I’ve read Will Davies’ potlatch for a while, and always enjoyed his writing and the chance to engage with domains he knows much more about than I do. Catching up recently I enjoyed his reaction to the planned Westfield Mk II shopping centre, and the developers’ efforts to “harness that edgy, eclectic east London feel” through giving the artists and independent producers perceived as responsible for that edginess a central role in designing and filling the shopping centre. His piece highlights the absurdity of a mall co-opting the “messy, racially mixed, polluted, dangerous city street”, after a bit of a scoff at the surreality of putting Hackney bohemians next to Nandos. I enjoyed it: I recognised a shared response in his searching for ways to explain or understand the collision between mainstream corporate lifestyle provisioning and the real world.

But the things that seem to give rise to such tensions of authenticity and what looks like the co-opting of the ‘underground’ (or least a less visible) economy aren’t peculiar to Britain. When I arrived in Singapore from the UK, it took me a long time to understand that there was no irony or contradiction in having edgy independent outlets based in malls owned by pan-Asian conglomerates, except that generated by my own Eurocentric ideas about the correct places to situate particular ways of selling things. From the tone of the piece, Will might be surprised to learn (as I was) that there are plenty of hip young things here who “dream of one day draping antique suits and second hand books across the window of their own glass box”, and around Orchard Road it wouldn’t take you too long to find a pastiche of “anti-corporate urbanism”. I’m writing this in an educational establishment which has stalls available in the public foyer for those students who want to become ‘youthepreneurs’: perhaps that’s some indication that here the imaginary line between ‘real’ and ‘commercial’, the distinction between authentically hip and tragically imitative is blurred in ways that seem contradictory to European sensibilities. (Perhaps it never really existed – perhaps it was just us being embarassed about being in trade.)

Regardless, there’s a kind of honesty to the way ‘subculture’ is sold in airconditioned malls here that I missed when I lived in Dalston six years ago. The bus along the Kingsland Road to Liverpool Street took me past any number of independent shops working hard to avoid the impression that anything inside was associated with anything as crass and mainstream as commerce. The shops in the Cathay have copied their anti-shopping presentation, but by living inside a mall there’s no deceit or pretence. They have nice things and will exchange them for your money. That seems more authentic an approach than pretending your edgy east London isn’t lifted from an incomplete impression of New York in the seventies, or trying to pass Hoxton off as a sort of new media version of Berlin.

This isn’t to contradict or challenge Will, really, just to note that the notions of public space and urbanity that operate in his discussion seem tightly coupled to a particular place, and that the militia marshalled at the head of the piece are out of their jurisdiction in these parts. Globalisation might happen everywhere, but the frames used to understand it are always local.

(Related: I enjoyed this interesting paper on one of Singapore’s first malls: Chii, Wong Yunn and Lin, Tan Kar (2004) ‘Emergence of a cosmopolitan space for culture and consumption: the new world amusement park-Singapore (1923-70) in the inter-war years’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 5:2, 279 — 304)

I’ve been in Singapore for three weeks now. Last night, just after sunset, I was out for a run, and thought about the thousands of other Europeans doing the same thing, running loops and circles around Singapore roads; for a moment I imagined us spinning the flywheel, building momentum, making things turn faster than some people born here might like them to, part of a long line of outsiders stirring things up and changing the psychic landscape. Being here makes it impossible to avoid thinking about who I am and who I’m not, and while I’m able to pretend to ignore difference when I’m the UK, here difference is the one thing everyone seems to have in common.

I may have just been dehydrated and imagining things, of course. The last few weeks have been busy, arranging visas and contracts, meeting teachers and game developers, learning my way around new transport routes and vowel sounds, remembering how tiring constant novelty can be. But I think I might be able to see everything settling down a bit more, and I’m looking forward to having more time to consider some of the things that have struck me since I arrived here: modernity, time and the spirit world, place and history, language, culture and power. These are all things I don’t understand and that seem especially present in everything right now.

