Singapore
SingaporePunggol Northshore and Bukit Merah Public Rental Flats
Smart Cities, Smart Neighborhoods?
Emerging Issues
Singapore topped the 2020 Smart City Index (SCI) which surveyed 109 cities across various dimensions of how citizens would consider their respective cities as becoming better cities by becoming smarter ones.1 It showed Singaporeans to have a high level of positiveness and support for the Smart Nation movement, such as their willingness to concede personal data to improve traffic congestion, are comfortable with the use of face recognition technologies to reduce crimes, support cashless financial transactions, and have an increased trust in the authorities that came with the avaliability of online information. For a city-state that has rapidly transformed itself from third world to first under the strong leadership of technocrats, its success to becoming a smart city seem undeterred.
The success of a technocratic centralized planning and leadership is especially prominent in the town of Punggol. As a fishing village occupied predominantly by Malay settlers and Chinese immigrants engaged in plantation work, poultry farming and pig-rearing activties, Punggol has undergone a transformation in the 1990s into a waterfront town and by 2010, into an Eco-Town that tests technologies and ideas as urban solutions for green living. In 2014, Punggol Northshore was announced as the first nature-centric destrict to test smart technologies in public housing, such as intelligent parking demand monitoring system, sensor-equipped lighting in common areas and smart waste management. In 2020, the Punggol Digital District was designated as a tech-enabled sustainable town that will drive the adoption of digital and smart urban solutions throughout Singapore – for the redevelopment of existing towns as well as drive solutions for future new towns and districts such as Tengah and Jurong Lake District. These developments have led to a rise in residential rates in the recent decade, made up mostly of tech-savvy young families who are attracted by the technological “connectedness” to nature and amenities, and are connected digitally to their neighbourhoods such as sharing acts of kindness by residents who leaves sanitizers and masks for others during the Covid-19 circuit breaker. The draw for these younger generation of Singaporeans to these “progressive” towns signifies their comfort with living in technological-embedded infrastructures where residents serve as data-points, and reflects their support with centralised urban-planning as the provider of a solution to “better” living experience.
Neighbourhood-community-city-state relationships
While “smartness” can be built directly into the development plans of new towns, older towns face different challenges. Bukit Merah Town was developed after WWI from a land with numerous hills and lowlands with swamps to a modern town with significant landmarks. Close to the Central Business District (CBD), Bt Merah has several heritage buildings and also the largest concentration of Singapore’s public 1-2 room rental flats occupied by eldery and low-income families with limited assessibility to technology.2 The Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) has revealed its plans for building high-end waterfront residential living with the expansion of the CBD, connection of green spaces throughout Bt Merah, and redevelopment of housing in the old neighbourhoods of Spottiswood, Redhill, and Kim Tian. Immediately, the uneven development of the national strategy of “smartness” is clear, and the development plans made the socio-economic divide of these older and marginalised communities more apparent. But these communities have a stronger sense of community – their sense of their identity and belonging is one tightly tied to the history of the place, connected by bonds with each other in the community as their everyday way of living continues within an aging space. As such, social services found it more effective to build the capacity for self-help among its residents by recreating the nostalgic sense of neighbourliness of the kampung, and continued direct face-to-face contacts with residents even during the Covid-19 circuit breaker. It was also shown that charities and volunteer organisations were more effective than the government in reaching out to these communities when the nation transitted to online learning and work-from-home.
Relevance to SEANNET CollectiveThis study aims to examine the “technologization” of Singapore and Singaporeans, and where appropriate, undertake comparative analysis with other Southeast Asia cities. Martin Heidegger terms “technologization” as the technological “enframing” of human life where technology turns everything, including humans into “standing-reserve” to be arranged and rearranged, and disposed of when we lose our instrumentality for production. Jacques Ellul warns of a “technique civilization” – a society that is pervaded by technicians and dominated by “technique” as any complex of standardized means for attaining a predetermined result. More recently, Neil Postman called this a “technopoly”, a society in which power technologies come to dominate the people it was supposed to serve, and reshape people into their image.
Singapore, having achieved success under the leadership of technocrats and with pragmatism embedded in the DNA of most Singaporean, presents a case for examining the response and resistance to technologization. Singapore’s smart nation movement is a national commitment to “technique” which imposes a centralism to find “the one best way”, but this impersonal approach will inevitably challenge the everyday human need for autonomy and spontaneity, human-to-human relatedness, and meaningful connectedness to their surroundings. The different historical development and demographic make-up of Punggol Nrothshore and Bukit Merah public rental-flats will thus present a comparative backdrop to this study. It will first examine the centrality of technology in the development plans of both towns, with close attention to the care taken to preserve and enhance the humanist aspects of everyday living when the political long-arm of the government is expected to challenge and restrict everyday autonomy and place-making. Second, it will reveal the different outlook of “technique” of residents from both towns in relation to their understanding and importance of autonomy and place-making. It will ask questions related to how “techniques” bring new understandings to their lives and city-living. Finally, it will examine the gaps “technique” has created between centralised notions of city-life and everyday notions of city-living. The fndings from this study is significant as Singapore climb the global rankings of smart city development, and as a member of the ASEAN Smart City Network.
Research Focus and Proposed MethodologyPhilosophical and politico-sociological theories will be used to frame the analytical and critical direction of this study in the first 2 years. It will use publically available information of urban plans and responses of residents and interest groups (eg. heritage and voluntary services). It will also conduct interviews with residents, and use phenomenological approaches to describe everyday expriences over the next 2 years of the project. Futhermore, to make meaningful theoretical developments and comparative findings, this study will be closely connected to the larger SEANNET Collective of multi-disciplinary scholars and early researchers. It will through active exchanges at SEANNET Collective activities, the hosting of faculty and early scholars, and PhD students to develop new analysis.