The Rise of ‘Hipster' Culture in Singapore: Spatial Transformation in Tiong Bahru

ENCOUNTERING URBAN DIVERSITY IN ASIA: CLASS AND OTHER INTERSECTIONS 15-16 MAY 2014, SINGAPORE This workshop is organised by the Migration Clusters of Asia Research Institute, & Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences,

National University of Singapore. It also has support from Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany, & International Geographical Union Commission on Population Geography.

DRAFT COPY – Not To Be Quoted Without Permission From The Authors 1

The Rise of “Hipster” Culture in Singapore: Spatial Transformation in Tiong Bahru

CHUA YI, JONATHAN

Department of Philosophy, National University of Singapore

[email protected]

TAN JUN HAO, SHERMAN Department of Anthropology,

The Australian National University

[email protected]

TAN SU YING, LAURA Department of Architecture,

National University of Singapore

[email protected]

Traditionally viewed as exemplary of Singaporean “heartland” community and local ways of life, Tiong Bahru is filled with sites of cultural significance and heritage, such as old public housing flats that predate Singapore’s independence. However, with the recent introduction of small cafes and specialty stores, Tiong Bahru has taken on a new identity as a “hipster” locale. Hipster culture is characteristically defined by the deliberate emulation of particular counter-cultural lifestyles (as opposed to the status quo) as well as a receptivity to cultural experimentation. Such places within Tiong Bahru are frequented by both locals and foreigners alike, presenting themselves as dynamic and interactive spaces for cultural contact as well as the development of hybrid and creative social practices. We propose to examine the rise of hipster culture within Tiong Bahru as a focal point of cross-cultural influences. There are two aspects to our ethnographic inquiry. Firstly, we investigate the socio-economic and material conditions within Tiong Bahru that made it a conducive site for hipster culture to germinate. By actively seeking out and emulating what is perceived as counter-cultural, hipster culture brings about a juxtaposition of new, foreign elements against a highly traditionalised backdrop. It opens up an opportunity for dialogue between the foreign and the local. Moreover, it constitutes a metacommentary on cultural differences in Singaporean society, translating into a specific social literacy employed in subjects’ encounters with conditions of diversity. 1. Introduction In a tranquil corner of the Tiong Bahru neighbourhood, one finds a coffeeshop that appears to have been snatched right out of the 1970s. On its shophouse façade, faded plastic tarps present the local speciality, Ya Lim Mee Pok, with prices ranging from $3 to $5; inside, old “uncles” prepare bowls of mee pok and lor mee for their breakfast and lunchtime customers, with the smell of coffee inundating the air; the shabby-looking interior is boasts checkered floors, rotating fans, plastic stools and round wooden tables. These are sights and smells and furniture that are typical of a traditional Singaporean kopitiam [coffeeshop in Chinese dialect].




Yet, this is no ordinary kopitiam. By nightfall, east meets west as the traditional coffeeshop transforms into a Western café that is aptly named “Twoface,” offering dishes such as fish & chips, smoked duck linguine and fried calamari. The café self-consciously brands itself around “the concept of metamorphosis – from traditional kopitiam in the day to casual chic place for dinner and drinks at night.” Indeed, the local kopitiam’s twilight metamorphosis into a western café is a reflection of remarkable spatial and material changes that have taken place in the Tiong Bahru locale over the past five years. These changes are especially striking since Tiong Bahru has remained largely unchanged since the 1950s, imbuing it with a traditional character and a strong sense of place within the collective consciousness of Singaporeans (Yeoh and Kong 1995, p. 113). Yet, so extensive and sudden were these tranformations that local commentators are now describing the neighbourhood as "chic", “hip”, "cool", and "edgy”.

