An old man walks towards a statue of Phra Phromet prays. Incense burns at the foot of the Golden Mile complex, a brutalist 16-storey building in the Kallang district, in the heart of Singapore. Drenched by a heavy downpour that has just ended, the tropical vegetation is dripping with rain.
Before continuing on his way, the man caresses an elephant sculpture decorated with a crown of plastic flowers. You can hear the chirping of birds, but also the roar of traffic on Beach Road. The sea here seems quite distant. However, this road, as its name suggests, once ran along the coast.
An island at the tip of the Malay Peninsula, Singapore has a major problem: it lacks space. To remedy this, the country stubbornly fills the perimeter of its coastline with sand. Since its independence in 1965, its territory has grown by 25% at the expense of the sea. It is now as large as the islands of Montreal and Laval combined.
The conquest of land over sea is ubiquitous in Singapore, home to 5.6 million people. Changi Airport stands on new ground. The port of Tuas, currently under construction, requires the creation of hundreds of hectares of dry land. The recreational tourism sector of Marina Bay, near the city center, rests entirely on fill.
“I grew up in the Katong sector. When I was a kid and we drove around, I saw the backfilling works, all these huge machines pumping sand into the quarry. They used conveyors to transport it to the coast,” recalls cartographer Mok Ly Yng, born in 1967. He knows the geographical evolution of his country like the back of his hand.
Once surrounded by swamps, mangroves, beaches and coral reefs, Singapore is now bordered by low walls. At the City Gallery, an exhibition center dedicated to the territory Singaporeana 1/5000 modele illustrates the magnitude of the transformations. The coastline is no longer rugged and dotted with islets, nor gently curved like a sandy shore: it is square, drawn at right angles.
In the gallery, a map shows the zoning of the country, block by block: commercial, community, residential, natural, industrial, etc. It is the country’s “master plan”, revised every five years by the all-powerful state company responsible for territorial planning, the Urban Redevelopment Authority. Nothing is left to chance. “In Singapore, the whole island is just one city,” notes Mok, who helped design an exhibit at the museum.
Of greenery and concrete
The lack of space in the city-state has proved, in practice, a formidable incubator of ingenuity. Every square centimeter of the island, a veritable laboratory of urban density, is put to good use. The government also has a free hand: following its incessant acquisitions, it owns about 90% of the territory. To industrialists and residents, he sells emphyteutic leases, often for 99 years.
The State encourages a constant change in the housing stock. Very close to the City Gallery, a 52-storey cylindrical skyscraper, the AXA Tower, is enveloped in a chrysalis of scaffolds. New owners will demolish the building built in 1986 to replace it with a new building, taller and more modern. Social housing towers are periodically demolished and then rebuilt. Their inhabitants have no choice but to follow the parade.
Necessarily, the smallness of the territory also implies a scarcity of natural resources. Water management is thus a major issue in the city of the lion (“ Singapore Pura in Sanskrit). Through a pipe that crosses the Strait of Johor, the country imports blue gold from Malaysia. However, the Singaporean government wishes to free itself from this dependence. First, he relies on increased harvesting of his rainwater. At the mouth of each river, a dam retains fresh water.
However, this is not enough to achieve autonomy in drinking water. The country is also counting on the desalination of seawater and on extraordinary treatment — an object of national pride — of its wastewater. Using innovative ultrafiltration and reverse osmosis processes, he transforms his sewage into drinking water. This represents 30% of its supply. As a rule, this water is used for industries, but it flows in the aqueducts during droughts.
Singapore’s extreme urbanity also pushes the government to green the city as much as possible. He wants to guarantee the population a certain access to nature. Majestic rain trees (Samanea saman) line the main boulevards. Buildings of all kinds, grand or modest, incorporate greenery on their roofs or walls. The one we nicknamed “garden city” nevertheless remains heavily concreted.
