Conclusions: the Contribution of Singapore’s Park System to the Debate on Post-Independence and Post-Colonial Constructions of Nation

Abstract

Singaporean government policies were formulated to respond to the challenges that high-density urban development posed, by balancing economic imperatives with social,cultural and ecological demands. The park system planning reflects each of the changes in policy direction and parks have been used as instruments of sustainable urban development and the definition of a Singaporean identity. Some characteristics are critical in understanding the future of park development and the models/lessons that can be transferred.

Singaporean government policies were formulated to respond to the challenges that high-density urban development posed, by balancing economic imperatives with social,cultural and ecological demands. The park system planning reflects each of the changes in policy direction and parks have been used as instruments of sustainable urban development and the definition of a Singaporean identity. Some characteristics are critical in understanding the future of park development and the models/lessons that can be transferred.

Singaporean planners consistently re-interpreted and evolved western conceptualizations of urban parks. The publication identifies six strategies adopted by the government—through the formulation of concept and master plans—to shape urban green-provision.

First, the ‘colonial strategy’ (1958 plan) organized parks into the western structural planning model of ‘open space system’ and ‘green belt’.

Second, the modernist ‘functional strategy’ (1971 plan) conceptualized parks as services for new towns’ high-density public housing.

Third, the ‘identity strategy’ (1980 plan) perfected design and planning of parks at the local scale of the housing districts and the regional scale, to provide public recreation and ‘character and identity’ to the built environment. Parks were not organized into a connected system, however, they were designed with re-occurring symbolisms, and conceived as a network or cultural infrastructure. In a postmodern perspective, parks and public spaces became cultural constructs framed within a larger picture of nation building.

Fourth, the ‘ecological strategy’ (1991 plan and Green and Blue Plan ) shaped a ‘water narrative’ that conceived parks and waterbodies (the canals and reservoirs developed since colonial times for water management) as linked and restructured into a functional and ecological infrastructure and biodiverse social amenity—the green infrastructure .

Fifth, the ‘biophilic paradigm’ (2011 plan) evolved the bi-dimensional concept of green infrastructure into a three-dimensional ecologically functioning landscape interweaving parks, green architectures and water-based green spaces.

Lastly, the ‘singapore playground’ (2014 Plan) categorizes parks according to their intended theme and function, and frames then as a set of ‘themed public parks’ that embraces all the parks constructed since colonial times, connected by a park connector network. This is a park system conceptualized as a public large-scale social, ecological and cultural green infrastructure that responds to sociopolitical as well as tourism marketing purposes.

The colonial government referenced public park design within the Victorian and picturesque movements, while the city state’s planners, who placed urban green-provision as a central strategy to the city’s development, adopted a modernist, then a postmodern vision and lastly embraced the contemporary ecological debate. However, both the colonial and post-colonial governments have consistently used urban green-provision for nation building objectives.

Some characteristics are critical in understanding the future of park development and the models/lessons that can be transferred.

First, the evolution of parks in social and cultural terms, from arenas for display of social conformity and uniformity (colonial and modernist parks) into areas of supposed multiculturalism (postmodern/post-traditional parks).

The Singaporean design-approach has managed to deviate from the globalized and formalistic Victorian or modernist park design by adopting a postmodern and post-traditional attitude. Initially, this was achieved with design of parks based on cultural symbolism , and a return to concepts of contextualism and regionalism in order to ameliorate the aesthetics that characterized the modernist design of architecture and public space implemented in the early years of intense urban development. More recently, the deviation from a ‘globalized aesthetics’ has been achieved through an environmental drive that favours a return to the local tropical richness of flora and fauna. The ecological focus further evolves the social contribution of parks with interactive nature-human settings, community gardening, educational programs , and participatory design processes, as for western case studies. However, while responding to the criticism of a general lack of community participation in design processes of urban open space, Singaporean efforts still follow top-down, essentially government-led policies.

The second defining characteristics of the Singaporean park system that can transfer as a valuable lesson to emerging countries is the recent recovery of ecological connectivity, achieved by restructuring the water-system, as a remedy to the loss of the colonial green belt.

Third, Singapore’s major contribution to the debate of urban green-provision resides in the attempt to evolve from single-purpose, disconnected parks into multi-purpose park system, encompassing green infrastructure concepts.

Lastly, the Singaporean park system makes another interesting contribution to a global debate, as it showcases a post-colonial praxis that closely interweaves sociopolitical strategies with tourism marketing policies. The result is a park system that is a nation building policy which takes the form of a glamorous island-wide narrative and urban iconography.