Fig. 1. Entrance to Two Face Pizza & Taproom in Tiong Bahru That these cultural innovations have taken on a westernised slant is no accident, as they coincide with a noticeable influx of Australian, American and European expatriate communities in the area. Indeed, the two faces of Tiong Bahru present themselves as a stylised fusion of east and west, within a site that pop culture connoisseurs have identified as a newfound “hipster” enclave. As we shall argue, hipster culture is characterised by the deliberate emulation of particular countercultural lifestyles as well as a receptivity to cultural experimentation. By actively seeking out and emulating what is perceived as counter-cultural, hipster culture appears to be bringing about a juxtaposition of new, cosmopolitan elements against a highly traditionalised backdrop. The cafes and specialty stores that best exemplify these tendencies are frequented by both locals and foreigners alike, presenting themselves as dynamic and interactive spaces for cultural contact as well as the development of hybrid and creative social practices. However, the relation between tradition and cosmopolitanism is often a politically troubled one. As Delanty (2006) points out, the social world within which we live is closed and bounded by preconceptions about the limits of our imagined community. Consequently, localised traditions often do “not sit comfortably with the




openness of the cosmopolitan idea, with its universalistic orientation” (Delanty 2006, p. 26). Against the backdrop of this debate, hipsterism emerges as a phenomenon that has introduced the possibility of openness, innovation and cultural experimentation in a way that militates against the mainstream. In this vein, we found Tiong Bahru to be a fertile site for investigating the role of hipsterism as a mediator between tradition and cosmopolitanism, as an exemplary instance of what Delanty calls a “cosmopolitan moment” that brings about a “creative combination of different forces – centre and periphery, the local and global” (Delanty 2006, p. 38). This is, at the same time, a countercultural moment that challenges the limits of local tradition. In this paper, we shall investigate the conditions that enable the introduction of hipsterism as a cosmopolitan and countercultural moment. We seek to explore the following questions: What is hipsterism? How has it been translated into the context of Tiong Bahru, and how has it effected a gestalt switch through which the traditional neighbourhood has suddenly emerged a fashionable place to be? How has hipsterism promoted a certain way of thinking, acting, and speaking that bespeaks a cosmopolitan openness to cultural experimentation that may have been previously foreclosed in Tiong Bahru? By tracing the social history of Tiong Bahru leading to its revival as a hipster enclave, we hope to better understand the relation between hipster culture and urban diversity, and the role that hipsterism performs in promoting the possibility of cosmopolitanism. 2. Hipster Culture Before delving into a more detailed examination of hipster culture and “hipsterism” in the Singapore context, it is important to note that there has been a relatively well-established literature on the rise of hipsterism as a subcultural ethos across various geographical sites of study. In this regard, the culture of hip is not a new phenomenon. What is particular striking in a cursory survey of writings on hipsterism, is the way by which the term is often cited (and recited) in politically salient ways. The figure of the hipster is hardly free from social judgment. Hipsters may be cool, rebellious, edgy. They stand apart as an exemplar par excellence of cultural non-conformity, the glorified expression of hyper-individualist ideas of social being. At the same time, one need not look very far for negative appraisals of the hipster. The hipster is a self-aspiring rebel, yes, but in a more negative sense, a frustrated and misguided one. Hipsters, in this light, pursue self-defeating goals, and often counter-productive cultural aspirations. Here, the hipster’s desire to stand apart, to be different, is essentially ineffective and foolish. Hipsterism’s resistance to the mainstream does not win out. Instead, hipster becomes the new mainstream. What starts as a hip movement of self-differentiation has, in a cruel twist of irony, turned into yet another cultural homogeneity which it had so fervently resisted. To some extent, as Thomas Frank (1997) is quick to highlight, capitalist businesses ride with, and not against, the rebellious consumer. They have been quick to exploit these popular attitudes and have been "amassing great sums by charging admission to the ritual simulation of [their] own lynching" (Frank 1997, p. 153). It is perhaps more accurate to describe the phenomenon of hipsterism as occupying a liminal zone between resistance and conformity to the consumerist mainstream. As Heath (2001) points out, subcultural entities exist amidst the constant threat of being reintegrated and reabsorbed into the mainstream. As such, he rightly suggests that a more nuanced picture of "hipster" subcultures should acknowledge their struggle to negotiate the extreme poles of cultural conventionality and distinctiveness. In the same vein, Lauren Alfrey asks, "how are hipsters able to maintain a cohesive subculture while denying group identification?" In addressing the category of "the hipster", one is always faced with the fact that hipsters themselves "shun categorisation", yet are concerned with defining and recognising themselves reflexively as an "in-group" vis-a-vis mainstream cultural trends (Alfrey 2010, p. 6). What seems particularly clear here is that a more fluid approach to examining the cultural practices of hipsterism is required. While some notion of cultural distinction is essential to understanding how hipsterism operates, it is equally important to identify the combination of spatial, material, aesthetic and affective practices which constitute the hipster ethos in any




