“A Strange Coalition / an Ambiguous Victory: The Case of Singapore’s Bukit

Brown Cemetery”

Jason Luger

King’s College London / National University of Singapore

Department(s) of Geography

Rebel Landscapes (AAG 2014)

Structure

• Introduction / Theoretical Context

• Singapore Context

• Case of Bukit Brown: Synopsis

• Findings / Conclusions

Singapore at a Crossroads • Singapore faces a crucial turning point, or ‘coming

of age’. Decades of growing wealthy and sophisticated have resulted in a society increasingly asking: ‘who are we?’, and searching for meaning in other ways than money and the trappings of the good life.

I. Introduction

• Bukit Brown Cemetery is the largest Chinese cemetery outside of China, with over 100,000 graves, dating to Victorian times.

• The buried include many of Singapore’s pioneers and most important families.

• The cemetery is currently being developed into a new master-planned urban extension.

• This development has galvanized a resistance movement formed of an unusual coalition of grassroots groups, indicative of broader dissatisfaction with Singapore’s neoliberal, developmentalist trajectory.

Context

‘The universal consequence of the crusade to secure the city is the destruction of any truly democratic space’ (Davis, 1992:155)

Key Questions

1. What are the alliances / coalitions forming the Bukit Brown movement?

2. Why has Bukit Brown been able to unify Singapore’s grassroots when many other causes cannot?

3. What does resistance and contestation look like in such a (soft) authoritarian setting?

4. Has the Bukit Brown movement been a success or a failure?

5. What does the Bukit Brown case say about the new geographies of resistance in the (post) neoliberal city?

The Project

• Case study is part of a larger PhD Project, ‘Creative Singapore: Paradoxes and Possibilities’

• Ethnography conducted in Singapore in 2012/2014 (observation / participation)

• Project explores the relationship between the State and the grassroots in relation to arts / culture policy.

Theoretical Framing

• 1. Moving beyond the West / comparative urbanism and the Asian city (Nijman, 2008; Robinson, 2010, 2012; Parnell, Pieterse and Watson, 2009, Roy and Ong, 2012)

2. The ‘Post’ Neoliberal City and the new / emerging geographies of

Resistance and activism (Smith, 2008; Mayer, 2009; Harvey, 2012; Amin and Thrift, 2013; Davidson, 2013)

3. The geographies of unusual coalitions / alliances: Ruth Craggs 2014, Chatterton and Pickerell (2010) Horton and Kraft (2009a, b)

4. Arts / Activism, ‘Cultural Activism’, ‘Creative Resistance’ (Colomb and Novy, 2012; Buser, et. Al, 2013)

Theoretical Framing

• 5. The cemetery as ‘heterotopia’, spiritual, meaningful ‘other’ (third)space (Foucault, 1984; Soja,1996; Pile, 2005)

• 6. Conceptions of activism / civic / civil society in Singapore (KP Tan, 2008; 2012; 2013; Chua Beng Huat, 2007, 2012; L. Lim, 2013; Rae, 2009).

• 7. Public space / digital space / public sphere (LeFebvre, 1972, 1994; Habermas, 1989; Sennett, 1992; Mitchell, 1995)

2. Singapore, 2014

Singapore

• Founded 1819 as Br. East India Company Trading Post

• 1867- 1942 and 1945-1963 British Crown Colony

• 1942-1945 Japanese Occupation

• 1963-1965- joined with independent Malaysia

• 1965-Present: Modern, independent Singapore

Singapore

• 75% Chinese ethnicity (but mix of many dialect, cultural groups – some multi-generational in the Straits, others newly arrived)

• 13% Malay (Including Javanese)

• 10% Indian (Sri Lankan and Bangladeshi)

• 2% ‘Other’ (Eurasian, etc)

• Resident Population 3.5 milloin

• Total Population 5+ million

Singapore

• People’s Action Party in power since 1965 – ‘soft authoritarian’ (Ooi, 2009), ‘economic pragmatism’ (KP Tan, 2008); ‘Illiberal pragmatism’ (Yue, 2007).

• Quasi-democracy, managerial state: freedoms exist, but restricted. Public assembly comes with many caveats and must be pre-approved.

Singapore

• Elections in 2011: PAP challenged for first time in decades; Worker’s Party (socialist) won 40% of popular vote

• Rising costs of living, general unhappiness, high gini coefficient, mistrust of foreigners, poor treatment of foreign workers, high-pressure existence;

• Riots in Little India (2013) brought tensions to surface; First riots in 40 years

• First Labour strike in 2012 in decades

Questioning the Neoliberal State

Activism in Singapore

• Artists / artistic groups are central to activism in Singapore because the arts are largely encouraged and seen as non threatening.