These findings confirm that planning of parks is a political process, and that parks, therefore, are ‘not ideologically neutral’, but ‘exist for specific ecological, social, political and economic reasons’ which affect how people conceive of and utilise them (Byrne and Wolch 2009; Henderson 2013). The way parks are designed and managed demonstrates the realities of political rhetoric (Thompson 2002).

However, a demolish-and rebuild philosophy prevails (Kong and Yeoh 2003, p. 131) as consequence of the combination of the government’s ‘land-scarce’ and ‘land-optimization’ philosophy and the evolving production of imaging policies that address sociopolitical as well as tourism marketing concerns. Furthermore, Singaporean parks exhibit an overlapping of narrative-making with park-theming , which might pertain to the politics of inclusion/exclusion of certain ideas and beliefs in construction of the physical landscape.

10.1 Singapore’s Evolving Urban Imaging Strategies in Green Provision as Reflections of Post-Colonial Constructions of Nation

The Singaporean park system illustrates in a compelling manner some aspects of the recent post-independence and post-colonial constructions of nation. For each phase of the evolution of this park system, nation building policies are evident in the iconographic representations of the open green spaces, including the urban planning models and the physical design of individual parks.

Critical to understanding post-colonial constructions of nation, is the fact that post-independence movements were driven by the need to ‘cultivate and consolidate national identity in ‘multiple and contending groups from within’. This was a drastic departure from the nationalistic ideals that drove nineteenth century European independence movements—which implied a national unity that was formed against alien forces (Lu 2010). The Singaporean sociopolitical strategy of implementing a ‘multicultural theme’ in the built environment is a response to these issues.

Lastly, key to understanding the contribution of the Singaporean park system to the debate on post-colonial constructions of nations in emerging countries, is the post-war global consolidation of the connection between the tourism industry and the sociopolitical discourse.

The urban imaging strategies produced by the colonial and post-colonial governments in Singapore, which resulted from the issues described, are examined in the following paragraphs.

10.1.1 The ‘Colonial Strategy’

Since colonial times, parks and urban green space were planned by governmental authorities to furnish the city with certain amenities that absolved specific functions pertaining to the challenges of urban development, but were also designed to represent conceptions of nation produced by the different societal organizations.

Colonial archival maps and imagery showcase an organization of green spaces that expresses spatial order and provides the tangible presence of the vigilant British government.

Western administration—and representation—of urban public space is manifested in the first use of the planning instrument of the master plan (aerial regime) and the use of the perspective view to represent urban parks.

The deployment of certain design elements in parks reflected the aesthetics as well as the ideologies of the English public parks movement, namely the promotion of parks for public recreation and civic education, for city beautification and ultimately as a manifestation of governmental city pride. The iconography of the parks show the western conventions of the picturesque, which was employed by European travelers and artists to represent Southeast Asian landscapes. Those visual conventions much influenced the design of Singaporean parks in the following years.

The colonial rule in Singapore marked the establishment of an aesthetics of ‘tropicality’ in both built environment and printed imagery, which blended the Victorian gardenesque style—characterized by flowerbeds of tropical plants—and the style of the English landscape park , characterized by ample lawns, undulating landforms and waterbodies.

A very different aesthetics was proposed in those years by eastern intellectuals in their private pleasure gardens, often open to the public. Those gardens could have informed a design of public parks embracing the local cultural context. They displayed an eclectic style, which seemed to creatively combine eastern and western symbolisms, and reject the globalization of the gardenesque and picturesque to express the island’s reality of multiculturalism. The majority of the pleasure gardens have been demolished, while their survived images are few. It seems a lost opportunity for culturally-specific design, since these gardens could have been used as a valid reference for post-colonial design implementations (Fig. 10.1).

Fig. 10.1

Plan of the town of Singapore by Lieut Jackson, 1828. Survey Department Collection, courtesy of National Archives of Singapore (left). Postcard featuring MacRitchie reservoir, 1900s. Arshak C Galstaun Collection. Courtesy of National Archives of Singapore (right) The images showcase synoptic objectification, which includes master planning and scenography

The late colonial planning policies demonstrate a shift from the mere formal and aesthetics arrangements to more ecologically-driven considerations, which were nonetheless in line with the European ideals on urban parks—conceived in the western context as amenities providing public sanitation (parks were commonly referred as ‘the lungs of the city’), and psychological relief (parks implemented to improve the physical and moral condition of urban citizens).

As in western models, the Singaporean ‘system of open spaces’ proposed by the late colonial 1958 plan expanded the range of typologies of urban green space to provide basic ecosystem services at all the scales of urban development, from the regional scale—with large public parks and boulevards , the green belt, nature reserves and coastal sites—to the scale of the housing districts, with small town parks. In synthesis, the plan proposed the organization of open green space and parks into a structured park system that was to address the social and ecological challenges posed by the rapid urban development of the island.

