IN-PERSON Barcelona. Section A

Abstract

Bukit Merah Town in Singapore was developed after WWI from a land with numerous hills, lowlands and swamps to a modern town where the Central Business District (CBD) is located, with significant landmarks and some of the earliest public housing estates. In its latest development plans, the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) proposed an expansion of the CBD with the building of high-end waterfront residential living, improvement of green-spaces connectivity, and a redevelopment of housing in the nearby old neighborhoods. As these old neighborhoods are home to some of the largest concentration of Singapore’s public rental flats occupied by elderly and low-income families with limited accessibility to technology, an obvious concern will be that an uneven development will make the socio-economic divide of these older communities more pronounced. Yet, too drastic changes may disrupt the relatively strong sense of identity and belonging that is tightly tied to the history of the place, and the agency and capacity for self-help founded in the nostalgic sense of neighborliness of the wider network of the “kampung”. What a society cares about, and who and how it cares for, are thus points of contention and in need of careful calibration. This paper will examine the notions of development (or the lack of) as a care relationship between time and technology. It will first examine how development is largely synonymized with technological advancement in Singapore’s Smart Nation movement, and discuss how technology interacts with time that is imprinted in infrastructures of heritage sites, and where time is marked in aging communities within an aging housing space. Finally, it will show how development in its different forms and levels of care is understood across Bukit Merah by analyzing the relationship between time and technology.