Unstoppable development
In her ultra-urbanized country where technology is king, Rachel Cheang, 25, has found her piece of happiness: it is Ground-Up Initiative, a ” kampong of the XXIe century”, in the Yishun district. The kampongstraditional villages that once flourished on the island, serve as inspiration for this hippie and anti-capitalist bric-a-brac, where volunteers indulge in gardening, woodworking, cooking, herbalism or composting.
In a leafy alley of the heterogeneous campus, Mme Cheang drinks in the words of SK Lye, an old man who makes it his duty to pass on his knowledge of medicinal plants. He tears off a few leaves from a foul-smelling plant which, he explains, soothes the cough. The herbalist then invites you to taste several varieties of mint that grow here. “Chewing gum is banned in Singapore. People could be disrespectful and throw her on the ground, ”he recalls, smirking.
A small stream with a sandy bottom winds through the land. Just opposite, the landscape is quite different: tractors and trucks are preparing the ground for a large construction site. Gravel piles up and greenery vanishes. “Sometimes I sit there to read, by the stream,” says Ms.me Chang. Before June, this construction site did not exist. It is tragic to know that one day our space will suffer the exact same fate…”
The fate of the Ground-Up Initiative (GUI) is symptomatic of a Singapore where nothing, or almost nothing, can oppose the development of the territory. The organization had been renting the vacant state-owned lot since 2008. In the 2019 master plan, this corner of Yishun was allocated for habitation. GUI’s lease ends next year: housing construction seems imminent.
Are these sacrifices inevitable? “We are not short of space,” replies pioneering architect Tay Kheng Soon. Designer of several mythical buildings in Singapore – including the Golden Mile complex, which will soon be renovated from top to bottom – the 82-year-old architect is one of the few voices who do not hesitate to criticize the government’s orientations in terms of of town planning.
If all buildings were 40 stories tall, Tay says, the entire building stock would occupy only one percent of the land. This would make it possible to quintuple the green spaces in the center of the island, and “we could reintroduce the tigers!” underlines the old man. In addition, he believes, the strict compartmentalization of the territory harms the social fabric. The architect emeritus advocates density — “the denser, the better” — and a mix of uses.
“We can’t put down roots”
The pressure to constantly densify the space means that Singapore is constantly changing its face. Rodolphe De Koninck was a young man the first time he looked at the country, then independent for only two years. Half a century later, the famous Quebec geographer, visiting the city of the lion, still sees the city with the eyes of the heart. ” Go on ! We go up, we will have a much better view at the top,” he said as he climbed into the double-decker bus towards the botanical garden.
Singapore, he first covered it on a motorcycle. Spinning from kampong in kampong, he studied, for his doctorate in geography, the Chinese market gardeners of the island. Then, when his wife, Hélène, joined him, it was aboard a Fiat Cinquecento that he crisscrossed the territory. After graduating, in 1970, and until the pandemic, in 2020, Mr. De Koninck returned to Singapore every year, with one exception. The garden city served as a base for him to carry out research projects all over Southeast Asia.
Despite his in-depth knowledge of the city-state, he found himself getting lost in his travels. The church, the village or the cemetery that he knew so well had suddenly disappeared. A new city appeared. “I began to wonder how the population was doing to endure this,” he says on a bench in the botanical garden, under a sun at its zenith. Admittedly, the displaced families were offered generous financial compensation, and it was ensured that they could practice their profession. Nevertheless, Mr. De Koninck noticed an astonishing resignation.
Thanks to this unique perspective, the professor has developed a theory on Singapore: “territorial alienation”. The population “abandons” its attachment to the places, to its childhood memories, to its little history. It places all of this in the hands of the state. In return, the latter assures him prosperity, offers him better housing, creates an ever more beautiful, ever greener city.
In the kampong ground-up initiative, Rachel Cheang isn’t sure she wants to let go like this. Like other members of her generation, she questions the complete subordination of the earth to the imperatives of economic growth. “We feel that we cannot put down roots in Singapore, because any attachment to the territory will eventually disappear,” she says.
This report was financed thanks to the support of the Transat International Journalism Fund.The duty.