Recreating place,replacing memory: Creative destruction at the Singapore River

Abstract: The transformation of urban landscapes is as much a physical process as it is a symbolic one. Material changes in the form of demolition and redevelopment are often accompanied by changes in the image and identity of places, as well as the personal and collective memories associated with these places. Focusing on the Singapore River, we explore how waterfront redevelopment has rendered certain activities, people and place memories invisible, to be replaced by other landscape elements and their associative identities. Through ‘creative destruction’ and ‘destructive creation,’ the waterfront's transformation is evident in three areas: its built environment (‘builtscapes’), activities and events (‘eventscapes’) and displays of public art (‘artscapes’). We contend that landscapes reflect the tensions between ‘remembering to forget’ and ‘forgetting to remember’ in ‘New Asia‐Singapore,’ a city attempting to blend modern Asian dynamism with tradition and heritage.     

广东省种子总站赴泰国、马来西亚、新加坡种子考察报告

1泰国 2001年7月25日上午,我们拜访了泰国农业部的种子质量检验和植验机构,该机构设在曼谷农业大学里,接待我们的是一位叫Kittiya的女士,她负责进口种子质量检验工作,泰国农业部对种子进口的质量检验主要是两项,一是检验发芽率,二是净度,例如:对进口的水稻种子(Rice),要求达到的发芽为80%,净度为98%,对进口芥兰种子(Chinese Kale),要求达到的发芽率为70%,净度98%,白菜(Chinese cabbage)发芽率70%,净度98%,蕹菜(Chinese convulvulus)发芽率50%,净度94%.从质量要求的标准来看,比我国标准略为偏低,检验项目也比我们少了纯度和水分两项,在检验名称上,我们分为亲本种子、杂交种子和常规种子,在检验种子级别上,我国分为原种、良种和一级、二级种子,而每一级都有不同的标准,检验项目较细,而泰国的质量标准不细分,操作起来容易,整个看来管理偏于粗放.     

Public intervention,private aspiration: Gated communities and the condominisation of housing landscapes in Singapore

While the proliferation of gated communities worldwide has generated great interests and debates, the emergence of gated communities is by no means a ‘global’ urban phenomenon that displays uniform characteristics and genesis. Drawing on Singapore as a case study, this paper goes beyond the universalising and often polemical discourses on gated communities to provide a balanced account on how gated communities in the form of enclosed condominium estates are locally embedded in the city state where public housing dominates. As will be pointed out in the paper, gated communities in Singapore may be considered as a form of ‘club good’ that exists as part of the state's urban/national developmental agenda and are, arguably, less socially and spatially divisive than those depicted elsewhere. By teasing out the local specificities of gated communities, this paper underscores the need to read beyond the physical form of gated communities in order to understand the complex social and political production of housing landscapes.     

新加坡热带园林植物景观设计初探

植物景观是城市景观的重要组成部分,在反映城市印象和推动度假旅游业的发展过程中具有重要的作用。而研究热带地区植物景观设计的理念和营造手法,对充实热带园林相关理论和丰富植物景观设计艺术手法等方面都具有理论意义。本文采用文献查阅和实地调研相结合的研究方法,对新加坡的植物景观进行研究,总结出新加坡植物景观设计中多元文化的浪漫主义色彩和从“花园城市”到“花园中的城市”的生态理念两个指导思想;分析出新加坡植物景观强调自然与生态、重视庭荫树和芳香植物、注重立体绿化和与其他造景要素紧密结合等特征。并从新加坡的植物景观设计理论与手法上提出我国热带地区园林植物景观设计的发展建议。     

Regionalism and tourism: exploring integral links in Singapore

Traditionally, tourism development in Singapore involves creating and promoting tourist attractions to lure inbound visitors. Today in the 1990s the focus is on regional tourism, and Singapore is being developed as a ‘tourism capital’ and a hubbing centre for visitors travelling to and within Asia. Tourism development now has a regional focus and tourism enterprises are being encouraged to invest in overseas projects in the Asia Pacific. This paper explores Singapore’s forays into regional tourism. Specifically, it argues that ‘regionalisation’ and tourism enjoy a mutually reinforcing relationship. This means that regionalism provides an avenue for the tourism industry to expand and, conversely, the tourist industry provides an opportunity for Singapore to regionalise its economy. The turn towards regionalisation hints at local problems faced by Singapore’s maturing economy as a whole and its tourism industry in particular. Such local problems include: geographic constraints of site and the lack of natural attractions; limited market and investment opportunities within Singapore; increasingly sophisticated leisure needs of Singaporeans; and strategic concerns for political survival. ‘Tourism regionalisation’ helps to circumvent both real and perceived problems but this paper also warns that many challenges and difficulties will be faced even as Singapore’s regional economy takes root.     