• Terms like ‘protest’ and ‘resistance’ take a careful reading: must be nuanced and may take forms not seen elsewhere due to restrictions on speech, assembly

Singapore-Style Activism

Singapore Style Activism

Material Space / Digital Space

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How important is material space for dissent / activism? Habermas (1989) Public Sphere (extends beyond a specific space); Harvey (2012): The city street / park / plaza still the prime focal point of meaningful action

The Developmental State

A Great Affective Divide

• PM Lee Hsien Loong (Chatham House, London, March 2014) ‘Casinos... River safari’

• ... ‘we have no internal divide’

• Catherine Lim (1994) ... ‘a great affective divide.. Between the government and its people’.

Spiritual Meaning Pile (2005) looks at importance of latent spirituality in the (unexpected context) of hyper-modern Singapore...

3. The Battle for Bukit Brown

Bukit Brown

Bukit Brown

Bukit Brown

• 4,000 + graves have been exhumed to make room for a new highway

• Eventual plans develop the entire site

• Local and international groups have protested: importance to world heritage and the Chinese Diaspora.

Bukit Brown: Unusual Coalition

• Spiritualists • Polo Club • Gamblers • Chinese family members • Tourists • Joggers • Activists • Environmentalists • Artists • Academics • Ghost Hunters and Paranormal Investigators

Bukit Brown: External Forces Tripadvisor:

Ranked #15 of 315 attractions in Singapore

102 Reviews

Travellers' Choice® 2013 WinnerAttractions

Type: Cemeteries

As Singapore Loosens Its Grip, Residents Lose Fear to Challenge Authority By ANDREW JACOBS SINGAPORE — Those accustomed to thinking of this booming city-state as a bastion of apolitical strivers and shopaholics might be stunned by the burst of civic activism sweeping this crowded flyspeck of an island.

Bukit Brown Bukit Brown offers a material space for urges of dissent to manifest... Something not possible in the Singaporean street, park, or square.

... “The wary dance between the government and civic activists has been on full display at Bukit Brown, a sprawling public cemetery that would be bisected by the highway, and later sprinkled with new housing. Having persuaded the government last year to convert an abandoned rail line into a 25-mile-long “green corridor,” preservation groups and environmentalists argue that Bukit Brown — once the final resting place for Singapore’s most illustrious citizens and one of the last of the island’s traditional burial grounds — should be preserved as a nature reserve where people can connect to the past. They have organized petition drives and walking tours that have so far drawn more than 3,000 people.”

Bukit Brown

Bukit Brown

Bukit Brown

Bukit Brown

Bukit Brown

Bukit Brown

Bukit Brown

Bukit Brown

Conclusions: How to Read the Battle for Bukit Brown, and What Does it Say

about ‘Rebel Landscapes?’

1. Construction is proceeding at Bukit Brown, despite protests and international recognition. (Failed activism? Or small successes? The birth of something new?)

2. Is this is a bourgeois exercise? as Habermas describes, the ‘Bourgeois public sphere’ are … ‘privately owned and operated for profit.’ ...subordinated social groups lack equal access to the material means of equal participation” (Fraser, 1990:64-65).

Reading Bukit Brown: Failure?

• Mitchell reminds us that there has ‘never been a revolution conducted exclusively in electronic space’,(1995: 124)

• Kuryel et al., (2010, 19) argue, ‘activist practices are situated at the juncture of power, desire, identity, political practice, political agency, and the dialectic of subversion and recuperation’. This dialectic describes how activists might aim for a certain political end or ethos, but... in fact such activism might be complicit with practices contrary to such aims. (Buser, et al., 2013: 618)

...Or creating new openings?

• Buser et. al., argue that … ‘Cultural activism’ is not merely capable of constructing meanings about urban space’ but also provides ‘prospects for a new political opening’ (Scott 2011:316; Long 2013) within the wider context of global capitalism through the cultivation of a shared aesthetics of protest.

• “Aesthetics of Protest” – From Jacques Rancierre – a form

of protest specifically designed to challenge perceptions (aesthesis) of urban life and capital in which certain ways of living and visions of community are deemed unacceptable. (Buser, et. al., 2013: 607)

Bukit Brown as Heterotopia • As a space of the non-living – it is a mirror of

modern Singapore – a reflective chance to be in an ‘other’ space.

‘As an example I shall take the strange heterotopia of the cemetery.’

“There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places - places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society - which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.” (Foucault, 1984)

Bukit Brown as a reflection of the neoliberal city

“The last trait of heterotopias is that they have a function in relation to all the space that remains. This function unfolds between two extreme poles. Either their role is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory (perhaps that is the role that was played by those famous brothels of which we are now deprived). Or else, on the contrary, their role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled.”

Thank you.