Growing into the Sea

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Andra Pop-Jurj

Growing into the Sea

Growing into the Sea Andra Pop-Jurj History and Theory Studies Policy Cluster 2020/2021

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land reclamation in Singapore

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Contents

Andra Pop-Jurj

Part I: The making of Singaporean land Urban development as a nation building tool under the challenges of independence

Growing into the Sea

Abstract Growing into the Sea

Part II: Escaping the historical context Urban development and regeneration in the modern city-state Part III: An insatiable technology Finite resources in a black economy in times of environmental degradation

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Conclusion

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Abstract

Andra Pop-Jurj

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‘Henry George’s Remedy: Land Reform’

cessed 30 December 2020].

In order to paint an accurate picture of Singapore’s often envied urban development, it is vital to recognize the driving forces behind its achievements and future endeavours. The monumental scale of the changes the island has undergone from a British colony to an independent power on the international stage epitomises a profound nation building exercise. This growth is thus intertwined with its social, economic and political values. The question of what exactly is being reclaimed is a central one.

Heavily dependent on foreign sand and labour, it appears as though neighbouring coastlines are being dismantled and then reconstructed into new, Singaporean territory by migrant workers on barges.

Further, a comparative analysis of the various techniques and typologies employed throughout the state’s relatively short history reveal architecture as a nation building tool. This will be carried out with a focus on the intense residential development of the East Coast with its history of cultural and environmental erasure in contrast to the more recent industrial typology of the Tuas port.

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<http://www.henrygeorge.org/rem0.htm> [ac-

Tabula rasa, formerly used to do away with the inadequate landscapes of the colonial era, has been replaced with more polished forms of territorial engineering of the more recent landscapes of the nation state. Yet resources such as sand and labour needed for the expansion of its geographical borders are finite, thus the city-state is approaching the question of limits and with that perhaps a need for a shift in paradigm. The increasing environmental degradation characteristic of the Anthropo-

cene era further challenges these practices through rising sea levels and coastal erosion, loss of biodiversity and reduced agricultural yields, to name a few.

Growing into the Sea

This essay explores land reclamation in Singapore as means of urban development but also as a tool for cultural identity formation and nation building. As a key port on the international infrastructure and financial system, the country’s most limited resource is land. As stated by 19th-century radical economist Henry George, ‘the ownership of land is the great fundamental fact which ultimately determines the social, the political and … the moral condition of a people’1. Land is a finite resource that can be controlled and exploited, which justifies the competitive nature of its ownership. Physical and legal barriers such as distance or financial constraints can lead to the exclusion of potential users from this competition. Singapore, however, is in the position to increase the size of its island through terraforming.

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Growing into the Sea

Land is often considered to have always been there, seemingly existing without a beginning. Its own history is often obscured by the infrastructures that inhabit it and the events that have unfolded on it. Yet the records of its shaping, remodelling and more recently constructing, reveal a history of its own.

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William Jamieson, ‘There’s Sand in My Infinity

Pool: Land Reclamation and the Rewriting of Singapore’, GeoHumanities, 3.2 (2017), 396– 413 (p. 400) <https://doi.org/10.1080/23735 66X.2017.1279021>.

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Lee Kuan Yew, The Singapore Story: Memoirs of

Lee Kuan Yew (Marshall Cavendish International Asia Pte Ltd, 2012), p. 18.

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William

Jamieson,

‘Singapore’s

Scentless

Growth Is Built on the Brutal Extraction of Cambodian Sand and Imported Labour’, Failed Architecture

<https://failedarchitecture.com/

singapores-scentless-growth-is-built-on-the-brutal-extraction-of-cambodian-sand-and-imported-

The construction of land is a recurring phenomenon throughout history and generally

Land reclamation is currently playing an important role in many coastal territories, particularly in high density areas. This phenomenon has been further accelerated by environmental degradation and rising sea levels. Yet, while this process is not only confined to small territories or coastal lands, the intensity and duration of Singaporean land reclamation reveal its indispensability in nearly any new development effort. The acute lack of stable land coupled with favourable natural settings - shallow water areas and mangroves - mark the beginning of Singapore’s terraforming journey. The

Through my research I discovered that while land reclamation seems to be almost ubiquitous in the development of coastal cities, its spatial implications are rarely discussed.

