Singapore’s postcolonial ethnic revival in parks design

Abstract

Either led by state, market or civil society, ‘ethnic revival’ — a process associated with multiculturalism — helped countries respond to last century’s challenges of immigration and identity formation. In postcolonial states, politics of multiculturalism negotiated colonial policies and their expressions in the built environment. In postcolonial Singapore, ethnic revival informed design and planning of its public park system. What aesthetic was used in postcolonial Singapore? How precisely does it reveal political ideas? Were these ideas and aesthetics general or specific to Singapore? How did local history influence that aesthetics? The paper situates Singapore’s postcolonial parks design, with its use of ‘multiethnic’ popular symbolism, within the discourse around the aesthetics of fast-growing urban environments of the mid-nineteen hundreds. It examines its contradictions and merits, casting a light on the consequences of postmodern culture for socio-political and economic gain: a state’s negotiation of local history and culture versus globalized trends; and the commodification of landscapes for tourism purposes and consequent ephemerality of urban imagery. The research examines the design of over 400 parks built between independence (1960s) to the late 1990s — the majority of those (90%) are sited in public housing estates, where 81% of the population of over 5.6 million lives.