Urban Redevelopment Authority Research Articles

Beyond Preservation: Heritage as an Educational Practice Process at 141 Neil Road, Singapore

Over the past two decades, the concept of heritage has been significantly broadened, with an increasing number of scholars viewing it not as a set of static objects with fixed meanings but as a social process consciously endowed with commemorative functions through human creation. This research illustrates and empirically supports this perspective through a case study. Initially, the paper reviews the development of the heritage concept through the literature review and elaborates on the idea of “heritage as process”. Subsequently, it examines Singapore’s enriching exploration and successful implementation of heritage conservation, particularly since 2000, when the local government shifted from preserving historical buildings to a comprehensive conservation strategy that embraces a sense of place, identity, and memory and encourages a bottom-up participatory approach. Finally, this paper takes the transformation of the century-old townhouse at 141 Neil Road in Singapore as its focus. After being renovated into an urban architectural heritage conservation laboratory, the house has gradually become a place of heritage on Neil Road by training professionals’ construction skills, transforming its function, introducing technological explorations, and enhancing public interaction. This process has developed the abilities of heritage conservation professionals in desktop research, reuse design, and practical construction skills while simultaneously promoting community participation and heightening awareness of heritage conservation among local residents. Through daily practices, this historical townhouse gradually became a place of heritage on Neil Road, exemplifying the research theme that “heritage is a comprehensive and dynamic practice encompassing social, cultural, and technological dimensions”. From being preserved for renovation in 2020 to being approved as a “Heritage Show House” by the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) in 2023, the case of 141 Neil Road offers a new perspective in the heritage conservation field that “heritage is always in the process of becoming, rather than a constant given”.

Strategies for Streamlined Urban Development: A Case Study of Land Use Succession in Upper Hill, Nairobi

This study examines the dynamics of Urban Land Use Succession (ULUS) in Upper Hill, Nairobi, highlighting the impact of neoliberal policies and private sector-led urban redevelopment. It investigates how land tenure, public infrastructure, and planning controls shape urban landscapes, leading to patchwork land use patterns and environmental misalignments. The case of Upper Hill, transitioning from a serene residential area to a bustling commercial hub, is explored to understand the determinants of ULUS and propose strategies for streamlined urban development. Employing Neoliberal Theory and hypothesis testing, the research identifies spatial policy as the primary driver of ULUS. The study suggests innovative approaches, including land assembly and the establishment of an Urban Redevelopment Authority, to harmonize urban development. These strategies aim to bridge the gap between private and public land development, ensuring coherent urban growth. The research contributes to the understanding of urban redevelopment, particularly in Kenyan contexts, by offering a model that integrates public and private interests. This model serves as a blueprint for managing urban transformation in Nairobi and other similar urban settings, promoting sustainable and equitable urban development.

