Engineering enclosure and exposure of urban water in Singapore

Engineering enclosure and exposure of urban water in Singapore RGS-IBG 2013, ‘Engineering cities’ session Mark Usher, University of Manchester ------SLIDE ONE------- 1. The mutable materiality and mobility of water, and its consequential connection with irrationality, make it a capricious, ambiguous presence in the city. The intractable nature of water makes for immense logistical problems. Indeed, as Karen Bakker (2003) has argued, the lively, material constitution of water makes it an intrinsically ‘uncooperative commodity’ to govern over- whether permeating, pouring or pooling. From Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, the life aquatic is at the whim of the passions, lacking direction, altogether irrational, a road, or rather, a river, to inevitable ruin. The shore, however, is associated with integrity, reason, concreteness. It is this connection that I aim to explore with my research, how conceptions of water have changed in the modern imagination, and what have been the consequences for water governance and the material and conceptual relation between people and water, taking Singapore- who’s more archaic name ‘Temasek’ literally means ‘land surrounded by water’- as a case study. 2. Water is an fascinating and fruitful object to focus on in order to look at the differences between modern and post-modern forms of government, and the techniques that are used to manage its slippery ways. Under modernism, as James Scott (1998) has deftly illustrated, the state is principally in the business of making things sedentary, to tame, to master, to essentially bring things under complete, technological control. Le Corbusier, the architect and poster boy of high modernism, advocated a style of urban planning and engineering practice that isolated and enclosed the different elements of the city in contained spaces, to provide what he referred to as a 'water-tight formula'. Indeed, watery evocations were regularly used by Le Corbusier, torrents, waves and stormy seas, to represent nature as an anarchic adversary that needed to be corrected and submitted to geometric order, 'a modern city lives by the straight line...for the construction of buildings, sewers and tunnels, highways, pavements' (p.10). 3. But, to use the watery metaphor of Zygmunt Bauman (2000), aren't we, or at least most, currently living in an era of 'liquid modernity', one that embraces transience, lightness and mobility? Is the city not a veritable 'space of flows' as Castells (1996) has suggested? I think the dialectical distinction Bauman makes between solid and liquid modernity, and their respective emphasis on 'hardware' and 'software', is a valid one. In terms of water governance in Singapore at least, a marked shift has taken place. Where trapezoidal drains and impounding reservoirs used to feature in Government Reports as spectacular examples of national modernisation, innovative educational campaigns, branding initiatives and lifestyle programmes now get the best headlines. 4. I have used Foucault's analytics of government in this research, specifically his distinction between discipline and security. I can't go into detail here but it will suffice to say that where discipline isolates, concentrates and encloses, security integrates, disperses and exposes. Where discipline 'carves out a new division' and brings to bear an 'absolute artificiality' (p.349) on what could be considered natural phenomena, security works precisely through the re-entry of nature into techniques of government. Two very different technologies of power then, diametrically opposed even, and two very different approaches to government. And one last note- what distinguishes Foucault's analytics of government from other approaches to state power is the level at which it focuses- material practices, infrastructural arrangements, spatial engineering- what he called 'the material network' of the city, and the impersonal, continuous power this affords. ------SLIDE TWO------- 5. Being a relatively low-lying country with sixty five per cent of its territory sitting less than fifteen metres above sea level, Singapore has historically suffered from watery inundations. Prompted by a greater understanding of malaria, the colonial administration had initiated a drainage programme at the beginning of the twentieth century to prevent build-up of water. A number of natural streams were concrete-lined, entirely so in select European districts. However, by the middle of the century, Singapore was facing what the Public Works Department described as an ‘enormous drainage problem’, exacerbated by a labour shortage and lack of engineering expertise. A Mr. Pelton, an experienced drainage specialist, was therefore flown in from Malaysia in 1955 to formulate an urgent anti-flooding plan, which stated that ‘the main drainage problem was to find a suitable outlet to the sea for flood waters’ (TST 9 November 1955, p.5). MP Francis Thomas reiterated this ethos stating ‘the nature of the problem…is essentially one of scientific control of vast natural forces’ (PD 12 October 1955, 794), which would serve as a rallying call for what he envisaged to be the strictly scientific development of drainage over the next three decades. 6. On gaining independence in 1965 the Singapore Government accelerated the roll-out of drainage to support the policy of rapid industrialisation, essential for the survival of newly independent country. No doubt buoyed by these circumstances, Mr Barker, Minister for Law and National Development at the time, boldly surmised in 1967 that ‘the real answer to the problem of development is to eradicate flooding completely’. That same year, Tan Gee Paw, who had only just joined the PWD fresh from college, was charged with engineering the first multi-million dollar anti-flood initiative in Singapore. Spurred on by the success of this first project, anti-flood measures were accelerated in 1972 under the new Ministry of the Environment, which undertook a 50 percent increase in drainage construction on the year before, building 52,600 metres of canal (MEV 1972). Under the Ministry, the anti-flooding programme would come to resemble a coordinated military campaign, where modernisation would be measured in kilometres of laid or lined canal, enacted by a taskforce of engineers and evinced by the growing separation between the city and water. According to Tan Gee Paw, ‘the battle cry in those days was build the canals, send the water out to sea, relieve the flooding’ (NAS, 003170/6, p.57). The public housing board even promised to make flats ‘watertight’ in response to residents’ fear of flooding (TST 29 May 1970, p.5). Drains also had to be watertight of course, but this wasn't enough; the route and rhythm had to be exhaustively established where the velocity of water flow should always be limited to a minimum of 1m/sec and maximum of 3m/sec, with as little curvature as possible (MEV 1976b). Water wouldn’t just flow but proceed in file; its natural transience would be tempered by the intransigence of state bureaucracy. 