given context. From another perspective, hipsterism is marked by its emphasis on authenticity. Schiermer suggests that hipsters engage in forms of "personal creative practice" to secure authentic forms of social being. According to him, this "quest for authenticity" is one that is contrasted with imitation and, more specifically, imitative social behaviour (Schiermer 2014, p. 169). More broadly, it is important to note that this constitutes a counter-cultural moment present in the hipster impulse. In this way, hipsterism, as a social phenomenon, is explicitly defiant in its resistance towards cultural categorisation and classification. Hipster culture, as such, contains elements of creativity and surprise, of the unknown, and of the ever-evolving. While it is certainly arguable that hipsterism requires a degree of public visibility for its own identity and recognisability as a social trend, it also resists its own fossilisation into any given definable or bounded cultural form. It continually and reflexively stresses its own singularity in a world of ready-made categories, and draws attention to its own processual aspect, such as its constant metamorphosis amidst the wider cultural field. In this respect, the hipster impulse harbours a distinctively anti-cultural ethos — a discernible hostility towards already formed or structured cultural hegemonies, and in stark comparison, a high regard for open-ended and contingent movements of social becoming. At the same time, a different kind of authenticity is also valued in the culture of hipsterism. While the authenticity of self-stylisation is important, this remains inseparable from the pursuit and glorification of authentically alternative cultural forms. Hipster culture, as such, is also concerned with the cultural authenticity of these non-mainstream ways of social being. The authenticity of cultural experiences is guaranteed by their distinctiveness from the regular, the mundane, and the mass-produced. Schiermer acknowledges that hipster culture draws upon "saturated cultural forms" such as those "belonging to the recent past". To some extent, the authenticity of being hip needs to be "found in places where no one else looks". Present-day hipsters are "eclectic and broad-minded" and pride themselves on being so in drawing upon a repertoire of fossilised cultural types (Schiermer 2014, p. 169-170). This, however, does raise a number of interesting issues. For one, the practice of hipsterism has the uncanny effect of reproducing the specific cultural types from which it draws upon. To a large extent, it romanticises ideal types of "lost" or "distant" cultural forms which are perceived to have faded into insignificance or disrepute in light of the popular and/or the majority. As an alternative and minoritarian form of social being, hipsterism prides itself on its support for the cultural underdogs — those less visible forms in the public sphere of everyday cultural circulation. Therefore, hipsterism relies on, imports, and uses authentic cultural sources that guarantee its self-identity as a coherent social movement. This essentially constitutes a hyper-cultural impulse — one that places great importance on the cultural recognisability and definability of particular revived (and non-mainstream) cultural forms. Indeed, the cultural authenticity of hipsterism is linked to some of “modernity’s defining practices such as categorisation [and] the production of order and purification” (Jones 2010, p. 183), and to associate itself with an imagined past/origin or already existing cultural form. Of course, and as a qualification, this is not to claim that hipster culture simply and uncritically reproduces and reinforces cultural archetypes. While this is surely an effect of hipsterism, it also distinguishes itself by means of emphasising and drawing attention to its own unique combination of social practices. It is therefore possible to suggest that hipsterism, as a lifestyle and social practice, involves the novel and unpredictable fusion of different cultural forms, such that it stands apart from mainstream cultural consumption. What is important about our preceding discussion, however, is the fact that hipster culture is marked by tensions between demands for an anti-cultural authenticity (and uniqueness) of the self, and simultaneously, a hyper-cultural requirement for the authenticity of cultural forms. As such, hipsterism involves a constant negotiation between the poles of experimentation, distinction and uniqueness, on the