The Changi-Marina Bay Corridor: green strategies for Singapore’s soft power

Singapore’s city-making strategies are seen by many Asia Pacific cities as a model to achieve today’s desired ‘world-class city’ status. They represent a source of innovation to design alternative configurations and rethink established norms of urban and social standards. This article looks at the urban landscape of the city of Singapore through infrastructural systems instead of individual design masterpieces, focusing on the urban corridor defined by the connection of Changi Airport, East Coast Parkway (ECP), and Marina Bay as a single urban entity, unified by a visual and experiential choreography. At a time of intense global competition in the aviation industry, Changi has deployed new strategies to sustain its reputation as an innovative transportation hub. The leg between Changi Airport and Marina Bay is an integral part of Singapore, experienced by the majority of its annual visitors arriving in the city-state. The 19-kilometre route, a major infrastructural project begun in the 1970s and still in progress, is a highly landscaped and scenic artery of the island, through which the airport has injected its hyper-urbanism into the city. While conveying the history of the developments of the Corridor, we consider the soft power strategies used by the city state to develop a form of transnational elite urbanism based on leisure and recreation, where urban planning, design, and green infrastructure play a key role. We reflect on the global and local dimension of Singapore, discussing how the ECP corridor reveals only one side of the city’s double character.On the one hand, this article critically analyses the rhetorical use of landscaping ingrained in the Corridor to attract foreign investment and tourism, where the artificialisation of green interventions has overwritten the presence of the native vegetation and morphology. On the other hand, we reflect on the less evident but nonetheless split that the Corridor has generated between the city’s southern residential areas and foreshore. While cutting through the urban tissue of part of the island seamlessly and without interruption, the Corridor does in fact separate out substantial residential areas, turning Singapore successful green strategies into a form of urban injustice. The twofold nature of the corridor – at the same time, that of the ‘connector’ and ‘divider’ – thus reflects Singapore’s intrinsic ambiguity: its manifestation of global ambitions set against its local realities. This article unpacks the planning mechanisms used to design this development, including the land reclamation powers of the state and the government land sales programme. It also discusses the strategies and choices underpinning the urban sequence of the ECP’s infrastructural nodes, from the Jewel (2019) to the Conservatories (2012). Drawing on official documentation from Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA), field research, and using a multidisciplinary lens, this article interpolates architectural and planning studies with insights gleaned by onsite investigation.

Subterranean Displacements and Replacements in Singapore: Politics, Materialities, and Mentalities

Geographical writings on displacement have highlighted how processes of dispossession are instrumental in rupturing the connection between peoples and place or territory. These studies, however, tend to privilege horizontal and surface-level inquiries, thereby neglecting the ways in which the volumetric and subterranean matter to the analytical sites and lived scales of displacement. Using the case of Singapore, where underground spaces have been championed by the Urban Redevelopment Authority as the new frontier for the land-scarce city-state, we go beyond a human-centric focus to call for attention to the materialities and mentalities (and their associated politics) that are caught up in acts of displacement. In so doing, we not only tease out the surface–subsurface relations and interactions that are closely bounded up with displacements but also illuminate how instances of displacement subsequently map onto practices of replacement. Crucially, although the city-state’s underground plans are in part meant to reduce its ecological footprint emerging from land reclamation, they ironically lead to further environmental degradation given the replacement of materials from subterranean excavations into offshore marine sites. Furthermore, with the large-scale nature of this project, the Singaporean state elites have spared no efforts in displacing prevailing mentalities about the health and safety risks of a subterranean way of life and replacing public confidence and belief in the sociotechnical expertise necessary for going underground. Displacement, as such, should not only signal eviction, expulsion, and exclusion; it can also comprise different forms of replacement designed to secure resilient urban futures.

Leveraging open data to reconstruct the Singapore Housing Index and other building-level markers of socioeconomic status for health services research

BackgroundSocioeconomic status (SES) is an important determinant of health, and SES data is an important confounder to control for in epidemiology and health services research. Individual level SES measures are cumbersome to collect and susceptible to biases, while area level SES measures may have insufficient granularity. The ‘Singapore Housing Index’ (SHI) is a validated, building level SES measure that bridges individual and area level measures. However, determination of the SHI has previously required periodic data purchase and manual parsing. In this study, we describe a means of SHI determination for public housing buildings with open government data, and validate this against the previous SHI determination method.MethodsGovernment open data sources (e.g. data.gov.sg, Singapore Land Authority OneMAP API, Urban Redevelopment Authority API) were queried using custom Python scripts. Data on residential public housing block address and composition from the HDB Property Information dataset (data.gov.sg) was matched to postal code and geographical coordinates via OneMAP API calls. The SHI was calculated from open data, and compared to the original SHI dataset that was curated from non-open data sources in 2018.ResultsTen thousand seventy-seven unique residential buildings were identified from open data. OneMAP API calls generated valid geographical coordinates for all (100%) buildings, and valid postal code for 10,012 (99.36%) buildings. There was an overlap of 10,011 buildings between the open dataset and the original SHI dataset. Intraclass correlation coefficient was 0.999 for the two sources of SHI, indicating almost perfect agreement. A Bland-Altman plot analysis identified a small number of outliers, and this revealed 5 properties that had an incorrect SHI assigned by the original dataset. Information on recently transacted property prices was also obtained for 8599 (85.3%) of buildings.ConclusionSHI, a useful tool for health services research, can be accurately reconstructed using open datasets at no cost. This method is a convenient means for future researchers to obtain updated building-level markers of socioeconomic status for policy and research.