However, a synoptic objectification of the landscape prevailed, with use of master plan and perspective view, and the picturesque and gardenesque was promoted as British aesthetics in park design.

10.1.2 The Modernist ‘Functional Strategy’

The post-colonial planning model adopted only certain characteristics that defined the ‘open space system’ of the western models of ‘garden city’ or new town, and transformed these models to suit certain state ideologies. Planners promoted essentially the construction of public parks as discrete entities that were not connected to each other. This modus operandi marks a departure from the European western ideals of urban green-provision, which emphasized ecological connectivity through development of green belts and greenways. This departure should be read as a cautionary example, as it undermined the ecological sustainability of the island’s grand scale urban renewal program of the 1960s and 1970s.

Urban imaging policies oscillated between two attitudes. The modernist attitude promoted planning and surveying the land from the aerial viewpoint (with use of the master plan and through the bird’s eye views of the governmental propaganda imagery). Also, Modernism influenced the implementation of an island-wide extensive greening campaign, which was conceived as an overarching beautification program —urban nature depicted by the state as a free-flowing stream and the emblem of collective interest and social welfare. Precedents can be found in Le Corbusier’s writings for the Athens Charter and the western ‘Open Space Plan’. This urban planning model has been criticized. Weng Choy (1998) discusses the implication of state-led urban policies: ‘it is hard to find talk about any dimension of Singaporean life that does not quickly turn into a commentary about the totality of the Singaporean system’.

In design of parks, the modernist attitude still reflected the colonial ‘tropical aesthetics ’ of the Victorian gardenesque arrangements of flowerbeds made of foreign, ornamental plants used to achieve a tropical ambience. This can be read as a trend of globalization achieved by repetition of the ‘tropical eden’ conceptualized in the western world during colonialism (Ignatieva 2010). The western imported image of tropicality was overlapped to the native tropical nature of the island, and dominated the aesthetics of parks and gardens. This imagery was used by the city state as one of the first tourism marketing policy, meant to attract foreign investments by showcasing ‘a garden city beautiful with flowers and trees, and as tidy and litter less as can be’ as specified by the late Prime Minister in 1967 (Kuan Yew 2013) (Fig. 10.2).

Fig. 10.2

Ring concept plan: interdistrict linkage. Source Planning Department Annual Report 1970. © Urban Redevelopment Authority. All rights reserved (right). Aerial view of Clementi New Town, 2014 (right). The images show a modernist planning model, reflected in the rational and overaching reorganization of land use, and the implementation of an island-wide extensive greening campaign

While planning policies that renounced the green belt concept and promoted implementation of public parks as discrete entities lessened the park system’s emphasis on provision of ecological services, recent literature advice that the modernist island-wide ‘garden city’ greening campaign did assure the preservation of some degree of biodiversity, and therefore partially remediated the adverse effects of early urbanization efforts (Tan et al. 2013). Hence, the Singaporean ‘garden city’ model does make a positive reproducible example of urban greening.

10.1.3 The ‘Identity Strategy’

The Singaporean late 1970s–1990s greening-provision model provides an interesting case of postmodern critical attitude, which prioritized the social aspect of parks—by providing public amenities for recreation at all scales for urban development: construction of parks of all sizes, placed at a walking distance from the housing blocks. To effectively manage the population by controlling the physical space, Singaporean planners promoted ideas of enclosure and spatial definition of public places—by ascribing boundaries and containing; an organization that would best contribute to the city state’s nation building policies.

The postmodern attitude came to be reflected in the conception of well-defined open public green spaces, organized as a constellation of parks of different sizes, designed to provide recreation in the public housing districts; and was also reflected in the representation of public green space, with frontal perspective-imagery that populated propaganda magazines, such as the magazine Our Home published by the Housing and Development Board and distributed in public housing estates.

The postmodern attitude was also part of the conception of a nascent tourism-marketing strategy that well suited sociopolitical objectives: the promotion of a uniquely ‘Asian’ identity, meant to counteract the modernization of the urban environment. Initially, the scope was achieved through the design of theme parks with a Chinese thematism , as well as the revival of the imagery of exotic Southeast Asian landscapes depicted in the nineteenth century’s western paintings, through a display of reconstructed tropical jungles complete with flora and fauna. The influence of tourism marketing strategies in parks’ design was consolidated in the 1980s.

The marriage between sociopolitical and tourism marketing strategies presents novel implications in the shaping of urban identity, which are typical of post-colonial and post-independence states, namely the close relationship of urban imagery with economic revenue, and the ephemerality of the urban imagery that shapes the built environment (Fig. 10.3).