7. With the emergence of urban catchments in the mid-1970s water also had to be safeguarded for potable use. Water had to be quickly captured from the streets of Singapore, incarcerated and conveyed, to protect it from contagions resulting from human activity. Throughout the 1980s, investment accelerated as water descended underground and out of the national consciousness in ever greater volumes. A subterranean canal large enough for a single-decker bus to drive through was constructed on Orchard Road, Singapore's famous shopping centre (MEV 1988), whilst a vast 8000-metre network of closed pipe conduits and box culverts was planned for the Marina Centre (MEV 1980). Around the turn of the 1990s, a campaign to cover drains in Singapore’s housing estates and litter-prone areas was also announced (MEV 1988). Accordingly, Environment Minister Ahmad Mattar announced, that ‘the flood problem in Singapore has to a large extent been resolved’ (PD 16 March 1989, v.53, c.369), and indeed, according to his ministry, flood-prone areas of Singapore had been reduced from 3178 hectares in the 1970s to just 354 hectares in 1991 (MEV 1991). 8. However, whilst Singapore’s circulation of water has been competently circumscribed over the last forty years, there have also been adverse effects associated with this disciplinary approach. First, citizens had become socially and emotionally alienated from water, an unfortunate upshot of concrete modernism, which had the counterproductive effect of increasing rather than decreasing the amount of litter entering Singapore’s network of drains, canals and rivers. Increased grating was incorporated into drains to catch litter before it entered waterways whilst float booms were installed across rivers to prevent debris travelling downstream. Nevertheless, by the end of the decade ten trucks a day were loading a dripping, foul freight that had increased to 40 tonnes (PD 16 March 1999, v.70, c.943). Second, the policy of covering drainage channels was linked with a rise in mosquito numbers and outbreaks of dengue in Singapore. Concrete, reassuringly impermeable and immovable, terra firma epitomised, had proven to be too unyielding, too precise, too modern. Trapezoidal drains, concrete culverts and thick-set walls belong to that of discipline, of austere institutions of containment, the prison, barracks, factory or madhouse. Singapore was suffering from, what Deleuze (1992) describes as, a crisis of closed systems. ------SLIDE THREE------- 9. So whereas previously discipline was the default technology of power- dividing, enclosing, isolatingsecurity would subsequently provide the strategic basis for governmental practice, encouraging instead ‘movement, exchange, contact’ (Foucault, 2007, p.64). Wong Poh Poh (1989), who would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize as part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), counselled that Singapore was overly reliant on the technical expertise of engineers, architects and planners, whilst ecological and social scientists had not been able to contribute effectively to environmental management processes. On the expert advice of authorities like Wong, the Environment Minister affirmed that the objective was to shift attention from the ‘hardware’ of environmental management- infrastructure and concrete- to subtler types of ‘software’ that would engage the public and make them ‘feel for the environment’ (MEV, 1993). To achieve this, Singapore's first Green Plan proposed a more integral, interactive role for water in the city, not something to be feared and foreclosed, but as a positive source of engagement and enjoyment. Coastline tracts would be doubled from 140km to 300km, and waterways would be aesthetically upgraded and eventually opened up to water-based activities. With this, the geography of governmentality has changed from being principally concerned with demarcation, to inspiring or tempting desirable types of behaviour, conditioning choice through people's involvement in water. Here, the role of the engineer has almost reversed, where previously the objective was to separate people from water through concrete interventions and enclosure; now engineers are been asked to blur the boundary, to create a sense of ambiguity. 10. Setting a precedent, the Waterbodies Design Panel was formed in 1989 to revise existing guidelines for architects, engineers and developers when building at the water’s edge. The new guidelines advised the incorporation of waterbodies into the urban environment to achieve two key planning objectives: to enhance commercial and recreational locations such as cafes, bars and sport centres, and reinforce Singapore’s status as garden city (URA 1993b). To achieve this, a multi-disciplinary approach would be adopted that includes the expertise of landscape designers, architects and town planners in addition to engineers, which also utilises natural materials such as stones, vegetation and water itself to soften and blur the sharp edges of concrete through careful contouring. Waterfront design would seek to incorporate footpaths and bridges where possible to allow ‘people to get close to, and enjoy, the water’ (p.10). To assist this transition, statutory requirements relating to land use would be relaxed to encourage development of what were considered ‘compatible water-side activities’ (p.13). Indicative of this advanced style of government, the panel deduced that ‘treatment of the water’s edge determines the sort of relationship that can be established between the landscape and the water’ (p.25). A situation that would previously have been abhorred by Singapore’s modernist planners, a pond in Toa Payoh was identified as informative of this approach where ‘the edge of the water…is allowed to overlap with the pavement between low and high watermarks so that the edge is always in flux’ (p.25). The hydrosocial boundary was now negotiable and could be reconfigured in ways conducive to government programmes, opening up opportunities for the orchestration of human conduct. 11. In 2005, the ABC Waters Programme, Active, Beautiful and Clean, would take this policy even further. According to the Environment Minister, 'The ABC Waters Programme challenges a mindset: to keep our waters clean, do we keep people away, or do we bring them nearer? We believe that by bringing water into people’s lives, by encouraging them to come closer to the waters and interact with it, they will develop ownership and help to keep it clean.' So we have come full circle, whereas water was once immediately conveyed to that aquatic, the sea, now Singapore operates sustainable urban water management, green roof installing retention ponds, green roofs, swales etcetera, which work on the basis that water remains in the city, which treats water at source. Through these schemes, Singapore wishes to promote itself as a 'City of Gardens and Water'. This is government that works through the presence not absence of water.