one hand, and that of stable recognition, definition and identity, on the other. In this sense, much of the interest in hipster culture revolves around the ways by which cultural openness and newness are socially performed and enacted through the re-citation of a historical or already-existing field of cultural typography. As such, hipsterism can play an essential role in bridging traditional cultural forms with experimental social practices involving cultural hybridity. Hipster culture, in this regard, constitutes an important optic through which one can understand cultural importation and fusion, between elements of the past and the present, the local and global, or even the traditional and the cosmopolitan, however these may be defined in specific contexts. Therefore, we propose that hipsterism should, more broadly, be treated as a useful analytical construct in the examination of urban diversity and cultural change. At the same time, while it is good and sound to focus on the sites, strategies and effects of hipster culture in ethnographic perspective, we believe that there is a critical gap in the literature on hipsterism. Hipsterism is often looked upon as an interesting social phenomenon to be documented, yet there is very little that has been said concerning the conditions for its emergence. Methodologically, this suggests that one needs to examine how the hipster impulse brings about new cultural meanings, social relationships and practices, but also to be equally attentive towards how different spaces and histories are more or less conducive for the germination and development of hipsterism. While there has been a sustained attempt to outline what hipsterism might resemble as a cultural phenomenon, it is equally important to consider the existing urban landscape as well as social field that enables (or constrains) hipsterism as a cultural practice. Although this involves examining complex relationalities at the intersection of historical development, economics and spatiality, we wish to suggest that paying a close and detailed attention to these different aspects may better allow one to account for the rise of the hipster ethos and its myriad of multifaceted ideas and social practices. 3. Tiong Bahru 3.1. Historical Narrative and Urban Form The Tiong Bahru estate is historically significant as the first public housing estate in Singapore. Its development began in 1936 when the Singapore Improvement Trust (SIT) built and sold a block of flats based on a modified shophouse plan, ostensibly for the purpose of alleviating “the shortage of housing accomodation for the lower income groups” (SIT 1953, p. 7). Although they failed to auction these units at a profit, the SIT continued to build additional flats in Tiong Bahru in an attempt to create the perfect housing estate. Contrary to the express intentions of the SIT, their flats proved to be highly unpopular among the low-income population due to their high rental charges (Loh 2013: 37), which may be partly attributable to their resistance towards building one-room flats. As a result, pre-war Tiong Bahru was almost exclusively an upper class estate where the rich kept their mistresses, resulting in Tiong Bahru being nicknamed the Den of Beauties [美人窝] (Chow 2011). However, after Singapore’s population more than doubled to about one million by the end of the Second World War, the SIT found itself facing an acute housing crisis, with “nearly half a million people in Singapore . . . living in slums or overcrowded conditions” (SIT Report 1953: 9). It was in the postwar context of the 1950s that the SIT finally took seriously the task of providing affordable housing for the masses. Between 1948 and 1954, the SIT constructed a number of four-storey flats along Lim Liak Street and Seng Poh Road, which constitute the area that is currently recognised by Singaporeans as the Tiong Bahru heartland (Yeoh & Kong 1995, p. 96). These flats were designed by architects Lincoln Page and Robert Kan, favouring the International Style which seeks to eliminate “any design that impairs or imposes excessive strain on the natural human equipment” (Neutra, as cited in Frampton 1980, p. 249). In the context of Tiong Bahru, buildings were reduced to “very simple expressions of lines and planes in shades of white” (Lou 1990)




while retaining the distinctive features of Singapore architecture: the shaded five-foot walkways created by overhanging upper floors, the communal backlanes, and the shophouse typology. These flats are regarded as the first example of modern architecture in Singapore.