Fig. 10.3

The park network system, published by the Parks and Recreation Department in 1992. Courtesy of National Parks Board (left). Theme park of the Chinese gardens, 2014 (right). The images show theme parks conceived as a park network implemented for tourism and sociopolitical purposes

The Singaporean 1980s park system—with the hierarchical organization in new towns of the town park, neighbourhood parks and precinct gardens, as well as the implementation of regional parks and tourism theme parks —presents a case of very effective structural organization that address social challenges. Furthermore, the deployment of design-narratives that would convey state-led messages and assist in sociopolitical concerns is critical in understanding the future of park development in many developing countries that want to establish an identity in the global arena, and are struggling with community cohesion and implementation of welfare-state housing.

The emphasis on theming and design-narratives is a particular contribution that the Singaporean park system makes to the literature of garden design: it illustrates that parks can make a fundamental contribution to the fabrication of urban iconography, by displaying ‘variations in scale, location, content and theme’ (Henderson 2013) and through creative reinterpretations of history and of the very idea of urban nature.

The Singaporean is one of the post-independence movements driven by the need to ‘cultivate and consolidate national identity in ‘multiple and contending groups from within’ (Lu 2010). The government addressed the development of national identity by allying urban development—including park-implementation—with the tourism industry. From the late 1970s, the Singaporean Tourism Task Force devised a ‘multicultural’ thematization, which, by embracing the principles of multiracialism, multiculturalism and multiethnicity, was committed to economic challenges (the expansion of the tourism industry) as well as to sociopolitical intents.

Singaporean planners begun to characterize the built environment with the ‘multicultural’ theme. By attracting tourists as well as uniting the multi-ethnic but divisive population of the island, the ‘multicultural’ theme could potentially ensure social harmony, political stability and economic survival. The definition of this theme in the built environment, was one of the drives that pushed local planners and designers to explore various assets of postmodern urban design—including the use of symbolisms, and concepts of imageability , place making , visual identity , regionalism and contextualism, promoted by western urban planners and theorists such as Kevin Lynch, Kenneth Frampton and Charles Jencks.

While the policies of placing public art central to the urban renewal program imitated British ‘Action for Cities Programme’, the governmental emphasis on thematization allowed local artists to experiment with the making of sculptural pieces that, resonating as symbols of nationhood, resulted in unique cultural expressions.

The construction of narratives in Singapore’s parks was achieved with a reinterpretation of the Chinese Garden, the display of a postmodern eclectic mixing of codes and styles of western and eastern derivation, a return to ornamentation, symbolisms, the vernacular and popular culture. Those characteristics essentially departed the design of Singaporean parks from the globalized western model of the gardenesque, picturesque and the English landscape park , which was implemented profusely in other post-colonial nations.

The Singaporean park system crafted in the postmodern is a singular case: its totality and magnitude soon encompassed the initial network of regional theme parks built for tourism and sociopolitical purposes, to transform all the parks implemented on the island into theme parks . These include the upgrade of the colonial parks of the civic district, as well as the community and neighbourhood parks built as part of the grand scale urban implementation of the new towns—which by 1985 were already 16, housing over 80% of the population of the island.

The insistent focus on design-narratives shaped a cultural network of parks that evolved the concept of ‘open space system’ defined by Cranz (1982)—ubiquitous and overarching social network of public open spaces built in 1960s American cities (Fig. 10.4).

Fig. 10.4

Existing and anticipated recreational areas. Source Singapore Planning Department Annual Report 1972. © Urban Redevelopment Authority. All rights reserved (left). Dragon playground, designed in the 1980s by HDB for precinct gardens in Toa Payoh New Town, 2014 (right). The images show the strategy of multiplication of parks in housing estates, and the deployment of elements of cultural symbolism in design of parks and public open space

The Singaporean park system offers a compelling case of contemporary construction of nations. However, the transfer of this model needs to take into account the specific political, cultural and social conditions. Those include the presence of a welfare-state patronage which embraced the ideology of building a novel society by combining an architectural design experimentation and urban planning, and for this ideology appealed to the invention of a culturally suitable language and weaved politics into place making.

Singapore’s parks and open green spaces were cultural injections made though deployment of symbolisms. They were conceptualized as constructions of nation meant to trigger the citizens’ emotional response by referencing a primordial tropical nature, or ethnicity. While emotions would derive from the recollection of a fictitious past, constructed by the state to evoke a sentiment of nostalgia, the symbols pitched into one of the primeval need of mankind—the need to belong to a group. Designers rendered the narrative meaningful by infusing space with symbols that were meant to construct an ‘imagined multicultural community’. This was the invention of the city state to build the nation, which tapped into the notion of ‘imagined community ’ as defined by Anderson (2006), who claims that national identities are based on the creation of communities among people who do not know most of their co-nationals or much of their national territory, and are therefore only ‘imagined’.