Instead, land reclamation tends to be treated as a phase in a specific development project, as a by-product of a city’s historical trajectory or as a technical solution to solving a specific social or environmental problem. Thus, this particular terraforming process deserves particular attention as it set the tone for both social, cultural and economic development and regeneration, thus serving as a testing ground for nation building.

While ranked as the most liveable and sustainable city in Asia and while the language of greening and sustainability dominates its urban policy and architectural identity, its seemingly limitless economic and physical growth draws from invisible and limited external sources. 25% of the city-state has been reclaimed from the sea. As Singapore has grown, it has become increasingly dependent on labour and sand, extracted almost entirely from countries in the wider region, which has seriously depleted some of these sites and even led to the destruction of entire islands.

As outlined in the following chapters, Singapore’s urban fabric was developed in three stages of land reclamation: the creation of new land in colonial Singapore, land reclamation in independent Singapore and the opportunism of territorial expansion enabled by its contemporary status.

Singapore is a city-state renowned for its size, or lack thereof. Often referred to as a ‘a small country with no natural resources’ that ‘was cut off from its natural hinterland and had to survive in a tough world of nationalistic new states in Southeast Asia’3, Singapore’s size has increased from 640km² to 725km² in the course of a few decades. Its endeavour to overcome its geographic and economic constraints has become the driving force in its urban HTS Policy

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labour/> [accessed 23 November 2020].

The remodelling of the city and state territory is hardly unique historically or geographically. What sets Singapore apart is the speed and extent of its changes, the intensity and the sustained energy in achieving its purpose, where neither the urban concept nor the projected social values have changed significantly in the five decades of independence. The use of land as a refined instrument for the pursuit of socio-economic, political, and geopolitical goals is rather astonishing. In this sense, the constructed island of Singapore is a unique case.

Spatial extension through land reclamation can be considered an act of terraforming the modification of the ecology and surface topography being the first step in making inhabitable space. Singapore’s brief history as a nation state, which began in 1965, is founded on the island’s intermittent history as a nexus of sea-based trading networks, where goods and people were exchanged between land and sea. Further building on this, its urban and economic rationality are a product of strategic colonial planning.

development process. Singapore sees itself as chronically undersized: it imagines itself as a larger country, and works backwards, materialising the necessary geographical responses to the demands of the global economy.4 Sites of reclamation are symbolic of the state’s agenda of modernity which can afford to shift its focus from one productive phase of accumulation to another.

Growing into the Sea

Land reclamation is the gain of land from the sea, or wetlands, or other water bodies, and restoration of productivity or use to lands that have been degraded by human activities or impaired by natural phenomena. As the example of Singapore goes to prove ‘it is often a place engineered and designed with an ideological and visual unity, but interpreted through political, ecological, and personal spaces of contestation’2.

represents the culmination of socio-cultural and political value systems and priorities in a specific context at a given point in time.

Entire cultures have evolved around a constantly shifting relationship between water and land, leading to outstanding works of engineering such as Venice and Amsterdam. From a morphological perspective, constructing land defines a human interaction with the earth and its transformation. In the context of the case study of Singapore, terms such as man-made or artificial often refer to more than just land - they describe the atmosphere of a place itself. Yet in the context of construction disciplines, these refer to the displacement of large quantities of material by humans, while also pointing to techniques and technologies such as cutting, filling, levelling, dredging, stabilising and compressing. Thus, reclaimed land is one way of modifying land and interfering with the natural.

traditionally maritime orientation, the strategic military and economic significance of this island along with its tense relation to the hinterland are additional important reasons.

Growing into the Sea

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Changi Airport

East Coast Tuas Port Jurong Island

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Reclaimed land extents of Singapore

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The making of Singaporean land

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Samanth Subramanian, ‘How Singapore Is Cre-

ating More Land for Itself’, The New York Times, 20 April 2017, section Magazine <https://www. nytimes.com/2017/04/20/magazine/how-singapore-is-creating-more-land-for-itself.html> [accessed 10 April 2021].

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Vernon Cornelius-Takahama, ‘Singapore Stone

| Infopedia’, Singapore Infopedia (National Library Board) <https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/ infopedia/articles/SIP_43_2005-01-26.html> [accessed 17 April 2021].

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Tai-Yong Tan, ‘Port Cities and Hinterlands: A

Comparative Study of Singapore and Calcutta’, Political Geography, 26.7 (2007), 851–65 (p.