Distilling actionable insights from big travel demand datasets for city planning

Working towards a more data-informed land use, amenities and infrastructure planning process, the Singapore Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) harnesses big data and spatial analytics to deepen its understanding of urban activity and mobility patterns. Big travel demand datasets from public transport and ride-hailing services enable planners to observe mobility patterns at a high level of detail for large numbers of users, trips, and trip types. Since August 2018, the URA has been working with leading technology company and ride-hailing operator Grab to understand how daily commute patterns vary between existing and new transport modes, and how the volume of activities in each area evolves across different times of day. This paper describes the novel dataset and analytical techniques utilised to study the relationship between urban activity and mobility. It will also report how spatiotemporal characteristics of the urban environment, such as land use mix, location accessibility, and peak-hour travel demand, influence commutes by different modes in each area. By studying mobility over a range of travel modes, this method of analysis will provide city planners with richer insights to better assess infrastructure requirements for new developments. The findings are also useful for emerging transport providers, who can improve service delivery across short- and medium-term time scales.

Promoting tropical architecture by implementing design control in zoning regulation

Globalization has led to uniformity in the city images. The ubiquitous “modern” buildings have dissociated the local climate and cultural context. Frampton’s Critical Regionalism postulate saw this phenomenon as the destruction of the creative nucleus of a great civilization and great culture. Postcolonial countries, like Indonesia which inherit colonial cities, facing issues to define their identity, namely in terms of performing Tropical Architecture principles and enforcing it institutionally. The private building’s architectural design is seen as a private domain that cannot be regulated, thus the building owner’s need to present themselves as a “modern and progressive” party shall not be restricted. This paper tries to examine how urban planning can help modern tropical city image actualization by implement supporting regulations. A qualitative approach with stakeholder analysis is conducted to seek the design control implementation opportunity by the municipal government that met with private interest. A content analysis of Landscaping for Urban Spaces and High-Rises (LUSH) Programme from Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) also studied as a success story. The result is that a design control, to achieve a more contextual approach in architecture design practice, could be performed with incentive and bonus schemes in the building permit process and zoning regulations.

The ‘Urban Elements’ method for teaching parametric urban design to professionals

The article proposes a method for teaching advanced urban design to working professionals in Singapore. The article aims to expand the discourse on parametric urban design education by introducing ‘Urban Elements’ as conceptual urban design instruments with an inherent rule-based logic, which can help to bridge gaps in teaching parametric urban design thinking. As case study we present a course developed for and delivered to the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) in Singapore in 2017 by the Future Cities Laboratory at the Singapore-ETH Centre. The article reports on the pedagogical method, course results and course feedback. The main difficulties of teaching professionals in parametric urban design are described and possible reasons and improvements are discussed. The results show that participants using the ‘Urban Elements’ method successfully linked theoretical input to urban design problems, applied evidence-based urban design strategies to these problems, and developed parametric definitions to explore the solution spaces of these urban design challenges. The teaching methodology presented opens up a new research field for urban design pedagogy at the intersection of explicating urban design intent, integrating multidisciplinary knowledge and exploring new software driven tools.

Seeing like a city through the Singapore City Gallery

Urban planning galleries are interpretive spaces that assert the state’s vision for the city. Ostensibly public showcases of a city’s past, present, and future, state administrations use these sites for specific purposes. On the one hand, planning galleries are designed to convince the public, tourists, and investors that their cities are aspiring towards a greater and more optimistic future. On the other hand, these galleries imply to visitors that the state holds extensive spatial knowledge about their territory—in essence, planning galleries are a material and discursive assertion of state sovereignty. Such assertions are a reaction to shifts in the state–civil society relationship, and represent the state’s desire to have citizens appreciate the challenges of urban management—to see like the city. This paper evaluates the Singapore City Gallery (SCG)—a performative space maintained by the Urban Redevelopment Authority that reasserts the state’s vision for Singapore. I argue that sites like the SCG are significant for understanding how cities are being made through negotiation between the state and diverse publics.