Fig. 2. SIT flats on Seng Poh Road that were built based on the International Style Within the Tiong Bahru masterplan that the SIT had formulated, the four-storied flats form a residential outer ring, surrounding an inner zone where communal spaces such as the wet market, hawker centre, coffeeshops and community centre are located. These spaces constitute the social nucleus of Tiong Bahru, where the majority of social interactions occurred through business transactions and coffee breaks. The origins of these sites also served as testament to the strong community spirit in Tiong Bahru: in 1948, the local community petitioned the SIT for the construction of Singapore’s first community centre, and in 1950, hawkers helped to build an open-air expansion to the Seng Poh Road Market, the costs of which were borne by the hawkers themselves. Additionally, since post-war Tiong Bahru was populated predominantly by middle class Chinese residents (Yeoh & Kong 1995, p. 97), the Monkey God Temple [齐天宫] and the Gourd Temple [葫芦庙] were often frequented as important religious sites that counteracted the fact that Tiong Bahru was built over an old cemetery. Finally, Tiong Bahru was the location of a world-renowned bird singing corner where local enthusiasts gathered daily to showcase their pets. It attracted visitors and tourists from all around the world, and was arguably Tiong Bahru’s most famous landmark until it was closed down in 2003. Tiong Bahru proved to be a popular locale, with its population blossoming to almost 400,000 in the 1950s. However, its popularity was not to last, in part due to changes within the political landscape that lay beyond its boundaries. With the passing of the Rendel Constitution in 1959, Singapore was granted full internal self-government by the colonial administration. Under this mandate of self-government, the People’s Action Party was elected into power. With housing as a clear priority on its agenda, one of the PAP’s first initiatives was to dissolve the SIT and to replace it with the Housing and Development Board (HDB) (Wong & Guillot 2005, p. 51). Despite the success that SIT experienced in developing Tiong Bahru and Queenstown, its broader mission of providing public housing for the growing Singapore population ended in abject failure. Between 1947 and 1959, the SIT had constructed a total of 20,907 housing units, with an additional 19,000 units added by private developers. However, these numbers pale when compare to the census, according to which the population had grown from 938,000 in 1947 to 1,579,000 in 1959. As the HDB pointed out in its first annual report, the rate at which SIT had been building represented only “one new unit for every




increase of 16 persons in the State” (HDB Report 1960, p. 5) What followed was a paradigm shift in the way public housing was conceived and carried out. The HDB began its first Five-Year Building Programme by constructing emergency one-room, low-rise flats for people living in slums and squatter settlements. However, this could only be a temporary fix to alleviate the immediate problem of homelessness; a permanent solution required the HDB to house millions of citizens within Singapore’s limited land space. Holding fast to its principle of providing decent and affordable housing for every citizen, the HDB decided on the construction of high-rise, high-density flats. These flats are to be situated within self-contained New Towns that, much like the Tiong Bahru estate, had shops and markets for the daily needs of the local residents (Wong & Yeh 1985, p. 93). By 1976, more than 50% of Singapore’s population was living in HDB flats. Under the SIT, much of Tiong Bahru had been developed to the point where new flats could not be added to the heartland without demolishing old ones. At a time when the HDB is more concerned with spending their budget on the construction of New Towns in areas such as Jurong, Ang Mo Kio, and Marine Parade, Tiong Bahru remained physically unchanged. In comparison to the newly built HDB estates, its facilities grew increasingly obsolete (Lim 2011). For example, SIT flats in Tiong Bahru lack lifts and rubbish chutes, amenities which are almost taken for granted by the rest of Singapore. With young, working couples preferring to move into newer HDB estates in order to raise their families (Kong, Yeoh & Teo 1996, p. 530), Tiong Bahru increasingly became the stronghold of an aging, traditional Chinese neighbourhood. While it is widely acknowledged for retaining its “old charm” (Lou 1990; Tan 2011) as the rest of Singapore modernised, the most memorable occurrences between 1970 to 2000 are the construction several new flats, the opening of a new condominium, the development of a nearby mall and a mass transit station (Ho 1994). Against the backdrop of a rapidly changing society where modernity and pragmatism are valued above all else, Tiong Bahru appears as a place trapped in stasis, frozen in time until the thaw brought about by the turn of the millenia. 3.2. Creation of a Hipster Enclave In 2003, SIT flats within the inner zone of the Tiong Bahru estate were awarded conservation status by the Urban Redevelopment Authority for its "rich history, unique architecture and familiar streetscapes" (URA, as cited in Zaccheus 2013; see fig. 3). Even as HDB flats established an ubiquitous presence across the island, SIT flats became increasingly valuable on the property market for being the only form of public housing that the HDB did not construct. URA’s official recognition helped to concretise their unique status, ensuring their physical longevity. However, just before this policy was passed, the popular bird singing corner and Gourd Temple were demolished on the very same year. These two landmarks were replaced by Nostalgia Hotel, whose ironic name surely added insult to injury. Additionally, the Seng Poh Road Market was shut down in 2004 for a complete rebuild, despite having stood for more than five decades as a model for wet markets across Singapore. Although it was reopened in 2006 as the Tiong Bahru Market and Food Centre, the storeowners that we interviewed felt that the sense of community between hawkers and consumers had already been eroded by the passage of time, as evident by their poor profits as compared to the market’s heyday.