Furthermore, the imagery of the parks published in Singaporean propaganda magazines functioned in a similar way as the landscape-representations or stock images of European rural landscapes that, since the beginning of the nineteenth century, were conveyed in western landscape paintings, tourist brochures, and also school textbooks. Those ‘representative landscapes’ were visual encapsulations of a group’s occupation of a particular territory and of the memory of a shared past. Overall, those images, as the Singaporean images, demonstrate the ‘way in which the social history and distinctiveness of a group of people is objectified through reference (however idealized) to the physical settings of the everyday lives of a people to whom we ‘belong’, but most of whom we never met’ (Agnew 2011; Graham 1994).

Thus, through the building of public space—the park system—and through the imagery of the parks published in the propaganda magazines and tourism brochures, the government hoped to consolidate the group of potentially divisive ethnicities into the community of people—the ‘nation’.

Therefore, the design and planning strategies of parks within the new towns and the civic district can be considered as framed within a larger picture of nation building, and regarded not just as a physical setting where the lives of the majority of Singaporeans would take place, but also a social and cultural construct designed to educate the newly formed communities to Singaporean citizenship.

However, this modus operandi had its flaws: the insistence on state-led and top-down policies hindered community participation in park-planning; the development of parks generally resulted in a design vocabulary that was developed with little regard to site-specific qualities of the site, including cultural and landscape features, which were often removed. In the re-development of the historic district, the urban renewal effort—including the politics of infusing urban open space with public artworks, and the efforts of preservation of monuments ad areas of cultural significance—have been criticized for ‘inauthenticity’ and ‘commodification’ of heritage values. While the focus on park-theming became predominant, the question of what themes were reflected in the public space, and what history came to be portrayed, was challenging.

As other third world developing countries, Singapore’s state was attempting to mediate the impact of ‘universal civilization’ with a return to tradition and the vernacular, and with design solutions that emphasized the ‘communicative’ power of place. However, the counterpart of the postmodern attitude has often been criticized as an aesthetic populism, with mass production of images in which culture was being commodified for commercial or political purposes (Jameson 1991), and an objectification of the landscape to create ‘aesthetic cultures of consumption’ (Corner 1999).

Furthermore, the parks designed in the 1980s were not structured as an ecological system, one of the reasons being the fact that the colonial proposal of green belt had not been developed by the city state government. The extensive urban development had fragmented the patches of residual native forests, undermined most of the coastal habitats with land reclamation , and regimented rivers, streams and waterbodies into canals and reservoirs built for water catchment and flood-control.

10.1.4 Green Infrastructure and Biophilic Urbanism

The more recent Singaporean model of park system is one that, in the Asian debate, been set as a reproducible example for Asian Cities. Through the ‘garden city’ vision, which has systematically integrated nature into urban transformations, the city state has earned a ‘green’ reputation (Siong et al. 2013). The city state’s emphasis on high-rise urban development combined with the ‘the systematic cultivation of a green environment integrated into a totalizing city state plan’ has inspired cities in Asia and beyond to develop their own “garden city plans”’ (Chua 2011).

The efforts made by Singaporean planners in the 1990s in restructuring the park system, are transferable modes of addressing the lack of ecological sustainability of the system. However, they also showcase a novel ‘national’ vision, and with it novel government-produced imagery, which came to be reflected both in the design and the propaganda images of the parks. The images were deployed by the government by to posit the city state in the global market as a ‘biophilic city’, ‘Green City’ and ‘vertical garden city’ .

Images of novel parks such as the grand project of Gardens by the Bay built in 2012, have proposed an evolved, high-tech version of the globalized ‘tropical aesthetics ’ which characterized park design since colonial times, with images that are feeding the tourism industry.

Under the novel ecological stand, the park system was portrayed by the National Parks Board with a map that represented the novel island’s ‘layers of pervasive greenery’. These layers embrace: parks and gardens, including the ‘riverine parks’—the green corridors that have undergone ecological restorations; park connectors, depicted as re-structured water courses and an overarching ‘venous system’ feeding the island; ramified roadside greenery; and green architectures, with rooftop gardens , vertical green walls and sky terraces. While the governmental representations of the parks and gardens as a fully integrated system manage to demonstrate the planners’ capacity of mastering the greening-project at an island-wide level, and answer comprehensively to ecological sustainability , they result in a commentary on the totality of the Singaporean system that recalls a modernist understanding of landscape representation from the advantage aerial viewpoint that was exercised by the planners since the first years of the urban renewal program (Fig. 10.5).