To Construct Buildings Onto Seabed Directly Without Land Reclamation

After shifting of the existing city seaport terminals from southern side of Singapore to Tuas South at western side of Singapore after 2027, the existing seaport areas including the sea spaces can be released for Southern Waterfront Development, as announced by Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) on 28 July 2016. URA has indicated in their Master Plan – Greater Southern Waterfront which could be built up for new housing, commercial, cultural and entertainment uses, cementing Singapore’s growing reputation as a world-class city for its people to live, work and play.In this Paper, the Author has given several ideas to construct buildings onto seabed directly without land reclamation. These structural systems will eliminate the energies for excavation, transportation, reclamation and compaction for the fill materials.

The Emergence of Heritage Conservation in Singapore and the Preservation of Monuments Board (1958-76)

In Singapore, where strong state has driven conservation measures, there has evolved distribution of conservation work between two state agencies-the Urban Redevelopment Authority and the Preservation of Monuments Board (known since 2013 as the Preservation of Sites and Monuments). The Urban Redevelopment Authority has designated whole conservation zones, while the smaller Preservation of Monuments Board has picked out individual historic monuments and buildings for preservation. The beginning of conservation in Singapore lies with the events that led to the creation of the Preservation of Monuments Board in 1971. The Urban Redevelopment Authority did not commence its involvement in conservation until much later. The Urban Redevelopment Authority's designation of key conservation areas, such as Chinatown, Kampong Glam, and Little India, started only in the 1980s. Singapore's non-governmental organization, the Singapore Heritage Society, was not established until 1987. The Preservation of Monuments Board had already been listing historic buildings for conservation for 16 years. Studying the history of the creation of the Preservation of Monuments Board in Singapore reveals the forces behind the early emergence of conservation in Singapore and how Western ideas and institutions provided models for conservation in Singapore to follow.Heritage conservation was often viewed as luxury developing countries such as Singapore could not afford during the early years of independence. was an urgency to rapidly industrialize and to maximize urban space for commercial development and modern housing through urban renewal. This has been taken to mean that little thought was given to conservation by postcolonial governments until after significant economic development had occurred (Yeoh and Huang 1996, 411). However, Lily Kong, in her history of Singapore's Urban Redevelopment Authority, suggested an opposing view. She proposed that even during the intense period of demolition and rebuilding of urban renewal, there advocates of conservation the bureaucracy persisted until their voices became more influential (Kong 2010, 47). These voices, although present in the 1960s and 1970s, had to wait for wider acceptance the bureaucracy. Her argument is that Singapore government agencies were not monolithic or homogenous; instead within those agencies and bodies, multiple voices seek to be heard (ibid.). Lily Kong and Brenda Yeoh (2003, 131) make it clear that in Singapore, the state's engagement with issues of heritage only occurred more fully at a specific juncture of its development-the 1980s and 1990s. However, the Preservation of Monuments Board had its genesis during the 1960s. Debates in the 1960s that led to the Preservation of Monuments Board's creation might reveal more about these early voices of conservation that Kong describes as not coming to the fore until much later.Kong's assertion that there quiet debates the Singapore bureaucracy in the 1960s and 1970s is hinted at by some published material reflecting the thinking of the bureaucrats and the politicians. In one article, Alan Choe, who became in 1964 the first head of the Urban Redevelopment Authority's predecessor, the Urban Renewal Department, asserted: Contrary to misinformed belief, urban renewal does not mean just the pulling down of slum sections and rebuilding on the cleared area (1969, 165). He argued: There are actually three indispensable elements of urban renewal; conservation, rehabilitation and rebuilding. This would mean identification of the areas worth preserving; programme to improve such areas and make them habitable with an improved environment; and an identification of the areas that must be demolished and rebuilt (1968, 2-5). In published interview, Choe even mentioned that in 1967 then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew had approached him with his concern that not enough consideration had been given to preserving historic buildings in the rush by Singapore's urban planners to engage in urban renewal (Straits Times, April 12, 2014). …

