Shaping Sustainable Urban Landscapes in Punggol Eco-town, Singapore

“Singapore is now at a turning point. While the past 40 years are about transforming Singapore into a clean and green city as envisioned by the nation’s founding fathers, the next 40 years will be about becoming a model sustainable city.”
~ Former Deputy Prime Minister Teo Chee Hean
                                              
The mall at Punggol, Waterway Point, is bustling on the Tuesday when I visit.  Shoppers chat and meander past designer stores, juggling savory pastries from Old Chang Kee with shopping bags. At the top of one of the escalators, I stumble upon a model of a miniature village: an old fishing village, with tiny square houses and muddy trails. Throughout the entire mall, the miniature village seems to be the only reminder in the bustling complex to passerby of how far Singapore has come. Once a fishing village, a Malay kampung, Punggol is now a busy, happening neighborhood on the east coast of the island of Singapore. Once a neighborhood where the last pig farms in Singapore were cleared in the 1980s, later speculated on as a site for a landfill, Punggol is now characterized as a modern, technologically innovative, model sustainable town. The narrative connected with the development of Punggol reflects how former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew characterized Singapore’s overall development trajectory: In a few short decades, Lee writes in Third World to First, Singapore developed from a small fishing village to a country with a GDP per capita higher than that of the United States. Continue reading “Shaping Sustainable Urban Landscapes in Punggol Eco-town, Singapore”

 
 

What is a Model City? Screening and Discussion

Gordon Hyatt and Susanne Schindler in conversation
Gordon Hyatt and Susanne Schindler at “What is a Model City?”, photo by UnionDocs

In the late 1960s, residents of Central Brooklyn joined a meeting about a new federal program, Model Cities. The meeting quickly soon The first community meeting in Central Brooklyn about a proposed new federal program, Model Cities, devolved into chaos and confusion. Community members invited to the meeting were skeptical about what they were hearing: A federal program had been launched, they were told, to address some of the problems facing the inner cities. Community participation was a key component of the program. Members of the community were asked to plan the programs and have a say in where the budget was allocated. Yet these members of the community were wary after years of government missteps and neglect. During the meeting, several stood up to demand an explanation, saying that they had had harmful experiences with city programs before and did not see how this one would be different. The central question underlying several of their statements seemed to be–How should we believe you? As one community member asked, “Can any government program be taken seriously by the people who live in the slums of our cities?” To these community members, the premise of Model Cities seemed too good to be true—A wariness that turned out to be correct, especially after looking at the disappointing end results of the program when it concluded in 1974.
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Capital City of Contraband: How a Railroad Made and Unmade an Ethiopian City

The Ethiopia-Djibouti railway has been compared by residents of of Dire Dawa to the Nile in Egypt—like the Nile, the train was a trading route, a mode of connection, a source of livelihood, a resource. Just as cities can be born based on natural geography, at the mouths of rivers and at ports, infrastructure creates new focal points in the built environment for urban life to develop and flourish. The railway infrastructure altered the geography of the region and provided a connective route across another man-made creation—the border between Ethiopia and Djibouti. 
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