Fig. 3. The shaded area demarcates the inner zone of SIT flats that were granted conservation status

by the URA in 2003. Nostalgia Hotel is located at the unshaded upper corner of the conservation zone, at the intersection of Tiong Bahru Road and Seng Poh Road. (Image from URA 2003 Conservation Plan)

The demolition of the bird singing corner, the Gourd Temple, and the old Seng Poh Road Market must have been a deep loss for the Tiong Bahru community, which took pride in “the distinctiveness of their built environment and its landmarks” (Yeoh & Kong 1995, p. 113). However, the effects of the losses of these landmarks were also felt beyond the boundary of Tiong Bahru. Coupled with the controversial demolition of the Old National Library Building in 2004 to make way for a tunnel under Fort Canning hill, public dissent over the loss of heritage sites around Singapore contributed to an unprecedented support for heritage conservation among young Singaporeans. More recently, plans for the partial demolition of Bukit Brown Cemetery were publicly contested and debated in newspaper forums and online platforms. It is interesting to note that the loss of these heritage sites was grappled with through the use of various strategies, such as the commemoration of traditional practices and culturally significant spaces on websites like remembersingapore.wordpress.com. For the purposes of our paper, we note that the drive towards heritage conservation after the demolition of the Old National Library Building led to a deeper appreciation of Singapore’s cultural roots, as well as a nostalgia for the past. These two factors proved to be crucial for the eventual revival of Tiong Bahru, which was no longer dismissed as an aging, traditional neighbourhood, but was precisely celebrated for its tradition, its age, and its cultural heritage. It was in this context that Tiong Bahru began its rapid transformation into a hipster enclave. Beginning with the establishment of 40 Hands Coffee in 2010, independent stores such as BooksActually, Strangelets, and Nicher flocked to Tiong Bahru to tap upon its rich and unique culture. Indeed, after the initial success and popularity of 40 Hands, there was a veritable explosion in the number of independent cafés and specialty stores, with no less than eighteen stores opening over the past four years [see fig. 4]. Their “hipsterism” can generally be identified through several signifiers. Firstly, hipster stores set themselves apart from Tiong




Bahru’s Chinese shops and kopitiams with their distinctively Westernised orientation, with signs and menus written almost exclusively in English. The services and products offered by these stores typically hail from or draw upon Western practices, from the revivalist-antiquated men’s grooming shop We Need A Hero to the hipster food favourites like truffle fries, smoked salmon and poached eggs. Secondly, the economics of these hipster joints is vastly out of scale with the traditional hawker centre and kopitiam prices - take, for instance, Two Face pizza, which charges $14 for a plate of noodles, nearly five times the cost of a bowl of noodles that the day-time kopitiam would charge. Thirdly, the interior design of these hipster stores tends to draw upon neo-Bohemian aesthetics that favour muted colours and ‘grit as glamour’ (Lloyd, 2006) material palettes of exposed screed flooring, wrought iron mullions, hemp and rope details and imperfect wooden furniture. In this way, hipster stores in Tiong Bahru have introduced foreign, innovative elements into a traditional context, which reflects the two concepts of historical authenticity and hyper authenticity that we have earlier identified within the discourse on hipsterism.

Fig. 4. The map details the locations of all hipster stores in Tiong Bahru and the year of their founding. Tiong Bahru’s atmosphere is chief among the reasons that indie stores have found it an attractive place to set up shop. In an interview with the Straits Times, Kenny Leck, co-founder and owner of BooksActually, suggests that the primary draw of Tiong Bahru lies in its “laid-back, chilled-out vibe” of the area (Zacharia 2011). More specifically, Alan Tan, owner of RICE, suggests that this vibe is constituted by two factors. Firstly, the architecture of the area “allows each business to add its own style to the mix without being too overwhelming.” Secondly, the quality of the community, which others have described as possessing a “kampung [village in Malay] feeling” (Chan 2010), helps these independent businesses to “complement one another well” in a way that may not have been possible in big malls and shopping centres (Zacharia 2011). Another reason that Mr Leck cites for setting up BooksActually in Tiong Bahru was the cheap rent of shophouses in the area, which he claims to be a third less than the cost of the store’s previous venue in Chinatown (Zacharia 2011). Similarly, Mr Ng opened The Orange Thimble after purchasing his Tiong Bahru property on the cheap in 2009, during a time when the global financial crisis kept property prices low (Chow 2011).




