. Together all these formed the stereotypical impression of a developing Asian city: busy, dense, dirty, disorderly, noisy, unfathomable and fluid, overwhelmed by Quantity.
This was the Singapore caricatured in Paul Theroux's Saint Jack -- R-and-R American sailors and skinny tanned prostitutes, hustling trishaw-men and sweaty coolies. It was the same Singapore which overwhelmed an eight-year-old Koolhaas with its "sweetness and rot."
From a teeming Asian city choked by Quantity, Singapore's city planners began to reconstruct it based on the strategies of North American-inspired urban renewal. For more than 30 years, from 1965 right up to the present, the old city underwent a total transformation into a modern Garden City with operations that mostly required the brutal destruction of the dense existing built substance. A three-stroke operation of Maki's 'displace, destroy, replace', what Koolhaas calls the blueprint for Singapore's "dystopian" urban programme, replaces the old city with the new modern city, now characterised by a business centre of gleaming skyscrapers, strips of hyper-malls, satellite residential towns of dense high-rise housing blocks centred around a mass rapid transit station and bus interchange, air-conditioned supermarkets, kitsch cineplexes, shopping centres and architecturally loud community libraries.
There was thus a 35-year metastasising of the existing city; all its fluid, random, temporary substances, had been ingested, the useless purged and the beneficent converted into rationalised vertiginous modern structures -- the sum total of which represents a modern ideological megastructure that is the city of Singapore today. In short, Singapore has become a metaphor for Metabolism.
To raze that which is existing, great will, great power and real force are needed. In its place, new built substance, new cultures, new ideologies are constructed. In other words, a new society.
Re-wired Global City
Five years on, after Koolhaas had theorised Singapore as a generic city, that is, a city without qualities, the city planners of Singapore after years of metabolistic expertise, still insist that the city could be made. Being without qualities, not being unique, grates into the skin of a city-state bent on competing in a globalised world economy against other global city players. But how not to lose face?
In a combination of the Bilbao Effect and a retro-invocation of Kevin Lynch, in September 2000, they announced a new urban strategy via an exhibition called "A Unique City in the Making." They declared, "To create something unique, we must GO BEYOND the ordinary and break new ground. Yet at the same time, we must consciously protect, if not ENHANCE, what we have, be they natural features, bustling spaces or buildings. We explore the possibility of creating GATEWAYS, having LANDMARK buildings, enhancing FOCAL POINTS and protecting our breathtaking VIEWS."(2) The city is to be re-defined with identity-giving physical attributes such as LANDMARK buildings, GATEWAYS, FOCAL POINTS, VIEW CORRIDORS, and LOOK-OUT POINTS, in order to make it more distinctive and memorable. But memorable to who? Whose eyes is the city made unique for?
At another level, there is another kind of urban restructuring going on. The programme of ideological metabolism continues relentlessly with even greater fanaticism and sophistication based on the same basic genetic code. The body of this modern city with all its categories of built substance are currently undergoing another round of metabolism - an intensive renovation, upgrading, or replacement of the recently constituted substance towards a positivistic pumping, technological re-engineering, and cybernetic rewiring towards a bigger, better, stronger condition, able to take on the challenges of other world cities in the battlefield of global economics. Entire housing estates, schools, community centres, community libraries, factories, bus stops, are being "upgraded" -- new bright and bold colours, new appendages, new architectural styles are added onto their generic, utilitarian functional-looking facades.
And where the existing built environment fails to deliver, new spatial resources and icons are added in order to identify it with other global cities. To propel it into the New Economy, new Silicon Valley type technology parks are being built; there are new Norman Foster and SOM metro stations, and a Richard Meier medical centre. To entertain transnational managers, there is a new multi-million dollar art centre designed by the ex-James Stirling/Michael Wilford partnership; or for their shopping needs, they have a choice between a 250 metre-long Kohn Pederson Fox underground mall, a Philip Johnson shopping mall, or Jon Jerde-inspired mega malls among many other distractions.
II THE NODAL CITY
But despite all the overdetermination all the urbanism of good intentions in Singapore, one of the accidental results of this super-metabolism had been the creation, growth and acceptance of an urban model which I call the Nodal City. The Nodal City can be characterised by the following morphological operations and urban figures:
Transport Node: Imagine a mass transit system whether subterranean (metro), at grade (tramway or bus) or elevated above ground (light rail), proliferating across an urban territory. A large site over a transport node is a fertile condition for the sudden appearance of a Nodal City.
Implantation Of Big Buildings: Next, built substance may be implanted onto it that seems to extrude upwards as podium and downwards as basement so that Critical Mass is reached. This big building may consist of some of the dominant programmes of the contemporary city - shopping, business, entertainment, restaurants, recreation, with some form of housing, permanent or temporary (hotels), and carparks.
