i have reached enlightenment in urban planning sometime ago...
the downfall of urban planners is that they religiously fearful of leaving spaced UNPLANNED. they fear it hints at incompetence.
often, activities happen at UNPLANNED spaces precisely they are accidental and the dynamics of spontaneous human activities arise there. the key, henceforth, is the strategic placement of unplanned nodes for "accidental" happenings.
and design for programmes that spontaneously generate a pattern of usage and empowerment to the users far outstrip creating themed parks and artistic urban sculptures. there are too many arty landscapes that serve no meaning rather than to engage the common man on the street to something closer to their hearts...
my supervisor then nodded casually and
"ok sounds logical, lets move on... pass this design on to XXX and i need ur plans for the other design by tuesday ok?"
.... and returns to the tireless task of answering emails at her workstation.
Saturday, September 16, 2006
save me from the patronising tone
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3 comments:
this is so interesting.
back in the 1990s, i was running an art e-zine called fuqwits, artzine, and other random names (we couldn't decide). in one particular issue, i was writing about the rise of graffiti art in singapore. in the states where it all started, the spectacles were very random, but all so beautiful. i scouted some neighbourhoods to look for similar occurences, and there actually were quite a number. the thing was, by the time i returned with my huge-ass camera the following week, they had been all white-washed.
a couple of years later, NAC and some youth development stat board decided that they'd turn around this plot of land that had so much potential (but was wasting away) into today's orchard youth park. the place to encourage a radical never been seen before kind of artistry called graffiti art.
crackers.
i was also very opposed to the zoning idea set some years back for main part of the city. apparently planners wanted to set somekind of defining limit on which part of the CBD was going to be the artsy part of town, and which part was going to be shopping etc. it didn't make sense to me that this zone was where risque happenings/ performance art was going to happen, and that if you crossed the small street to the other side, you won't be disturbed by naked people walking around in the name of art. as much as this red zone was going to be a more 'liberal' zone, it also meant the opposite: that this zone is a potentially dangerous one that one must tread at one's own risk.
after some time, i conceded that urban planning is basically a system of control. and of course, in a highly governed country like singapore, planning can come down to micro-management. but it's understandable as well simply because of the scale of our country.
what i do know, however, is that there're always opportunities between spaces and buildings that people can tap on if they made the effort. The Gays are very good at tapping onto such opportunitic moments with ann siang/ tanjong pagar. it sure as hell wasn't planned.
let the planners do their jobs and plan the country. accidents that are meant to happen, will happen. the only question is, will those accidents be white-washed?
oh i am coming from a more rural landscape pt of view. not the hustle bustle of the city. you see we are 2 different parts of the same person haha.
i am opposed to flattening entire fields and secondary forests to create a nicely manicured green of evenly planted trees which require another 10 to 20 yrs to mature.
the difference lies in that in URBAN planning where infill developments and spontaneous human activities plug the gaps left behind by urban planning, urban planning with nature doesnt allow that to happen. once nature is wiped out, the system is disrupted and replaced. the topography is erased and replaced with a flat terrain, drainages replace rustic streams.
accidents DO happen all the time in these ulu places. there will always be some uncle plucking durians, a malay family on a weekend fishing trip, ah bengs in a pickup van with radios catching crabs, young yuppies come together on empty grasslands to play their remote control planes. its nice really. now even got a community of kelongs building up in the coast of seletar. its wonderful! u see strangers talking and laughing to each other. why? coz these places are left alone from the top down urban planning and these ppl can find a sense of themselves. (which include littering as well, lol)
then here comes urban planning. which wants to come in and introduce terms like RUSTIC ZONE, HERITAGE HUB, DURIAN EDUCATIONAL PARK, CAMPING BELT, REMOTE CONTROL PLANE INTEPRETIVE CENTRE, HOMESTAY @ KELONGS PROGRAMMES. urban planners who sit in air con offices commenting abt sustainability and professing their love of nature...
whitewashing in this case produces various other outlets where other places of nature can provide. disneyfying the entire process of rural democratic fun becomes a killjoy. an anticlimax. like watching a channel 5 drama serial to masturbate. becomes a bourgeoisie moral obsession to provide clean sanitised "fun".
while i'm unfamiliar with the scheme you're referring to--seeing as how you have made very specific claims, i do understand where you're generally coming from.
essentially, i think we're on the same note in terms of registering our planners' whitewash-before-sanitised-versions approach to things.
what i think we sometimes forget is that urban planning hinges on policy making as much as it does our cultural and social feedback. and sg being sg, criterions like landscale, density, and economic$ come in high. but you know what's the funniest thing? i doubt sg has ever recovered from being critiqued a "cultural desert" those years ago. since then, or maybe pre-dating even that incident, sg has always had an outside-in view of itself. it's always about how other people see us, how we look beside this or that country on various different scales of measure. this is why it's always struck me that our understanding of ourselves seems very foreign, and outward.
what's most glimmering since that "desert" remark seems to be that we're ready to latch onto every possible activity that might lend us some sense of a unique identity that we might proudly call "singaporean". taking into account that we are a country honed to run a big tourism engine, it doesn't surprise me that any of these good cultural/ social "accidents" are wrung of every possible tourist factor. inevitably, that involves some form of sanitisation for easier consumption because we're "a clean and green city" of nicely packaged fun, but where unfortunately nothing is ever for nothing's sake.
green fields is money. imf is money. biennale is money. saying gay people are okay is money. biohub is money. marina redevelopment is money. singapore arts fest is money. food fest is money. and lest you didn't know, issues of sustainability and natural preservation is money.
money, money, money...
if there were dissatisfactions to be had, i would think something higher, more philosophical needs to be addressed. sometime post-independence, someone provided an answer to the country's "who am i" question, and everything we know of sg today is borne out of that. it isn't a bad thing per se, in fact, like MM Lee i seriously believe for singapore's economic survival, a certain status quo has to be maintained--he doesn't actually say that, of course.
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