Challenging the developmental state: Nature conservation in Singapore

Abstract: Nature conservation efforts are often reactive to encroaching development plans and systematic conservation planning that is integral with development is not only uncommon, but is often fraught with difficulties even where it is actually attempted. Such obstacles to conservation are especially apparent in developmental states where state legitimacy is largely derived from the state's ability to develop the country. Among other things, developmental states place a premium on physical and economic development. This paper critiques, through the standpoint of nature conservation, the inadequate conceptualisation of ‘development’ in the developmental state thesis. Specifically, this paper argues that the seemingly value‐free (but ultimately economically based) underpinnings of development goals pushed by the developmental state needs to be tempered with a broader concern for the ethics of development. To that end, I draw on two case studies of nature conservation tussles in Singapore to show how alternative extra‐economic visions of development have been articulated, notwithstanding the developmental state's monopoly on the discourse (and practice) of progress and development. The case studies, set in the heady economic growth of the early 1990s, will critique two related aspects of the developmental state: its ‘amoral’ economistic conception of development and its use of growth and materialism as legitimacy.     

International air cargo hubbing: the case of Singapore

International air cargo hubbing broadly involves two types of operations. Firstly, goods may be brought to a hub in one aircraft to be transhipped onto another aircraft bound for the destination with little storage involved. In the second case, goods which are brought in are stored as inventories in warehouses at the hub and are sent to the markets when the need arises. Over the past two decades, these hubbing activities have evolved with new developments in logistics management by the manufacturing firms, freight forwarders and airlines. This paper examines the intricacies involved in international air cargo hubbing, using Singapore as a case study. It is shown that the rapid growth in air cargo traffic handled in Singapore has come about largely due to careful planning on the part of aviation authorities in terms of identifying and responding to these developments in logistics management. The paper concludes with a discussion of the opportunities and challenges facing Singapore in its attempts to sustain its position as a major air hub in the Asia-Pacific region.     

Integrated Planning Strategies of Singapore and Application to Metro Manila

Singapore is globally regarded as a highly developed, livable city. The planning plays an important role in the development of Singapore. Looking back at these transformations, a few success factors can be identified. The years accumulated experience in urban planning and construction of Singapore is worthy learning for Manila. This paper mainly discusses the duplication of Singapore's experience to Manila.     

Voluntary environmental initiatives: ISO14001 certified organisations in Singapore

The value of environmental regulation through command and control measures has been questioned because of inflexibility and high cost. Voluntary environmental initiatives have been proposed as an alternative approach to save costs, overcome problems of inadequate enforcement and monitoring and to take advantage of the environmental leadership of transnational corporations (TNCs). Amongst voluntary environmental initiatives certified environmental management system standards have so far had most impact in Singapore and the rest of Southeast Asia. This paper investigates the environmental policy statements of 52 ISO14001 certified organisations in Singapore and shows that the environmental commitments being made are no substitute for traditional environmental regulations.     

Breeding vandaceous orchids for commercial cut-flowers in Singapore: an overview

Summary Extensive artificial hybridisation among members of some 86 genera of vandaceous orchids within the subtribe Sarcanthinae in Singapore over the past five decades has created many thousands of exotic hybrids. A small number of these are selected for commercial cut-flower production, while others are cultivated as pot-plants. Two classes of intergeneric hybrids are of special commercial importance as export cut-flowers, the bigeneric Aranda (Arachnis x Vanda) and the trigeneric Mokara (Arachnis x Vanda x Ascocentrum) hybrids. Cytogenetic studies of these hybrids in recent years have provided information on the significance of ploidy levels and genomic constitutions on the horticultural performance of cut-flower cultivars, and also on the strategy for effective breeding in vandaceous orchids.     