I’m in Charles de Gaulle airport, outside Paris, and nearly home. Of all the security lines I’ve been through in the past few months, the Parisians have shown the greatest genius for combining a surly inattention with a peculiarly insular and unwelcoming aggression. Not for them the earnest pomposity of the Americans, the breezy efficiency of the Dutch or the free sweets of the Singaporeans – they are wise enough to stick to what they know and love, a paradoxical ability to simutaneously ignore and patronise, and they share their gift freely.

So I’m taking my mind off where I am now by thinking about where I’ve just been, Singapore. It’s a couple of years since I spent any time there and it was interesting for me to see what’s stayed the same and what’s changed. I saw more adverts for tourism to Macau, Taiwan and Korea, a reflection I guess of the relatively strong Singapore dollar, though perhaps also echoing what seemed to be a renewed focus on its Eastern neighbours by Singapore, in contrast to the pro-Americanism I saw last time. Some of the coffeeshops I remembered are still there: some of the malls I shopped in have vanished entirely. I didn’t dare go back to Little India, my previous neighbourhood: I imagine it looks much like Spitalfields does now, another area I lived in briefly that was reckoned worth cleaning up.

But the most noticeable change for me was the height. There are hundreds of new condos, and all of them seem many storeys taller than the towers I was used to. The flagship developments that were under construction as I left are finished now, and look squat and quaint below their newer neighbours. Old sightlines are gone, old landmarks obscured by new balconies, and the skyline has changed completely. I was staying in Tiong Bahru: walking around the two-storey blocks of the 1930s estate you are always overlooked by a series of immense structures (the Capital Tower, the new Pinnacle@Duxton HDB flats), and it’s hard not to think that the estate isn’t so much a conservation area as a modern reservation. Though of course some of the architects of these new buildings, and the even more spectacular ones yet to be built (the Singapore Scotts Road Towers, the Interlace residential complex), live in the estate. Singapore is too small to have the kind of disconnnect between planners and dwellers that we might be more used to in the UK.

So Singapore definitely seems taller. But lots more of it seems to be underground as well. There are new connectors between Wheelock Place and Orchard MRT, a new subway between City Mall and Suntec, three new floors of shops below ground in Ion mall. Rather than reclaiming land horizontally, from the sea, and eventually from Indonesia and Malayasia, Singapore seems to be reclaiming it vertically. No new territory, as far as the map is concerned: instead, they’re using engineering to overcome the physical resistances of densely-packed earth and thin, unsupportive air to fit more people (and businesses, and advertising) in the area they already have, in the same way that engineering and ambition enabled them to reclaim vast areas of land from the sea. It must be easier than facing the political resistances that limit horizontal expansion. Or perhaps it’s a way of overcoming them: tunnels between malls in Johor Bahru and Woodlands must surely already be on a planner’s laptop somewhere.

The family in the shop round the corner were pretty sure that this would be better for my bite than Mopiko, my first choice, and though I think that was mainly because they didn’t have any Mopiko in stock their recommendation’s held good so far. I loved the elegance of the blurb inside the packet:

AXE BRAND UNIVERSAL OIL

1. The handy medicine for every household
2. It has many effective uses and is low in price
3. A few drops will do
4. It is so convenient to carry about

Prepared from a formula by Dr. Schmeidler, the Axe Brand Universal Oil consists of valuable ingredients in accurate proportions. It is pure in colour, pleasant in odour and entirely free from irritating substances. It is mild yet positively effective in action and is suitable for use by both adults and children. That it is a useful medicine for home, travel, estates and mines is testified by its ever increasing sales since its introduction.

In order to avoid imitations, buyers should particularly mention “Axe Brand Universal Oil” and see that it bears the genuine Trade Mark.

I’m going to Singapore tomorrow, on holiday. I’ll be there for a little over a week, seeing friends and drinking aloe vera juice from vending machines. If you’re there as well and fancy some food or a coffee, drop me a line!