Fig. 10.5

Planned green city-layers to create ‘pervasive greenery’, 2016. Drawn by Miss Fan Lei (left). Aerial view of Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park, 2012. Courtesy of Herbert Dreiseitl (right). The images show representations of green infrastructure from the vantage aerial viewpoint

Instead of adopting/adapting western concepts of urban greening, in the global discourse Singapore is now promoting its own model, which combines bi-dimensional ecological restoration (water-sensitive urban design and stormwater management) with three-dimensional green architecture. Tan et al. (2013) have commented that—with its novel experiments in green architecture—the land-scarce city has come to be defined as a ‘vertical garden city’ , which teaches the world that planning can comprise more than one function on the same land-coverage. The Singaporean governmental policy is now praised for having set a new standard, that ‘high-density does not mean reduced natural systems’, and Asian high-density cities are trying to reproduce it, in the hope of achieving similar sustainability goals (Newman 2010).

The new approach taken by Singaporean planners in organization and design of the park system checks most of the requirements of green infrastructure, as defined by Austin (2014). It seems to resolve into an ideal ‘multifunctional organizing structure of modernizing cities’ by evolving the concept of a linear landscape (the idea promoted by the 1991 concept plan of park connectors transformed into ‘greenways ’ connecting existing and new parks and gardens) to embrace wide ranging uses and new forms of green space—green architectures, as well as community gardens, constructed wetlands , ecological restorations, and requalification of derelict post-industrial lands, including railway corridors—for instance the Singapore rail corridor, or the transformation of quarry lakes into parks.

Singapore’s contemporary experimentation advances and extends western ideas, contributing to the global discourse on urban greening in a number of ways:

First, it has managed to create a new set of design-narratives and technical solutions that address the challenges of high-rise urban development, which interest most of the post-colonial and post-independence developing countries. This objective was achieved by experimenting techniques of ‘land-use optimization ’—that is promotion of multiple land-uses on the same piece of land. This goal includes implementation of skyrise greenery (the augmentation of urban ecology with integration of green roofs and green walls in architecture) and the ecological restoration of the existing network of concretized water canals and reservoirs into water parks and greenways, which absolve both functions of flood control as well as ecological and pedestrian corridors. In this manner, some of the colonial green belt concept is being recuperated.

Second, by attempting to combine design of ecological aesthetics with stormwater management, as in the ecological restorations of Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park and MacRitchie Reservoir Park (Sect. 9.9).

Third, by applying research on eco-based design in development of socially and ecologically sustainable public housing districts, and therefore contributing to the literature regarding residential and welfare-state urban planning and urban design.

Fourth, by advancing participatory design , community engagement and more inclusive processes of evaluation and conservation of cultural and natural heritage.

10.1.5 The Singapore Playground

One of the most interesting contribution that Singapore is making is the conceptualization of a park system as ‘singapore playground’, consisting in a network of parks of varying size, from community to town and regional parks, linked by greenways and designed around different themes, which seem to address the cultural and social as well as the environmental challenges posed by the high-rise urban context. The publication demonstrates that the contemporary Singaporean park system had managed to retain most of the park-typologies proposed by the colonial 1958 plan.

This Singaporean park system showcases the potential to expand park themes to include ‘art and heritage, nature, coastal, learning and discovery’ (URA 2011). Parks’ project are evolving into quarry-parks, historic parks, heritage parks , riverine parks , coastal parks, community parks , vertical and skyrise parks, and many others, including the large-scale iconic projects implemented in the civic district’s reclaimed lands.

This park system wants to answer to a number of urban cultural, social and ecological challenges, while functioning as recreational experiences. The ‘singapore playground’ blends the postmodern 1980s and 1990s experimentations with the more recent ecological considerations. The concept of ‘Playground’ is a ‘mosaic ’ of parks that provides a framework for sociopolitical goals as well as tourism marketing, by capitalizing on the park-theming ideology and blending it with the novel ecological agenda.

The peculiarity of this model is that ‘nature’ results in a ‘socially constructed reality’ that is placed at the core of the identity of an ascending nation, which is nevertheless concerned mainly with ‘economic development and progress’ (Kong and Yeoh 1996).

In the 1980s and 1990s the emphasis in park design was mainly on development of social narratives in towns’ community parks. However, in the new century the construction of narratives has increasingly been realized with regional parks, which have been upgraded to provide visitors, including tourists, with exciting experiences, crafted through the display of a variety of tropical habitats. Nature is portrayed as a national heritage and a Singaporean aspect of pride and identity. However, it is also exhibited as a spectacle for tourists’ consumption.

