The politics of public space planning in Singapore

Abstract

This paper considers the role of, and hence the social and political significance that has been accorded to, the design and provision of public spaces in the urban planning process. This approach gives useful insights into understanding the role these spaces have played in the colonial and post‐colonial city of Singapore. This discussion argues that public spaces in both the colonial and the post‐colonial city are essentially constructions by the ruling élite and its planning regime and are thus politically charged. Popular involvement has been singularly lacking in the planning and development of public spaces in post‐colonial Singapore. Instead, the general public has been marginalized in the creation of these spaces by the colonial and post‐colonial state. The completeness of this exclusion is shown through the demise of most of the vital and liveliest, albeit previously appropriated, public spaces of the colonial city. Public housing and the re‐invention of public spaces provided by a new social and political order followed the end of British colonial rule.In the following discussion, the role and significance of public spaces through the colonial period and then in the post‐colonial developmental state are examined. It is shown that public space provision by government authorities has served initially more as an imposition of colonial ideals and social segregation, and latterly as a reification of the prevailing political ideology, than in meeting real public needs for such spaces. A major focus of this article is the use of public space as a political tool of control by the state over its denizens in the Foucauldian sense, and how this could be construed even through different systems of governance and political agendas in Singapore.