862)

<https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pol-

The Port of Singapore is a primary economic necessity given the country’s limited land and resources. It plays a critical role in the nation’s supply chain, where goods are often re-exported after being reshaped or refined to generate revenue. Archeological artefacts suggest that the island has represented an important node in the international trade network due to its geographic location and deep sheltered waters.6 As an entrepôt trade centre throughout history, Singapore’s cosmopolitan nature/ identity is rooted in being a nexus in sea based trading that has ‘also served as nodal points for the reception and transmission of culture, knowledge and information’7. Port cities, however, are in turn shaped by their hinterland, a prerequisite for prosperous trading… . Singapore’s relationship to its hinterland was a fluid one, yet its economic, social and cultural orientations were heavily influenced by maritime trade and the international networks that emerged from these commercial activities. It is for this reason, that Singapore was steered in this direction as a British colony - paving the way for a modern state, which now embraces the world as its ‘hinterland’ but ‘remains in essence a port city – subjected to global flows, multi-cultural influences and fully integrated with and dependent on regional and global commercial networks’. The Malayan peninsula became its stable hinterland in the late 19th, which Singapore lost again in 1965

Fig. 1: Telok Ayer Basin reclamation plan

lost again in 1965 upon gaining independence.

However, a considerable amount of land was added to the waterfront on both sides of the Singapore river during this period, followed by a large portion of land built directly into the sea. This step increased the area designated for the vastly Chinese and Indian immigrant population, which also benefited from the construction of a new harbor basin (Telok Ayer Basin) intended to relieve the overcrowded Singapore riv-

er. The new coast was used for government institutions, a market and as recreational spaces for the European colonial inhabitants. These marked the first steps in the creation of Singaporean land as it is known today. The vibrant status of the harbour city attracted increasing numbers of inhabitants from its neighbouring countries, who quickly became responsible for most of the city’s economic activity. Thus, the rapidly growing population needed to expand even further into the sea as the port and trading operations were competing with the available HTS Policy

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geo.2007.06.008>.

During British rule, reclaimed land gave new shape to Singapore’s waterfront and the harbour but remained minor in scale.

Initiated by Sir Stamford Raffles, the founder of modern Singapore, the first reported land reclamation project involved the correction of the Singapore river shoreline in 1819. It involved the dismantling of a hill, clearing of mangrove swamps and gradually fishing villages in order to build trading centres.

Levelling off existing hills would provide enough material to fill in the immediate river bank. Undertaken by about 300 workers ‘who were paid one rupee per head per day to dig and carry the earth’5 in wicker baskets to its new location, reshaping the shoreline was necessary to facilitate the landing of trading boats. In the spirit of preservation, the urban fabric of Boat Quay maintains a fine grain with shop-houses that once doubled as their owner’s residences converted into restaurants and other leisure venues along the riverside. The parallel alleys reveal a backstage to the city’s entertainment strip, while another street away the high-rises begin in earnest. The legacy of the dismantled topography is marked with a slight incline leading up to today’s One Raffles Place. Optimizing the functionality and capacity of the harbour was the main reason for waterfront works during the colonial period. Extending the island by adding large patches of land to the existing shorelines quickly became ubiquitous - each time in a more optimized and sophisticated manner.

Growing into the Sea

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Land reclamation as a nation building tool under the challenges of independence

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Growing into the Sea

Fig. 2: Part of a series of aerial photographs by the British Royal Ari Force showing South Coast, Pasir Panjang, Tanjong Rhu and Pulau Brani, 19.09.1958

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hermes, ‘Amelia Earhart Called Kallang Air-

port the Aviation Miracle of the East’, The Straits Times,

2017

<https://www.straitstimes.com/

lifestyle/home-design/amelia-earhart-calledkallang-airport-the-aviation-miracle-of-the-east>

ly repurposed and later redeveloped into a complex centred around today’s National Stadium.

As illustrated by the increasingly sustained force behind these projects - from the dismantling and rebuilding of hills into mangrove swamps to larger sites of reclamation in line with the rapidly expanding Port of Singapore - the city has meticulously paved its road to prosperity.