The econometric analysis of retail rents in Singapore

PurposePrimarily based on Alonso’s bid-rent model, the purpose of this paper is to examine the dynamics of the Singapore’s overall retail rental market by adopting a vector error correction model (VECM) estimation.Design/methodology/approachThis paper uses the proxy for the overall retail rental value, which is indicated by a combination of the shop rent index from 2004 to 2013 and the retail rent index (RRI) in 2014, maintained by the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA). The independent factors are the real gross domestic product (GDP), monthly earnings of individuals and vacancy rates (VR).FindingsSuch a behavioral model examines the dynamic structures that overshoot and/or diverge from equilibrium.Research limitations/implicationsThe variables LOGGDP and VR are co-integrated of order one, I(1), while variables LOGME and LOGSRI are co-integrated of order two, I(2), to enable them to be employed in the VECM model.Practical implicationsThe VECM model shows a good fit that allows the error correction term (ecm) together with the economic, financial and rental variables to jointly explain about 79.2 percent of the variation in the overall RRI. With a positive CoinEq1 coefficient that is positive and statistically significant at 5 percent level, it would take a long time for the system to return to its equilibrium once it has been shocked. Another variable that shows significant explanatory relationships includes past rents (index points) in the second order lags [D(LOGSRI(−2))]. The variable [D(LOGGDP(−3))], with a significantt-statistic value at 2.916, also helps to explain the changes in the overall rents.Social implicationsThis paper highlights the importance of the first and third differences of the lagged macroeconomic variables of the monthly earnings of individuals is moderately significant. The VR in the first and second differences is significant in accounting for the variation in changes of overall retail rents with theirt-statistics values being above 3.0. It is thus meaningful for policy makers to so enhance their in-depth understanding.Originality/valueThis paper fulfills an identified need to study how the results from theex postforecasting estimates from the VECM for overall retail rents in Singapore can be enabled.

Coordinator’s Introduction to the Forum

In many ways, the redevelopment of Pittsburgh after World War II was similar to the experiences of many older American cities. Although the details of redevelopment varied from city to city, public–private partnerships between business elites and strong, often reform mayors worked to arrest the decline and restore the preeminence of their central cities by improving infrastructure, revitalizing downtowns, attracting new manufacturing firms, and eliminating slums. The Pittsburgh experience, locally called Renaissance, followed these familiar lines, but it had distinctive aspects that attracted national and later scholarly attention. The short essays of this Forum raise issues beyond Pittsburgh’s traditional Renaissance story, which invite a more balanced and nuanced consideration of this critical period in the city’s history. Informed partially by the ongoing national conversation about revitalizing American cities, Pittsburgh’s top corporate presidents under the leadership of Richard King Mellon formed the Allegheny Conference on Community Development (commonly called just the Conference) in 1943 and partnered with the powerful Democratic boss and mayor David L. Lawrence. The Conference generally set the agenda, supplied professional expertise, united the business community, and applied political pressure on state government. Mayor Lawrence delivered essential municipal requirements from the city councils, the ballot box, and referenda. The liberal and early use of authorities, in particularly the Urban Redevelopment Authority, overcame some political and revenue-raising obstacles. The partnership addressed the environment (smoke control, sewage treatment, and flood alleviation), infrastructure (expressways, international airport, and stadia), economic diversification (industrial and office parks), slum clearance (Lower Hill District), and downtown revitalization (Point State Park, Gateway Center, Mellon Square, and public parking garages).1 The partnership, like in most cities, eventually encountered strong resistance from disaffected neighborhoods, neglected industrial mill towns, and African Americans who bore the brunt of slum clearance. Opposition from several quarters in the 1960s, including an active civil rights movement and reaction to the riots following Martin Luther King’s assassination, ended the redevelopment program by the decade’s close.2 Nonetheless, clearing skies, diminished flooding, new infrastructure, and sparkling downtown office towers and parks garnered significant national acclaim. The partnership labeled its redevelopment successes as the city’s Renaissance, and the national media broadcast the term across the country. Pittsburgh’s importance in America’s postwar redevelopment experience stemmed from the city’s abysmal environmental reputation and the extreme concentration of power in both the private and public sectors. The Smoky City’s unhealthy, soot-laden skies and dirty, ugly