Vertical Stratification Of Programmes: To achieve further densification, more programmes may be layered vertically, one on top of the other, to further orchestrate what Koolhaas calls the CULTURE OF CONGESTION.
Simulation Of Urbanity Inside: The outside urbanity may be simulated inside, by creating an atrium space called a BIG CITY ROOM that simulates URBAN DIVERSITY, enacts URBAN TRANSIENCE by staging ephemeral elements and events.
Maximum Exploitation Of Surfaces: Its commercial culture may be further exploded to the outside by maximum exploitation of its surfaces such that its representations proliferate where eyes can see. Opaque surfaces may be embellished with large URBAN TATTOOS and ELECTRONIC TATTOOS offering more seductions. Ground planes on roofs of buildings may be reconstituted as RECONFIGURED GROUND with landscaping and open to sky facilities.
Horizontal Extension: Its systems and cultures may be extended horizontally at both MICRO and MACRO levels in order to channel more consuming bodies into the Nodal City. Non-contiguous sites are connected by MACRO CONNECTORS in the form of mass transportation systems. Connection to adjacent sites are maximised over and under roads with MICRO CONNECTORS. These linkages may be further energised with other programmes such that they may become HYBRID CONNECTORS: bridge-restaurants or underground shopping streets; or else mechanised with horizontal travelators.
Responding To The Adjacent Urban Context Outside: The Nodal City may effect nostalgic symbolic response to its adjacent URBAN CONTEXT by providing privileged views towards adjacent urban conditions with appropriate URBAN WINDOWS. Or OUTDOOR CITY PLATFORMS may be created to lend some kind of civic gesture. These mimic the semantics of "public spaces", but in fact are highly determined, strictly policed spaces.
Imagine all the functions of a city coagulated into such points dispersed across the city. Each point is Nodal City where material and non-material things flow through two coincident networks -- the mass transportation network in local places and the global network of economic flows.
Strategies
There are no structural principles to the Nodal City, no "master form". The absence of structure, makes it highly dynamic. Only non-fixed strategies and operations propel it ever optimistically forward. If the Nodal City has any strategy that underpins it, it would be an agile reflex reaction to changing urban forces, whether these be evolving economic or market needs, social, cultural or political sentiments. Intrinsically, it strategises to accumulate and proliferate its entities physically and non-physically: strategies of densification and connectivity. Its explicit agenda towards greater efficiency and rationalisation according to the logic of capital, demands the optimisation of its use of space, the prolongation of time spent in it, and the maximum extension of its influence across both time and space.
III PEOPLE'S PARK NODAL CITY
Nodal Cities could be categorised according to the notion of time of formation. For example, the main train stations around Tokyo's metropolitan Yamanote Line such as Shinjuku, Shibuya, and Ikebukuro are Nodal Cities that incrementally add or change built substance according to a host of complex forces. Most of them have been expanding, enlarging since the Second World War. While the mega-development at Potsdamer Platz which took four years to construct, was declared 'opened' at one single moment on the 29th of October 1998.
In Singapore, the urban accretion centred around the People's Park Complex is one such Nodal City that incrementally extends and densifies itself over time. Started off as one large building in 1970, over thirty years, it now extends its reach to 18 other buildings by 10 elevated link bridges stretching 600 metres long and 800 metres deep. These buildings accumulate high-rise apartments, offices, restaurants, shops, cinemas, hotels, food centres, shopping malls with atriums and multi-storey car parks. An underground metro station is under construction and by 2003 will connect this Nodal City to other Nodal Cities around the island of Singapore.
Implantation and Vertical Stratification
In any Nodal City, the simplest operation to densify a node is by accumulating built substance -- efficiently by implanting a big building onto a site in a single operation. The People's Park Complex is a mixed use development, built back in 1970, instantaneous it charged the site with urban Quantity: it featured an air-conditioned, large-volumed atrium space in the 5-storey shopping (15,000 square metres) cum office podium (500 square metres) with multi-tiered carparks (700 lots) to one side of it, and some 23 floors of 360 units of residential apartments over it. The apartment block is in the form of a rectangular slab block sitting onto the podium roof on pilotis with a restaurant incorporated under the lifted space. The VERTICAL STRATIFICATION of programmes in this complex is connected by escalators at the podium and lifts in the apartment block. These stop at every 5th floor and discharge onto wide "streets in the air" - a clear adoption of the Smithson's elevated social device. Ostensibly too there is a conscious attempt to include a new cultural component -- large public spaces inside the building to facilitate the holding of exhibitions and cultural shows; these were humanistic impulses straight from the rhetoric of Team 10.