Fig. 3: Haven to Singapore - Port at Singapore circa 1890, author: G.R. Lambert & Co. (Singapore)

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[accessed 11 April 2021].

land. On top of the development of the Telok Ayer Basin, an area east of today’s Telok Ayer street, the swampy Kallang Basin northeast of the colonial city possessed this expansion capacity for the first civil airport, known as the ‘aviation miracle of the East’8. The speed at which the industry advanced meant that the aircrafts soon required longer runways causing the airport to be decommissioned in 1955. Having caused the displacement of a large Malay community, the reclaimed site was prompt-

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Growing into the Sea

Fig. 5: Singapore’s street of religious harmony , Telok Ayer Street 1905

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Fig. 4: Tamil workers, 1880

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Escaping the historical context

of land deemed suitable for public development, the bill allowed the government to soon become the main landowner on the island, owning 76.2% of land by 1985.

This reclamation scheme began in 1965 involved the completion of the first phase of the Marine Parade housing estate in 1973.

The instigation of the scheme was evocative of the state’s behavior at the time: quick, decisive, and unsentimental. In 1966 the Land Acquisition Act was passed, which allowed the compulsory purchase of land, without requiring additional compensation for private seafront properties. Unable to handle the rapid population growth after the war and in order to prevent landowners from making unreasonable profits out

Intensive extension was carried out outwards over the sea using more and more advanced engineering techniques ‘made space’ for the new urban housing typology.

Nation building objectives and Singapore’s housing vision have been closely intertwined throughout its history as a city-state.

The Housing & Development Board, instituted by the People’s Action Party government in 1960, has gradually come to house over 85% of the population in modernist/ public high-rise apartment buildings that collectively form a ‘town’.

The new policy reform facilitated the urbanization of the population and the creation of a middle class, which were a priority for the newly formed nation state. The high attention to the social issues of the period is visible in the East Coast example, where the reclaimed land was set aside for public housing and leisure. A suspicion that the closeknit communities concealed and fostered communists and criminals was disguised as an urgent concern for the hygiene and safety of kampong dwellers. Their resettlement in high-rise Housing & Development Board (HDB) blocks meant these problematic ties could be severed and, similar to the rest of society, more easily regulated.

Fig. 6: Koenigsberger Ring City Plan 1963.

Image courtesy of Urban Redevelopment Authority

In the 1970s and ‘80s, new social and economic agendas entered urban development, whose character gradually shifted from the massive spatial redistribution of the land uses to their consolidation. Rural land and agriculture were declared uneconomical to maintain as part of Singapore’s territory, while major infrastructures, such as Changi Airport and the Massive Rapid Transport (MRT) system were completed by the end of the decade. The major land-construction projects migrated toward the coast with a focus on infrastructure and commerce with a global dimension, evoking a feeling of being landlocked, rather than on an island - with only 7.5% of the port being accessible to the public.9 Tuas Port and Jurong Island are now thoroughly given over to the petrochemical industry.

This tendency was ingrained in the local leaders and implicitly in the inhabitants under British rule. Kampongs - traditional

villages of wooden houses often lacking running water or electricity - have been almost entirely replaced with HDB blocks.

Singapore’s urban regeneration process exposes a series of legislative, policy and governmental reforms, such as The Land Acquisition Act, the Planning, that were vital in achieving the complete urbanization of the city state. However, urban renewal was preceded by the establishment of an effective urban governance system, whose primary target was the organization and planning of land use through development agencies.

Given the scarcity and reclamation costs of Singapore’s most revered resource - land Singapore sought technical assistance from the United Nations, a collaboration that culminated in the division of the city’s area in 21 planning districts.10 The resulting infamous ‘Growth and Urban Renewal’ report of 1963 was misread as an ‘international warrant for mass urban destruction’ by Lee Kuan Yew. ‘Rehabilitation and selective, not

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Milica Topalović, ‘Constructed Land: Singa-

pore in the Century of Flattening’, in Constructed Land: Singapore 1924-2012 (ETH Zürich DArch and Future Cities Laboratory, 2014), pp. 51–63 (p. 57) <https://doi.org/10.3929/ ethz-a-010824840>.

10

National Library Board, ‘Compulsory Land Ac-

quisition : Singapore and Malaysia / N. Khublall.’, Singapore Infopedia <http://eservice.nlb. gov.sg/item_holding.aspx?bid=7169719> [accessed 18 April 2021].

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As outlined in the previous chapter, reclaimed land gave new shape to Singapore’s waterfront and the harbour but remained minor in scale under British rule. This period accumulated around 2.4 square kilometres to the city and involved the levelling of the hilly rural area of Jurong to fill the low-lying mangrove swamps and build the country’s first industrial zone, Jurong Industrial Park.