An examination of the structure and dynamics of Singapore's maturing Central Area office market

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to examine the structure and dynamics of Singapore's Central Area office market. A long-run equilibrium relationship is tested and a short-run adjustment error correction model are estimated, incorporating appropriate serial error correction. The long-run equation is estimated for office rent, with office employment and available stock.Design/methodology/approach– With the vector error correction model (VECM), the lagged rent, available stock, office employment, vacancy and occupied stock (OS) can impact the rental adjustment process. Equilibrium rent on the whole reacts positively to lagged rents, available stock, office employment, OS and negatively to vacancy rates (VC). Past levels of positive change in VC and rental growth can have negative effects on current OS.Findings– While good economic conditions signaled by increases in rents increase the supply of new stock (available space), higher rents and VC dampen the long-term occupied space (space absorption) in accordance with economic theory. Available stock can be forecasted by past rent and absorption levels owing to the developer's profit-driven nature.Research limitations/implications– An understanding of the interaction between the macroeconomic variables and the Central Area office market is useful to domestic and foreign investors and developers, who then can better evaluate their decision making in commercial real estate investment and development projects.Practical implications– It is implicit that the Singapore Central Area office market requires at least a year before any rental increase can potentially dampen the space demanded. Firms are attracted to locate there owing to agglomeration economies and they are willing to pay premium office rents in conjunction with office space intensification in the Central Area. Newly built space is positively affected by past rents. Urban Redevelopment Authority and private real estate developers should be wary of excess office sector vacancies by avoiding over supply, even though an increase in the supply of office space in the Central Area can have a positive impact on office rent in the longer term. Most of the office space development would tend to meet the demand in the long run. Rental stickiness is exemplified as rental changes are affected by lagged rent.Social implications– Policy makers are better enabled to stabilize the office sectors of the real estate market if so required.Originality/value– The paper adopts the VECM and validated by empirical evidence, to investigate the long-run equilibrium relationship and short-term corrections underlying the dynamics of the Singapore Central office market. Delay in the restoration of equilibrium in real estate markets is attributed to factors like lease terms and supply lags.

Ethnoscapes, entertainment and ’eritage in the global city: segmented spaces in Singapore’s Joo Chiat Road

This case study considers the early development and recent changes that have occurred in the vicinity of Joo Chiat Road, Singapore, which can be described as a ‘linear activity corridor’ linking the districts of Geylang, Katong and Marine Parade, immediately east of Singapore’s urban core. Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) has declared Joo Chiat to be a ‘Conservation Area’, reflecting local-born Peranakan and Eurasian cultures, with similar status to other more central historic sites such as Chinatown, Kampong Glam, Little India and Emerald Hill. But the story of Joo Chiat has evolved along a somewhat different trajectory from the more prominent, tourism-related, heritage areas, with a multiplicity of interactions operating at the margins of the planning process. This has led to the spatial infusion of potentially discordant, globally related, ‘entertainment and recreational’ activities into an area of established urban identity and multiple attachments. When a policy of police containment was found to be inadequate in protecting local residents from undesirable impacts, changes were eventually brought about through a combination of neighbourhood activism and local political initiative. Through detailed land use inspections, press reports and strategic interviews, backed up by secondary sources, the study highlights the impingement of marginalised, potentially disruptive ‘global’ elements into a local heritage conservation area, and the importance of strong neighbourhood identity and community involvement as active components in the process of conflict resolution.