In architectural history, the idea of big buildings implanted in a single premeditated operation, is fully theorised as the megastructure by Reyner Banham's 1974 book of the same name. Despite its sheer imageability, the megastructure found itself rejected as a viable developmental model because great power, great will, and immense technical coordination are necessary to realised it. One of the main criticisms of the megastructure is that it promotes homogeneity, is too totalising, culturally too one-dimensional, as any systematised machine. They often do not concern themselves too much with the particularities of place, topography, or cultures. The same can be induced about big implantations of the Nodal City.
Mechanism
Through an act of tabula rasa, the People's Park Complex replaced an existing large cluster of ad hoc bazaar and food stalls in a popular area in the old city known as People's Park. The mechanism for initiating the People's Park Complex is simple. Labelled as "redevelopment", first all small land parcels are acquired, facilitated by a Land Acquisition Act which allows the acquisition of any piece of land on the island for national development. These are then assembled as larger state lands to be sold to the private sector for "comprehensive" development through a tender system. "The land came with a set of conditions tailored to achieve the Government's planning objectives within the framework of a free market economy."(3)
The displaced stall-holders at People's Park are promised to be resettled into a future "hawker centre" on an adjacent site. The planners offer an benevolent organicist metaphor as reason for this act: "Cities develop and redevelop on a natural cycle. Urban renewal is the means to expedite and properly guide the rebuilding and reshaping of our city. Analogous to a heart transplantation but on a much larger scale, its objective is to breathe 'new life' into parts of the city which are 'run down'."(4)
The planners further promise: "The three main aspects of the comprehensive urban renewal process are rehabilitation, redevelopment and regeneration. This coordinated reorganisation process correctly applied to an area will not only lead to rejuvenation and upgrading of the area but also result is a more efficient infrastructure and an improved total environment. A successfully renewed area will in turn act as a nucleus for spontaneous regeneration of the contiguous areas." This triad of "rehabilitation, redevelopment, regeneration" compares less ominously with Maki's "destroy, displace, replace."
The Nodal City as a big comprehensive development sometimes necessitates the erasure of existing built substance, existing communities, existing cultures; resulting in a contestation of ideologies, cultures, and identities. Large nodal implantations create anxiety in people, since there is both a physical and psychological “injury” to the very ground that they derive meaning from.
Metabolism
Designed by the local architectural practice called Design Partnership, which included William Lim and Tay Kheng Soon, both then active members of SPUR (Singapore Planning & Urban Research group), in essence, People's Park Complex was, for the young architects of the People's Park Complex, a built manifesto of the group's thinking about the city.
In 1965, SPUR is formed. It is a group of architects and planners who come together to discuss and study various problems affecting the physical development of Singapore. Amongst the members are Tay, Lim and a Japanese urbanist lecturing in Singapore called Koji Nagashima, who is in touch with the Metabolist movement in Tokyo, and subsequently guest-edits an issue of PROCESS: Architecture (Japan) on Asian urbanism.(5) For Nagashima there was no doubt that the megastructure could contain change in urban situations yet has an intrinsically humanistic dimension: "Urban planning must deal with the URBAN SITUATION which is the function of PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT and HUMAN ACTIVITIES which constantly change and evolve with the TIME factor…. The formula suggests that the urban planner has to be able to understand the interactions between physical environment and human activities, and to develop a technique to create a vessel which can contain the various human activities. He should go even further, to provide insight into human civilisation and to indicate the aspiration for a better life of the future human society."(6)
In a 1967 manifesto-document which they produced, the SPUR group already imagines an Asian City of Tomorrow with Nodal City characteristics: this is a "city where we have dwellings that stretch upwards towards the sky, and beneath them people humming with activity in the business houses, governmental offices, educational centres, theatres, open spaces and recreational centres. Imagine a city where the various centres of activity are linked up by an efficient rapid transport system,… where people make their living by day where people live by night … . This is our Asian City of Tomorrow."(7)
But the operation of vertical stratification also strongly suggests a socio-cultural stratification. As Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926) depicts, the rich and powerful controlling in towers, are segregated from the powerless workers who rummage in despair, below street level. Even Le Corbusier's Ville Contemporaine (1922), supports a differentiated spatial structure to correspond to a specific, segregated social structure: one's dwelling depended on one's job.
Since the 1960s, in many North America cities such as Minneapolis, Montreal, Milwaukee, Calgary, and Toronto, large-scaled urban redevelopment projects effectively created urban clusters with elevated or underground linkage systems. They were similarly planned to act as 'crystallisation' points for social, cultural, and civic activities, as exhorted by SPUR. In his essay, "Underground and Overhead: Building the Analogous City,"(8) Trevor Boddy warns that the system of elevated and glassed-in pedestrian 'skyways' in Calgary that despite looking like promises of a new urban realm, really serves to insulate the 'proper' shoppers from the harsh realities of both the cold weather and the urban poor that live at the ground level. He calls this insulated city that simulates the urban, the "analogous city." The point is that spatial stratification could easily become a convenient device for social stratification.