Following Singapore’s defeat in World War II and its separation from Malaysia due to political disputes shortly after that, the scale and the character of interaction with the land had to be redefined. After independence, a more holistic transformation of land and landscape became a fundamental tool of social, political, and economic modernization. The transformation that occurred during the 60s and 70s is characterised by tabula rasa strategies and heavily involved the East Coast reclamation scheme.

Growing into the Sea

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Urban development and regeneration in the modern city-state

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Fig. 7: Lorange Plan 1962 - Precincts plan

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Mark R. Frost, ‘Singapore Songlines Revisit-

ed: The World Class Complex and the Multiple

wholesale demolition’11 were interpreted to fit the Singaporean government’s agenda. In line with the state’s priorities and its tabula rasa syndrome, Master Plans would be reviewed regularly to ensure long-term modernist goals were on track, one demolition and piece of reclaimed land at a time.

Deaths of Context’, p. 14 <https://www.academia.edu/23517658/Singapore_Songlines_ Revisited_the_world_class_complex_and_the_ multiple_deaths_of_context> [accessed 11 April 2021].

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Diane K. Mauzy and Robert Stephen Milne,

Singapore Politics Under the People’s Action Party (Psychology Press, 2002), p. 81.

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Rem Koolhaas, Bruce Mau, and Office for

Metropolitan Architecture, S, M, L, XL (Monacelli

island were ended, layers of meaning derived from personal histories were ‘revitalized’ or ‘renewed’ but mostly buried. Social and cultural change was inscribed into the layers that followed and memories became placeless. Faced with this nation building and identity formation exercise, the country’s leaders concentrated on the necessity to pursue the path of globalization before academics, urban planners and architects conceptualized the typology of the ‘world city’12. As illustrated by Rem Koolhaas in his essay ‘Singapore Songlines’, ‘the city represents the ideological production of the past three decades in its pure form, uncontaminated by surviving contextual remnants. It is managed by a regime that has excluded accident and randomness: even its nature is entirely remade’13.

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Tai-Yong Tan, ‘Port Cities and Hinterlands:

A Comparative Study of Singapore and Calcutta’, Political Geography, 26.7 (2007), 851–65 (p. 862) <https://doi.org/10.1016/j. polgeo.2007.06.008>.

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Tan, p. 855.

Fig 8: Marine Parade HDB towers, 1973

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Press, 1998), p. 1011.

Not only was the tabula rasa approach - an almost universal constituent of the modern city - the ideal scenario for the colonial powers, it also enabled the young independent nation to build itself from the ground up.

An official effort to escape its historical context coupled with the limiting size of the island legitimized the destruction of traditional village culture of the Malay population along with urban slums and fishing villages. Rituals and rites inscribed into the

Marine Parade HDB towers, 1973

relations and can be considered ‘the antecedents of global cities’14. At the same time, they contradict the belief of globalisation being a revolutionary process and remind us of the origins of some of today’s financial centres and logistics hubs. Thus, Singapore is essentially still a port city, yet one that now embraces the world as its hinterland and operates according to the global context of political, cultural and commercial change.15

Growing into the Sea

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This conclusive concern to render Singapore history-less upon independence reveals another facet of the intensified urban destruction it justified. The new, profoundly modernist material space fuelled an augmenting hunger for land. For a global city in a globalized world, the notion of the hinterland has also lost its meaning. However, the (constantly) morphing character of port cities reveal globalisation as a historical process. They are spatial manifestations of global flows of capital and transnational

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Growing into the Sea

Fig. 10: Block 1 Marine Terrace was the first block to be built in Marine Parade, 1973

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Fig. 9: An aerial view of the several thousand hectares of land taking shape on the East Coast

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An insatiable technology Finite resources in a black economy in times of environmental degradation

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A. Arulrajah, M. Bo, and H. Nikraz, ‘Case

Study of the Changi East Land Reclamation Project, Singapore’, International Conference on Case Histories in Geotechnical Engineering, 2008