Vertical cities as a solution for land scarcity: the tallest public housing development in Singapore

Singapore, whose land area is approximately 660 km2, is one of the most densely populated cities in the world. In the 2001 Concept Plan, the Urban Redevelopment Authority estimated that Singapore would need 800000 more homes or 6400 ha of land to cater to a projected population of 5.5 million. Considering other competing demands for land resources, the 2001 Concept Plan has suggested constructing taller buildings. Thus, in August 2001, the Housing and Development Board initiated the development of a new 50-storeys public housing design. The 50-storeys public housing development, which comprises about 2000 dwellings, is the first of its kind in Singapore. This paper provides an insight into the potential residents’ perception, attitudes, concerns and acceptability of such a high-rise high-density housing development that has features that are similar to a vertical city. Findings reveal that despite being accustomed to decades of high-rise living, less than half of the Singaporean population would choose to live in such dwellings. Younger and smaller households, as well as males tend to be more receptive towards this new housing form. The main attractions of such high-rise housing developments are the scenic view and windy environment in contrast to major concerns such as pricing, safety of the building structure, insufficient provision of facilities as well as traffic congestion. The findings have important implications for policy-makers, especially in congested cities where land is a major constraint, and the only way to build is upwards.

Property rights, collective sales and government intervention: averting a tragedy of the anticommons

In response to the need to cater for the requirements of a larger future population, the Urban Redevelopment Authority of Singapore released development guide plans, which have provided for higher development intensity to residential land in various parts of the island. One of the impacts is that many property owners in Singapore have banded together to capitalize on the “marriage value” of the en bloc site to reap big windfalls as compared to individual sales. But there were minority owners who objected to the sale. The Land Titles (Strata) (Amendment) Act 1999 was passed on 11 October 1999 to facilitate such en bloc sales as these will release prime land for higher density redevelopment to provide more quality private housing in land-scarce Singapore. This paper shows how property rights and property ownership could have led to a tragedy of the anticommons and how government intervention through legislation has averted such a tragedy. Whilst the Land Titles (Strata) (Amendment) Act 1999 has been successful in facilitating en bloc sales resulting in optimization of scarce land resources, it has raised controversial issues such as majority rule versus minority protection and the attenuation of property rights. The authors conclude that in land-scarce Singapore, public good, in that more land will be made available for private housing for the majority, should take precedence.

Restaurants in Little India, Singapore: A Study of Spatial Organization and Pragmatic Cultural Change

Food is not culturally neutral but strongly associated with identity, prestige, social place, and symbolic meanings. In Singapore's Little India, food has been commercialized as a public good of consumption, integral of a broadly defined ethnic Indian identity and representation. Over the years, within the spatial setting of Little India, the ethnic Indian cuisine has been adapted for rapid change in new environments. These include the impacts of the government's policy to use it to promote multiculturalism, the Urban Redevelopment Authority's earmarking of Little India as a conservation area in 1 989, and the Singapore Tourism Board's campaign to attract international tourists. For restaurant operators, it is the pragmatic business adaptation and cuisine hybridization that is most essential for survival. Consequently, the outcome of this process of accommodating change has produced a new breed of cityscape in a systematically identified zone of the increasingly cosmopolitan Singapore. Food has an array of representations that make it far from being culturally neutral, even though it may appear otherwise. It is strongly associated with identity, prestige, social place, and symbolic meanings (Narayan 1997, p. 161). Frequently, food possesses inherent characteristics that are a habitually accumulated outcome of a long social process. As a social and cultural product, food can thus be domesticated as ethnic cuisine through which representation is established and fully inscribed with ethnicity (Chua and Rajah 1996). Hence, when food is represented symbolically as part of the cultural traits of an ethnic community, it carries a collectivized identity. Nevertheless, food being a basic commodity for public consumption,