Multiple dimensions in negotiating the cross‐border transport links that connect and divide Singapore and Johor,Malaysia

Abstract: Despite recent literature pointing to the need for a multidimensional approach to border processes, transport links across borders are usually uncritically associated with cross‐border ‘integration’. This paper focuses on examining the roles played by transport facilities in border processes. It uses case studies of three key transport links at the border between Singapore and Johor, Malaysia. As would conventionally be expected, enhancing these links was often seen in terms of the economic opportunities expected to arise from the easing of bottlenecks. However, the findings also reveal multiple roles for the transport links at this border, many of which cannot be enlisted in any simple conception of cross‐border integration, even when clear enhancement of the links is involved. These roles include: as ‘filters’ (or ‘valves’) used to encourage or discourage certain flows; as ‘gateways’ asserting territoriality; and as ‘bargaining chips’ in the bilateral relationship. A role as ‘collision points’ between policy regimes was also surprisingly important. However, contrary to usual expectations none of the transport links examined appear in the guise of ‘bridges’, contributing towards integrated governance. These findings highlight the complexity of border processes, and underline the contingent interactions between different dimensions of cross‐border processes sometimes simplistically conflated as ‘integration’.     

Negotiating Routes and/or Roots: Heritagisation of nanyin in China and Singapore, 1970s to 2010s

Originated in southern China, nanyin (南音) is regarded as ‘the sound of motherland’ (乡音) performed and loved by the Hokkien dialect speakers in Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and diasporic populations living in Southeast Asia. Having thrived in transnational spaces, nanyin is now celebrated as a shared heritage in China and Southeast Asian countries, such as Singapore. This paper explores the process of heritage-making, that is, the ways in which the art form and cultural practice of nanyin have been re-shaped and re-appropriated by the diasporic communities and the native place to articulate different understandings of the Chinese identity in their distinct nation-state frameworks. In this ambivalent entanglement, China has re-appropriated the diasporic history of nanyin to gain international recognition and build soft power through United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. In Singapore, the Siong Leng Music Association has actively engaged in the heritage-making of nanyin, leading to the creation of a unique Singapore brand that speaks to hybridity and cosmopolitanism, in the same way as the re-construction of their Chinese identity. Examining the two processes of heritagisation of nanyin along the China-Singapore ‘heritage corridors’, the paper argues that the two ends are connected in important ways but always seek to maintain distance to articulate their own cultural representations at international stages. Thus, nanyin through a comparative perspective enables a critical examination of issues of centre versus periphery, authenticity, and hybridity in the Sinophone world.     

‘Asian values’ as reverse Orientalism: Singapore

It is possible to demonstrate, using Singapore as a key example, the way in which the attribution of a set of ‘Asian values’ represented a Western project which is best labelled ‘reverse Orientalism’. This process entailed the attribution of a set of cultural values to East and Southeast Asian societies by Western social scientists in order to contrast the recent dynamic progress of Asian development with the stagnation and social disorganisation of contemporary Western economies and societies. The contrast provided legitimation for some of the nation‐building policies of political leaders in such countries as Singapore and was incorporated in attempts to identify and institutionalise core values.     

Popular music in a transnational world: the construction of local identities in Singapore

As an area of geographical inquiry, popular music has not been explored to any large extent. Where writings exist, they have been somewhat divorced from recent theoretical and methodological questions that have rejuvenated social and cultural geography. In this paper, I focus on one arena which geographers can develop in their analysis of popular music, namely, the exploration of local influences and global forces in the production of music. In so doing, I wish to explore how local resources intersect with global ones in a process of transculturation. Using the example of English songs by one particular songwriter and artiste whose works are part of the popular music industry mainstream, and that of Mandarin songs of the genre xinyao, I will show that, despite increasing globalising forces, music is still an expression of local/national influences. Indeed, I will argue that globalisation intensifies localisation.     

Arab ethnic enterprises in colonial Singapore: Market entry and exit mechanisms 1819–1965

Abstract: Ethnic entrepreneurs often concentrate in specific economic activities. Arab entrepreneurs in Singapore from the time of their first recorded arrivals in 1819 until the 1850s were concentrated in the consumer goods industry. The exit of the Arabs from consumer goods provision saw them moving into the real estate industry in the 1880s, where they remained concentrated until the 1940s. By the 1970s, however, no visible concentration of Arab entrepreneurs could be discerned. This paper argues that the entry and exit of Arab ethnic entrepreneurs into and out of consumer retail and real estate investments may be better explained with reference to political‐economic conditions which facilitate movement than embedded personal relations that enact a chain‐link pattern of industrial mobility.