New Paradigm of Urban Experience
What new urbanity or urban experiences does the Nodal City support?
Morphologically the contemporary city is increasingly transformed into plastic mass of urban substance connected by networks of rapid transportation systems latched onto other concentrations of urban built mass. The urban experience seems more about contiguity, smoothness, and plasticity. The linear compartments/containers of mass transit trains themselves spatial become vectors of connection with again with a curious mix of the public and the private. Intimate conversations can now be heard publicly in subway trains conducted with the absence of space over the mobile phone. Small groups huddle together to start a conversation in one place, carry it into the subway train, then out of it onto the platform up the escalators to a different part of the city. For them, the experience is a contiguous scenography of realms public and private, such that their contradistinction becomes problematic.
Perhaps all this points not to an ersatz, but a reconfigured urbanity. One may have to accept the fact that the urbanity as we know is, just like the city, has been transformed. Could the Nodal City engender a reconfigured urbanity of simultaneous concentration and extension that may encourage new multiplicitous ways of negotiating the contemporary city? The Nodal City may engender new psychological freedoms. Consider this: disparate urban situations get woven into unique tapestries of urbanity by the denizens of such urban territories in their negotiation with its urban substance. Each of their unique negotiation, unique weave is a syncretic act that conflates all types of networks operating in that weave - material, social, economic, political, cultural, aesthetic.
[Kok-Meng Tan is a partner in the architectural practice hAm based in Singapore. This article is in part based on his Masters dissertation supervised by Xavier Costa at UPC, Barcelona.]
Notes:
(1) Rem Koolhaas, "Singapore Songlines: Portrait of a Potemkin Metropolis or Thirty Years of Tabula Rasa", in Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL, The Monacelli Press, New York, 1995, p.1009-1089.
(2) Quoted from "A Unique city in the Making" exhibition brochure published by the Urban Redevelopment Authority of Singapore, September 2000.
(3) Changing the Face of Singapore, Urban Redevelopment Authority, Singapore, 1995, p. 5.
(4) Singapore Institute of Architects Journal (SIAJ) Sep/Oct 1968 no. 28/29, p. 12.
(5) PROCESS: Architecture, no. 20 Nov 1980. Editor in charge: Koichi Nagashima; Supervisor: Fumihiko Maki. This issue featured the Asian Planning and Architectural Consultants/ Collaboration (APAC) whose members included Maki, William Lim, Charles Correa, Sumet Jumsai, Tao Ho and Koichi Nagashima (+ AUR). The association and relationship between members of this group are detailed in the conversation between Maki and Nagashima included in this issue.
(6) Koichi Nagashima, Singapore Institute of Architects Journal, Jul/Aug '70 No. 41. Nagashima was then Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Singapore.(italics in quotation are mine)
(7) SPUR 65-67 (Singapore Variations of a Theme Park 1967), p. 5.
(8) Trevor Boddy, “Underground and Overhead: Building the Analogous City” in Michael Sorkin, ed., Variations on a Theme Park, Hill & Wang, eighth printing 1997, first printed 1992.
All images by Kok-Meng Tan unless otherwise indicated:
1. Street vendors in Singapore under ac hoc shelter.
2. Typical shop-house street in Singapore.
3. Schematic diagram of the NODAL CITY.
4. "Asian City of Tomorrow". (Illustration from SPUR 65/67, Singapore 1967)
5. Implantations at the Peoples' Park Nodal City.
6. Next metro station below the Peoples' Park Nodal City. (image from the Straits Times)
7. Apartments above. (photo by Albert Lim)
8. Corridor linking apartments. (photo by Albert Lim)
9. Vertical Stratification: Apartment block over offices and shopping centre.
10. Big City Room at Peoples' Park Complex.
11. Big City Room at Peoples' Park Centre next to the Peoples' Park Complex.
12. Big City Room with food centre at basement at Chinatown Point building across from the Peoples' Park Complex.
13. Food Centre under pilotis space of an apartment block.
14. Elevated Micro Connector to another big building across a main road.
15. "Asian City of Tomorrow", realised in modern Singapore.
16. Elevated Hybrid Connector: pedestrian link bridge AND Chinese Garden.
17. Metro station under construction that will link this NODAL CITY to other parts of the island.
18. Reconfigured ground.
19. Peoples' Park Complex to the left; Chinese Garden Bridge in the background.
20. Singapore: the metaphor for Metabolism.
21. Peoples' Park Nodal City: 18 Buildings, 7 Big City Rooms, 10 Micro Connectors and 1 Macro Connector.
22. Generic City: Singapore
Tan Kok Meng
|
