Just came across the excellent Remembering Singapore site, whose recent post on Singaporean urban legends adds a new dimension to the mission to colonise the underground:

It is said that when Singapore was building the Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) in the mid-eighties, the then-Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew consulted the highly respectable Venerable Hong Chuan about the plan. The latter warned that the tunnelings would severely damage the excellent fengshui of the island, and the only solution was to ensure all Singaporeans carry a bagua (octagon diagram) with them.
But this was impossible among the different races and religions, so PM Lee thought of an excellent idea: to design the new $1 coin with the shape of a bagua, so that it would be carried by all Singaporeans.
This urban legend was made believable due to the coincidence of the timings: The new $1 coin was launched in September 1987, just two months before MRT began its first operation.
A further addition to the rumour was the road tax label, also in the shape of an octagon, which means every car on the roads of Singapore would be carrying a bagua too.

I’d heard that the shape of the dollar coin was intended to give everyone a bagua to carry, but it never occurred to me to wonder what sort of geomantic effect building an MRT system would have. Fascinating.

A while ago I was thinking about what looked like a change of attention amongst Singapore’s planners and developers away from the horizontal and towards the vertical:

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.

I just came across the Economic Strategy Committee’s report, published on the 30th January 2010, a month before my speculation on the change of axis. About three-quarters of the way through, there’s this recommendation from the committee:

Adopt a long term perspective and invest ahead to create new land and space. While we can expand our land mass through reclamation as we have done for Marina Bay, there will be limits in the long-run. In the next 10 years, the government should seek to catalyse the development of underground space as a means to intensify land use. We should put in place enablers for underground development such as by developing a subterranean land rights and valuation framework, and by establishing a national geology office. We must also develop an underground masterplan to ensure that underground and aboveground spaces are synergised, and invest in the creation of basement spaces in conjunction with new underground infrastructural projects (e.g. rail), so as to add to our “land bank”.

Subterranean land rights and valuation framework, and an underground masterplan. Making sure above and below are lined up. And adding to a store by creating more empty spaces. As usual, Singapore is a few steps ahead of my imagination.

The above is a picture of a piece by Niklaus Rüegg, set in a village on the border between France and Belgium.

I want to make a game with this idea, handing out the same 16 frames to teams with cameras and imagination and seeing what they bring back. Everyone gets a “Suddenly..!”, a “POW!” explosion, a “Meanwhile, back at base..”, and a “But – “, and maybe a few dry-erase speech balloons, and an afternoon to go and use the city as their source. Maybe commuters crowding onto a train could be recast as henchmen rushing to their stations. Or a flock of pigeons could be accompanied by a single “Fly, my pretties!”. Or a frame could be strapped to a bike for authentic speed lines.

I’ve got no idea how you’d judge it. Perhaps you’d get credit for smuggling in certain locations, or for particular themes, or for managing to subvert comic convention, or just for running around town in spandex dressed as Captain Super. Perhaps the best one would be from the team of film students who make a comic out of other people making comics, though that could just as likely be the worst. Maybe the most popular one would be a collaboration between a six-year-old and their grandpa.

Anyway, I’d like to see it, and if I make it back to Bristol in time for the next Igfest I might see if I can do something about it.

A year or two ago I was thinking about how to hold on to shadows so that the link between time and space was made clear. Now Web Urbanist have a wonderful round-up of street artists incorporating shadows in their work – fantastic images. Go and see!

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.