<https://scholarsmine.mst.edu/icch-

Another vital step in the construction of land is its improvement, thus innovations such as vibro flotation have become widespread. This method involves introducing a vibrating poker at the desired depth, which increases the soil density. Ground stability can also be achieved by installing vibro replacement columns that act as a foundation. These reach all the way to through the firm seabed and are tightly filled with gravel. More recently, Singapore has decided to adopt the famous Dutch polder technique of land development in which the reclaimed area lies under sea level. A dyke marks the new land border, while draining canals and pumping stations remove the water from the enclosure. Not only does this method require less sand to fill in the new ground, it is also considered more resilient against rising sea levels - an existential threat for an island like Singapore. While construction costs and material use are higher in the case of infilled reclaimed land, keeping

Fig. 11: The Tuas Port Reclamation Project, led by the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore, home to a sprawling shipping-container terminal.

the polders dry comes with constant energy requirements and flood risks in case of power failure, yet these have to be weighed carefully against environmental degradation, scarcity of sand and the nation-state’s population and economic growth.17 Tabula rasa, formerly used to do away with the inadequate landscapes of the colonial era, has been replaced with more polished forms of territorial engineering of the more recent landscapes of the nation state. In line with the new tendencies of the global stage, the Tuas Port and Jurong Island have thoroughly been given over to the petrochemical industry. This area employs caissons - prefabricated retaining structures filled with concrete - instead of the piling technique and is advertised as being safer and more efficient. As the largest bunkering base in the world, the Port of Singapore serves as an important refueling station for ships sailing from the Suez canal. Millions of tons of fuel contained in vast farms of oil tanks are being exchanged each year in the

high seas.18 This greed is, however, not without repercussions. The scarcity of sand coupled with intensified reclamation efforts have not only made this resource exclusive to powerful nations, but it has also given birth to sand smuggling, which is considered an environmental crime.19 As Singapore has grown, it has become increasingly dependent on labour and sand, extracted almost entirely from countries in the wider region. Tracing the sand, it appears as though neighbouring coastlines are being dismantled and then reconstructed into new, Singaporean territory by migrant workers on barges.

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‘Creating Spaces for Our Growing Needs’

<https://www.ura.gov.sg/Corporate/Planning/Master-Plan/Themes/A-Sustainable-andResilient-City-of-the-Future/Creating-Spaces>

The decade between 2006 and 2016, Singapore was the main global importer of sand five times, having exhausted its own foreshore sand in the early 1980s. This led to a crisis in 2006, when both Malaysia and Indonesia had closed their frontiers.

The reclamation companies, being bound to deadlines, established a new market in

[accessed 14 April 2021].

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Subramanian.

19

Vince Beiser, ‘Why the World Is Running out

of Sand’, 18 November 2019, section BBC Future

<https://www.bbc.com/future/arti-

cle/20191108-why-the-world-is-running-outof-sand> [accessed 17 April 2021].

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ge/6icchge/session09/2>.

Projects involving the construction of land have increased significantly in size, are often implemented in deeper waters (over 20m) and employ various techniques and fill materials depending on their availability. Singapore’s hills were quickly flattened, locally available materials used up and the sand import started. After offsetting the coast and marking the new one with a wall, the simplest method involves filling the reclamation area with large amounts of materials that are firm and porous enough to be drained quickly such as rock and/or cement, followed by superior layers of clay and/or sand. Singapore’s hunger for land, its expanding port activities and the increasing size of shipping vessels require deeper dredging for shipping lanes. The large clay lumps retrieved from the seabed during this process are dumped into construction sites as fillers, yet clay particles are smaller than sand, which in turn makes the water drainage too time consuming. For this reason, the Changi East project was carried out en-

tirely with sand, using over 200 million cubic meters of sand for a total area of about 2500 hectares.16 Dynamic compaction is then used to improve the mechanical properties of the new land by repeatedly dropping heavy weights onto its surface. This drains the soil, often through prefabricated vertical drains, in order to achieve a specified density. Cement mixed dredged slurry is one of the most recent fill methods to be tested.

Growing into the Sea

While ranked as the most liveable and sustainable city in Asia and the language of greening and sustainability dominates its urban policy and architectural identity, its seemingly limitless economic and physical growth draws from invisible and limited external sources. Today, 25% of the city-state has been reclaimed from the sea. The question of what exactly is being reclaimed is a central one. Not only is this often

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Singapore’s steps towards this language of greening were initiated by Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, who introduced natural gas as an energy source, instead of more affordable coal, together with the goal for Singapore to become a ‘city in a garden’.