However, the sudden popularity of Tiong Bahru as a hipster enclave has brought about rapid gentrification, causing property prices to double from 2009 to 2011. For instance, a 900ft shophouse unit that had cost $1.45 million in October 2009 was sold at $2.9 million in April 2011 (Chow 2011). As a side effect of high demand for Tiong Bahru property, local tradition is eroded, with owners of kopitiam stalls preferring to rent their stalls out for monthly charges of $7,000 to $10,000, much more than what they could earn by carrying on their traditional businesses (Wee 2013). Moreover, problems of displacement and inequality are generally introduced as social costs of gentrification (Atkinson 2003, p. 2344). In Tiong Bahru, inequality takes on a more subtle form, with hipster spaces demanding a minimal price for entry due to the high costs of products that are being sold. As a result, these spaces are generally frequented by foreigners and visitors from outside of Tiong Bahru, as local residents in the area are unable to afford the products sold at these stores despite their middle-class status. This is beginning to be a point of tension within the neighbourhood, with frustrated sentiments being expressed when retiree Paul Tng points out that “a cup of coffee from these new cafés costs 10 times more than one from a coffee shop” (Zaccheus 2013). Local residents also observe a clear shift in the demographics of people living in Tiong Bahru since the arrival of the first hipster cafés. Contrary to the trend towards an aging community, Tiong Bahru has become markedly younger since it becoming a popular hipster enclave, with an influx of foreigners and young adults moving into the neighbourhood during this period. Storeowner Tan Tiong Pin noted the sudden change in a 2011 interview, “[Tiong Bahru] was still considered an old estate two years ago. Many elderly folks lived here. But with new condominiums built, many expatriates and yuppies now live here” (Contify 2011). Tiong Bahru realtor Maria Chua suggests that the interest of younger local buyers may have been perked by the convenience of living “close to the city and their parents’ home,” as well as the possibility of situating oneself within an environment and a lifestyle that is considered countercultural. As Chua puts it, “excitement is living on the edge” (Chow 2011). However, our own interviews with locals and expatriates suggest that with the rising p rices of property within Tiong Bahru, the most active purchasers of property are currently young, rich bankers looking for investment opportunities, but these are hardly the kind of people who one will expect to go against grain, and as such are unlikely to prolong the newfound hipster culture of Tiong Bahru. 4. Material Conditions for Hipster Culture By tracing the social history of Tiong Bahru from its humble beginnings as a block of flats on auction, we have seen how Tiong Bahru has become unexpectedly fashionable as a hipster enclave. From a cultural perspective, Tiong Bahru experienced a rapid transformation over the course of the past five years, changing from a locale known for its aging and traditional community into one that is characterised by cosmopolitan elements, by its countercultural lifestyle that is out of step with the mainstream. In what follows, we will discuss and analyse the material and socio-cultural conditions that allowed for the emergence of hipsterism as a countercultural and cosmopolitan moment within Tiong Bahru.

4.1 Economics of Cultural Experimentation

With the discourse of hipsterism in Tiong Bahru being dominated primarily by the owners of independent hipster cafes and specialty stores, it is essential for us to investigate the economic conditions underlying their choice of Tiong Bahru as a neighbourhood. As we have seen above, the trendsetters who first set up these stores came into possession of their property in 2009, during a time when the global economic crisis kept property prices low. After a wave of popular support for 40 Hands Coffee, subsequent cafés that entered the scene banked on the possibility that hipster culture in Tiong Bahru can be a profitable business. As such, some of them were willing to risk high rental costs and prices to set up shop. However, as prices continue to balloon, it is likely that no new businesses will be willing to enter the scene.




