An incomplete megastructure: the Golden Mile Complex, global planning education, and the pedestrianised city

Abstract

New experiments were taking place in Singapore from the early 1960s onwards, as pedagogies and practices of urban design were being circulated among global experts and multiple stakeholders. New attitudes towards modernisation and urban renewal were developed then. Post-war humanist ideals of ‘social’ Brutalist architecture and revisionist attitudes towards high modernism and the overdevelopment of automobile infrastructure coursed through Singapore’s Golden Mile Complex (GMC). This was a project that attempted to address the problems of increased density and economic imperatives in the urban realm. This article focuses on the GMC as a contested site and as a built megastructure, in an effort to chart a new relationship between architecture, urban design, and the missed opportunity to develop a pedestrianised city. Designed by William S.W. Lim and the Design Partnership (DP), the GMC was an experiment in pedestrianised urbanism that differed from what had emerged in the original centres of invention and intellectual discourse in Singapore. Partly coinciding with the GMC’s design conception and construction, the period between 1962 and 1973 raised warnings against the ‘bulldozer addicts’ of urban renewal. It also witnessed the socially levelling roles of shopping, alternative models of urban circulation, and the emergence of extra-large architectural forms. This was also a short period of democratic debate and experimentation with mixed-use typologies and strata-title private ownership in the increased commercialisation of the city, fuelled by Singapore’s ambition to become a global city. The need to attract global capital and private consumerist functions made polarising demands on the development around the GMC. Alongside its aggressive urban renewal, Singapore was also keen to gain social legitimacy through its public housing programmes. The circulation of globally relevant pedagogies in urban design and planning formed the backdrop to an incomplete conception and realisation of an avant-garde megastructure specific to an Asian discourse of urban densification.