Post‐construction analysis of the Chinatown pilot conservation project in Singapore

Examines the rationale behind the conservation movement in Singapore and presents a post‐construction analysis of the performance of the Chinatown pilot conservation project. This project was one of the earliest batches of shophouse restoration projects carried out and managed by the government agency, the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) in Singapore. This project was classified as a formative period project way back in 1989 when it was used to demonstrate the government’s commitment to conservation. On completion, the Chinatown pilot conservation project consists of 45 shops at ground floor with 93 other upper floor units. Aims to evaluate the performance of this project from its physical, economic and social perspective. For this purpose, all occupants of the restored units as well as 80 locals and tourists were surveyed in the third quarter of 1996. Analyses and presents the findings of this survey.

Singapore and the Experience of Place in Old Age

Since the 1970s, humanistic geography has gained adherents among geographers who emphasize the centrality of and their condition (Tuan 1976, 266). Humanistic research has focused on human relationships with place, notably the development, characterization, and outcome of such relationships. Except in relation to homes (Perkins 1988), neighborhoods (Rivlin 1982), or places of worship (Kong 1992), few authors except Graham Rowles (1978, 1980, 1983a, 1983b) have investigated in detail how elderly people relate to the places with which they interact. We address this deficiency in the context of Singapore, in view of the growing proportion and number of the aged and the necessity for understanding their experiences and considering their future needs. Specifically, we use two case studies, Tiong Bahru and Chinatown, to explore how the elderly in rapidly modernizing Singapore relate to their places. Environments are especially important to aging residents, affecting their adaptation to change, the sustenance of their personal identities, and their continued participation in life, particularly given their diminishing physical ability, reduced economic means, and changing surroundings. Tiong Bahru and Chinatown represent two areas with larger-than-average concentrations of elderly residents. The census divisions Tiong Bahru and Kreta Ayer, which correspond closely to our study areas, are two of only seventeen census divisions (out of a total of eighty-one) in which the age category with the highest proportion of residents is sixty and above (Lau 1992, 22-24). Tiong Bahru can be divided into two areas [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. The first comprises primarily three-to-five-story walk-up apartments, built between the 1930s and 1950s by the Singapore Improvement Trust (SIT), the housing authority prior to the current Housing and Development Board (HDB). The second comprises the high-rise HDB apartments in the Kim Tian estate. Physically, Tiong Bahru has not undergone many changes in the past few decades. The SIT apartments still look much the way they did when they were newly constructed. Likewise, Seng Poh Road Market / Food Center has been in existence since 1950, although the stalls were already operating in an unauthorized open-air market in the immediate prewar years (SIT n.d.). Only in the past five years have some changes been apparent: a Mass Rapid Transit station is now in operation on Tiong Bahru Road, and two developments on either side of the same road (one residential and one commercial retail, office, and entertainment) were recently completed. Even so, these changes have not drastically altered the essentially Old World environment of the SIT heartland. In demographic terms, however, the area has changed. The distinctively aged community has resulted because, over the years, many younger people have moved out to newer HDB housing developments that offer bigger and better facilities. Chinatown, in contrast, has seen many physical changes over the years. The shophouses (two- or three-story units in which the ground floor functions as shop space and the upper floors as residential quarters) were threatened by the bulldozer in the early 1980s; some were in fact demolished [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]. However, with a change in thinking toward a proconservationist stance, the Urban Redevelopment Authority has begun government conservation works and has initiated such works in the private sector since the late 1980s. Many of the elderly residents who lived in squalid conditions in these shophouses have since been moved to HDB apartments elsewhere, primarily in the adjacent Sago Street-Kreta Ayer Road vicinity. Focusing on these as our study areas, we conducted in-depth interviews with residents in 1993 and 1994, tape recording them when we were permitted to and translating them from Mandarin and other Chinese dialects when we had to. Part of our analysis was based on the observations we made as we walked through Tiong Bahru and Chinatown, noting in particular where the elderly congregated and what they did in their meeting places. …