Today the government employs discursive strategies around a clean and green environment that heavily contribute to the construction of national identity.22 Tree planting initiatives, for instance, are carefully planned nation-bonding exercises. The city’s ‘seductive tropicality’23 further serves to lure foreing capital onto the island. Constructing land is thus the product of urbanization in the modern city. And as the urban development of Singapore demonstrates, land reclamation is an accurate projection of the nation-state’s desires, goals and needs.

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Cambodia - almost overnight. Due to these extractions often occurring without environmental impact assessments, the dredging of sand caused a steep decline in the welfare of fishing communities. Furthermore, the lack of formal working contracts and security standards on diesel hungry barges, that further contaminate the air and local waters paint a thoroughly unsustainable picture of this practice.

21

Leon Yan-Feng Gaw and Daniel Rex Rich-

ards, ‘Development of Spontaneous Vegetation on Reclaimed Land in Singapore Measured by NDVI’, PLoS ONE, 16.1 (2021) <https://doi.

Topalović, p. 59.

22

Peter Teo, ‘“Clean and Green — That’s the

Way We like It : Greening a Country, Building a Nation’, Journal of Language and Politics, 3 (2004), 485–505 (p. 4) <https://doi. org/10.1075/jlp.3.3.07teo>.

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Topalović, p. 59.

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C. M. Wang and Z. Y. Tay, ‘Very Large Float-

ing Structures: Applications, Research and Development’, Procedia Engineering, The Proceedings of the Twelfth East Asia-Pacific Con-

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As the country terraforms itself in search of space, its public discourse inevitably raises the question of its relationship to nature.

Immense efforts invested in maintaining Singapore’s status as a ‘garden city’ seem contradictory to its habitual reshaping and shifting of land, revealing a differentiation between nature and greening. The value of nature as a raw material has long been outweighed by economic development profits and replaced by artificial greening interventions which almost always perform multiple strategic functions: vertical farming, military grounds, water catchments, recreation.

Greenness, however, is the product of urbanization and human-led interventions - in this sense, Singapore is an example of an urbanized nature, one that is ‘flexible, replaceable, affordable’21.

Fig. 13: from Vietnamese shores to Singaporean land

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org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245220>.

As climate reports over the last few decades have proven, technological and industrial advancements seem to go hand in hand with environmental degradation. Singapore’s extensive land reclamation projects have had a detrimental impact on marine and terrestrial life. All the nature that has been replaced with polished urban landscapes have led to an estimated 73% destruction of local natural species, with an 85% predicted biodiversity loss in the region by the year 2100 if reclamation practices continue at the same pace.20 Flash floods due to changes in ground porosity and drainage

patterns, reclaimed coasts prone to erosion and contaminated waters through escaping landfill sediments are only some of the dayto-day consequences of this intense nation building exercise.

While the case of the constructed Singaporean land further stands out for the speed and extent of its growth, land reclamation is widely employed as part of contemporary urban development models, particularly in prosperous port cities in Asia and the Mid-

Currently being researched at the National University of Singapore, Very Large Floating Structures might one day replace the entrapment of fluid land with floating facilities that ‘free up land’ in an environmentally friendly way. One of its reservoirs is already covered in a hectare of solar panels, with an entire solar plant being planned at sea.

Perhaps the already fluid land of Singapore has yet to embrace the notion of permanence as part of the Singaporean identity.

Considering the immanence of rising sea levels around the globe, how it fends off the ocean will be of deep interest to many other populous and productive cities near the water: New York, Miami, Rio de Janeiro to name a few.

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Fig. 12: loating sand dredger

dle East. The ingredients are generally the same - logistics, oil and gas storage and production, expensive real estate and other large scale projects. Together with their high population density, scarcity of coastal land and a strong economic growth, these characteristics render a city prone to shifting its borders into the sea, often taking Singapore’s envied success as a model.

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Fig. 15: Tuas Port Reclamation Project Terminals

Fig. 17: Caissons, or watertight retaining structures, that are part of the project

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Fig 16: Assembling rebar to make a caisson’s interior frame

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Fig. 14: A sand economy, aerial view

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Fig. 20: Dynamic compaction

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Fig. 18: Prefabricated vertical drainage system

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Fig. 19: Vibro compaction

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Topalović.

Reading the various governmental initiatives, nation and identity building approaches, land construction techniques alongside historical events challenge the common misconception of Singapore having started its spectacular rise as late as 1965. Similar to the proverbial saying ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’, what is most often hailed as a model of rapid and efficient urbanization and nation building, was not achieved overnight either, much to the chagrin of Singaporean elite.