While this park system provides for a glamorous urban iconography, it has its challenges, which mainly pertain to the debate on park-theming and narrative-making.

In design of the parks, Singaporean planners have attempted a reinterpretation of history and nature. However, while narrative-making can imply the recollection of cultural and natural features of a site and the integration of those in a novel design, park-theming is usually the imposition of a thematism that removes certain evidence, and portrays only some histories, to serve tangible capital and nation building objectives.

In the case of Singapore, some issues are problematic: local academics have highlighted how the development of the urban environment (and therefore parks) follows a demolish and re-build philosophy (Kong and Yeoh 2003). Chang (1997) has underlined the nature of the urban imagery, which is both dynamic and evolutionary, because it is meant to address evolving sociopolitical concerns and has been produced to satisfy evolving tourism’s demands.

Through extensive site-surveys, the author has witnessed the results of this modus operandi. In the different stages of urban development, park-implementation tends to manifest a scarce interest in the history of design or the history of place, beyond marketing schemes. Parks in Singapore are in a continuous state of transformation. This often implies the demolition of older design elements and site-specific landscape features, instead of their creative integration with the new design.

Furthermore, the design-evolution of the parks and gardens is documented by scarce literature, published by the governmental authorities that have conceived and manage them (Lee and Chua 1992; Auger 2013), and there seems to be scarce interest in placing this history of design in a global perspective, as this publication has attempted to do.

Lastly, the examination of the parks’ narratives, showcase that certain aspects of history or place have been selected, and some tangible sites and architectures that pertain to a version of the history of the nation were retained. In this manner, the state has constructed a story that conveys messages that suit the institutional needs.

In the making and management of parks, there have been some attempts made by institutions to involve citizens in the construction of meaning, for instance with implementation of stormwater and eco-designs that are meant to be interactive and educational, or the organization of participative processes of heritage evaluation and conservation. However, some efforts have been criticized as ineffective because of the marked interference of the governmental apparatus (Tan and Neo 2009).

The present stage of development of the Singaporean park system, which tends to adopt the ecological trend in order to strategize a display of tropicality, with regional parks designed as tourisms attractions, is certainly the most glamorous, but it is not devoid of challenges.

The promotion of the ecological upgrade of urban development disguises a governmental need of land-use optimization , achieved in public housing districts with town planning forms that result drastically different form the western traditional urban repertoire of street/square/park/garden. The Housing and Development Board is developing the basic unit of the new towns into highly compact public housing density schemes defined as ‘eco precincts’ shaped by housing blocks that surround vast rooftop gardens covering common carparks, which become the visual and social heart of the housing complexes.

This novel public housing model is meant as a research lab on environmental performance and sustainability. However, while such technical aspects of design are object of much research, this does not seem the case for aesthetics in architectural and urban design. Buildings appear stripped of any ornamentation, in what seems the revival of a modernist fashion. The leitmotif that underpins gardens is the ornamental planting scheme, a set of mass-produced facilities including playgrounds and rest areas, and the introduction of community gardening areas. These gardens seem to require high maintenance.

The latest model of compact town is most probably more sustainable in terms of energy efficiency and management, but it seems less interesting visually than the postmodern experiments of public housing made by the Housing and Development Board in the 1980s, which strived to achieve place making and imageability. In the formulation of public housing districts, the city state’s ‘multicultural theme’ had supplanted much of the native landscape. However, the Singaporean designers’ experimentations had resulted in a characteristic and varied form of Asian design that was a unique cultural expression, which had moved away from the mere proposition of globalized western models.

At present, the same urban planning model of compact housing-precinct is being applied throughout the island, regardless of any site-specific quality of the site, while many of the neighbourhoods built during the 1980s and 1990s are being demolished, and with them their set of public open space and gardens. Simultaneously, regional parks are being upgraded with bioengineering techniques , while a number of design-features that characterized the aesthetics based on ‘multiculturalism’ are being removed. In the light of the government’s renewed interest towards social memory, for instance the ‘Singapore Memory Project’ started in 2013 as an on-line collection of images and stories regarding the history of Singapore’s landscape, an interesting policy would be to retain and integrate in the built environment design-features made in various historic periods, as well as further encourage local artists and designers in the formulation of novel site-base cultural expressions.

The extensive post-colonial urban development was criticized for resolving in the levelling of the island’s topography, without reference to local ecological or cultural assets, and for adopting from Modernism’s full agenda, only ‘the mechanistic, rationalistic programme’ with ‘gigantic clearances, levelling, extensions, expropriations create laboratory conditions for the importations of social and architectural cultures’ (Koolhaas 1995). At the present stage of development, there is reason to assume that the demolition of the cultural symbolisms that permeated postmodern public spaces, and which were said to contribute to ‘imageability ’ (Teo and Huang 1996), might lessen the social sustainability of public places, parks included.