Singapore’s experiment in sovereign expansion and rise —not through military conquest but through land reclamation—is a rather unique example of how nation-states not only repurpose natural resources but use them to literally build themselves from the ground up as political acts of landscape architecture.

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Singapore has reached a new form of stability through its territorial revolution of the 60s. Tabula rasa, formerly used to do away with the inadequate landscapes of the colonial era, has been replaced with more polished forms of territorial engineering of the more recent landscapes of the nation state.

Singapore today resembles a controlled surface: In broad strokes, its urban vision has been completed. The ongoing work consists of refinement rather than reformation. ‘Greenness, cleanliness and efficiency’ are the new ubiquitous techniques of territorial control.25 The popular metaphors of the ‘garden city’ illustrate the perception of Singapore as a realized vision. However, from the capacity of its infrastructures to the availability of sand, labour, and other resources, it now approaches the question of limits and perhaps a need for a shift in paradigm.

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List of figures Fig. 1: Telok Ayer Basin reclamation plan, source: https://libmaps.nus.edu.sg.

Fig. 14: A sand economy, aerial view, source: https://chiyinsim.com/

Fig. 2: Part of a series of aerial photographs by the British Royal Ari Force showing South Coast, Pasir Panjang, Tanjong Rhu and Pulau Brani, 19.09.1958. source: National Archive of Singapore https://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/photographs/record-details/bd13ed6d-1162-11e3-83d50050568939ad

Fig. 15: Tuas Port Reclamation Project Terminals, source: https://chiyinsim.com/

Fig. 3: Haven to Singapore - Port at Singapore circa 1890, author: G.R. Lambert & Co. (Singapore), source: Leiden University Library, Collection page Southeast Asian & Caribbean Images (KITLV) Collection page Southeast Asian & Caribbean Images (KITLV), http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/ item:825177

Fig. 5: Singapore’s street of religious harmony , Telok Ayer Street 1905, source: National Archives of Singapore, https://remembersingapore.org/2016/09/14/telok-ayer-street-places-of-worship/ telok-ayer-street-1905/ Fig. 6: Koenigsberger Ring City Plan 1963, Image courtesy of Urban Redevelopment Authority, source: https://www.ura.gov.sg/Conservation-Portal/Resources/Links?bldgid=AIB

Fig. 17: Caissons, or watertight retaining structures, that are part of the project, source: https:// chiyinsim.com/ Fig. 18: Prefabricated vertical drainage system , source: https://www.newcivilengineer.com/the-future-of/future-of-airports-expanding-singapores-changi-airport-onto-reclaimed-land-11-05-2020/ Fig. 19: Vibro compaction, source: https://www.ceteau.com/products/vibro-compaction/ Fig. 20: Dynamic compaction, source: https://www.swissboring.com/Technologies/Rapyd_Dynamic_Compaction

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Fig. 4: Tamil workers, 1880. source: Morgan Betty Bassett Collection, courtesy of National Archives of Singapore

Fig 16: Assembling rebar to make a caisson’s interior frame, source: https://chiyinsim.com/

Fig. 7: Lorange Plan 1962 - Precincts plan, source: https://www.ura.gov.sg/Conservation-Portal/ Resources/Links?bldgid=AIB Fig 8: Marine Parade HDB towers, 1973, source: https://mpthenandnow.wordpress. com/2015/08/05/history-of-marine-parade-marine-parade-in-the-making/ Fig. 9: An aerial view of the several thousand hectares of land taking shape on the East Coast, source: https://mpthenandnow.wordpress.com/2015/08/05/history-of-marine-parade-marine-parade-in-the-making/ Fig. 10: Block 1 Marine Terrace was the first block to be built in Marine Parade 1973, source: https://mpthenandnow.wordpress.com/2015/08/05/history-of-marine-parade-marine-parade-inthe-making/ Fig. 11: The Tuas Port Reclamation Project, led by the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore, home to a sprawling shipping-container terminal, source: https://chiyinsim.com/

Fig. 13: from Vietnamese shores to Singaporean land, source: https://chiyinsim.com/ HTS Policy

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Fig. 12: loating sand dredger, source: https://failedarchitecture.com/in-conquering-the-sea-singapore-erases-its-history/

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