With regards with urban imaging strategies, the images produced by post-war developing countries such as Singapore are fleeting, evolving, and generally devoid of continuity with the past. Singapore’s is one of the post-independence nationalistic movements, mainly established after the world war two, which faced novel conditions, such as the rise of global markets and technologies, a faster pace of development, increasingly global and competitive markets. This is probably one of the reasons why, in the post-war period, the connection between the tourism industry and constructions of nation were consolidated.

In comparison, the imagery produced for constructions of nation in nineteenth century ascending European nations, and in specific the imagery produced through the built environment, were generally implemented with a slower pace, and have resulted as more stable—that is less susceptible of removal and modification. Their political and cultural conditions usually determined a design evolution of public open space that integrated the physical site-conditions—that is its historical and the natural features—in a harmonic manner.

Asian open space design practice in Hong Kong has been defined as ‘quintessentially post-traditional’. This design-vocabulary is ‘entirely borrowed and constructed’ and, during the last two decades, Hong Kong’s built environment—including architecture and designed landscapes—has developed with little regard for the city’s past (Padua 2007). Designers of urban open space, including parks, have deleted the traces of the city’s past, and appropriated symbols which do not emerge from local history but from the media. She underlines that in Hong Kong’s urban design ‘identities are constructed and reconstructed on a daily basis and continuity is a matter of connection between the immediate past and the proximate future’. This too is a characteristic that can be applied to Singapore, where urban imagery—the built environment—is continuously being demolished and reconstructed to display novel governmental nation building policies and tourism-promotion strategies.

This publication has placed the evolution of the Singaporean park system in a global perspective, and historicized it by elucidating on the evolution of governmental ideas and how they were implemented in the built environment. It seems that the Singaporean nation building policies have not tended to stabilize the image of the built landscape. Instead, the reconstruction of the historical evolution of the park system clarifies the continuous adaptation of the built landscape to the governmental ideas that have changed.

One can deduce that the Singaporean government does not want to connect the construction of a national identity to the physical construction of the landscape, which is always changing, but to the creation of the idea of the imaginary community, whose definition is in itself evolutionary. This is a radical difference from the evolution of European capitals established in the nineteenth and twentieth century, whose imagery usually revolve around a unifying idea of national landscape meant to be visible in the retention of the physical strata of historical layers in the built environment.

Singaporean parks has been and still are a great laboratory of ideas, and manifest the manner in which narratives can be depicted through physical construction of space; but the lack of interest in the history of design has hindered the documentation of these efforts, while the evolutionary nature of governmental messages and marketing strategies is continuously leading to their physical transformation. For instance, while it has been comparatively easy for the author to find some documentation of the latest stages of park development related to novel ecological trends, the only exhaustive documentation of the postmodern and earlier periods of urban development are held in governmental archives.

The unstable and mutable built environment might well have provoked a certain discomfort to the island’s residents. The psychological consequences of such policies of urban development in the perception of people have been voiced by academics. In relation to the rapidly changing environments, and the consequent loss of historical and cultural landmarks, Singaporean academics have underlined ‘our sense of the past—indeed our sense of ourselves—is both a problem and a challenge’ (Kwok et al. 1999).

However, there are few studies undertaken in order to understand resident’s perceptions of their constantly changing urban landscapes.

While this publication elucidates a certain evolution of the park system in the built environment, it does not dwell into the delicate relationship between place identity and self-identity, and in what manner the Singaporean constructions of nation affect them, which is a gap in the literature calling for further studies.

In conclusion, the contemporary Singapore’s park system is an exciting and complex urban iconography in the making. However, the parks’ aesthetics results as assemblage of ideas and features rather than a historical, or stratigraphic cohesive evolution of ideas and features. These ensembles talk about multiculturalism, but not necessarily about organic or interactive growth of parts. Continuously upgraded to respond to new challenges, parks do not work as a palimpsests, but as the mechanisms of an urban laboratory where meaning and physical evidence change constantly.

Ultimately, the Singaporean park system poses a novel perspective on urban greening policies. The magnitude and importance of the demolish and rebuild Singaporean philosophy in the shaping of a public system of parks and urban open space, may ultimately reside in the impact of this model in other developing countries, and its possible extension into becoming a global phenomenon.

The characteristics of Singapore’s park system underlined, make it a novel paradigm for high-density urban environments, expanding the knowledge on possible roles of urban parks in modernizing cities.