Based on the rate at which hipster stores have been opened, signs are already visible that will confirm this prediction. In 2010, three hipster stores were opened, one of which is 40 Hands Coffee; 2011 saw an additional six added to the list; and in 2012, seven new stores were opened. However, in 2013, only two new stores were opened. With property prices for a coffee shop hitting $10,000 per month in 2014, landlords have begun experiencing difficulties in finding potential tenants to take up their offer, as the high rent is not sustainable for small businesses (Toh 2014). There is a risk involved when a store is based around the concept of hipsterism: one does not know if the elements within the store that are foreign, innovative, and countercultural will be embraced by a sufficiently large number of consumers for the business to make a profit. As a result, setup and rental costs must be kept low if new, experimental stores wtihin a district are to be introduced. As things stand, the drought of new hipster stores entering the scene in 2013 and 2014 suggests that hipsterism within Tiong Bahru may reify and integrate into the local cultural landscape despite its countercultural element, unless hipster stores are able to engage in a process of continual self-renewal. Even so, it is likely that gentrification will slowly drive out the Chinese middle-class who had lent Tiong Bahru its authentic, traditional atmosphere, which was what made the neighbourhood so attractive to hipster businesses in the first place, thereby suffering the same fate as New York’s Brooklyn (Zukin 2010, p. 61).

4.2 Hyperauthenticity and Place In his seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin suggests that “the presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity” (Benjamin 1968, p. 220), linking an artwork’s unique position in history with it “aura.” The aura of an artwork is defined as “a strange tissue of space and time, the unique apparition of a distance,” stemming from its unique position in history. However, the modern age of mechanical reproduction has threatened and diminished this aura, or as Potter puts it, “we live in a world increasingly dominated by the fake” (Potter 2010, p. 4). Zogby concurs, acknowledging that contemporary society is characterised by a “deep-felt need to reconnect with the truth of our lives” (Zogby 2008, p. 151). Furthermore, as we had earlier noted, the demolition of the Old National Library Building had led, among the Singaporean public, to a deeper appreciation of one’s cultural roots and a nostalgia for the past. Tradition became valuable, and hipsterism was provided the perfect opportunity to draw upon Tiong Bahru’s surroundings in its bid to provide its customers with hyper-cultural experiences. As a gazetted conservation site, the numerous reminders of a Singapore that has long since disappeared beneath the rubble of development imbues Tiong Bahru with a particular sense of history that promotes - and rewards - those who explore the neighbourhood. Tiong Bahru thus possesses an aura of authenticity in the Benjaminian sense by virtue of its historically original character. In contrast, hipster stores attempt to deploy a reified concept of authenticity taken from within the global discourse of hipsterism, which, despite its fashionable iconicity, remains alien to the Tiong Bahru context. For such a concept to be successful in a locale in which it does not fit in, the hipster stores have to parasitically tap upon Tiong Bahru’s aura of authenticity in the process of simulating its own aura of Bohemian authenticity, which would otherwise have depended entirely on interior designs. 5. Hipsterism as Cosmopolitanism Having accounted for the material conditions within Tiong Bahru that enabled the rise of hipsterism as a counterculture movement, we shall now turn to a discussion of the ways in which hipsterism can be read as a social literacy of mediation between foreign and local cultures. Zukin sees the imposition of different tastes in urban space - “the look of a street, say, or the feeling of a neighbourhood” - as making “a claim to that space that displaces longtime residents” (Zukin 2010, p. 4). She acknowledges that these new spaces can be authentic in their own right, where “new stores and new people produce new urban terroirs, localities with a




specific cultural product and character that can be marketed around the world” - but they are ultimately “a means of displacement as well.” As such, hipster culture is constantly tracking between the poles of uniqueness and differentiation, on the one hand, and its own cultural recognizability and identity. However, we contend that these new urban terroirs can be read as a platform of negotiation between different the old and the new/the local and the foreign. 5.1 Aesthetics of Difference and Similarity

Figs. 5.1-5.2. The hipster aesthetic at The Orange Thimble The hipster aesthetic is a distinct one that has been discussed briefly above. It evinces a certain ‘grit as glamour’ vibe that harks back to American bohemianism, making use of deliberately untreated, roughened surfaces such as screed floor finishings, exposed plaster walls or repurposed scrap metal or wood as decoration. In doing so, these hipster stores recreate the Bohemian origins of American hipsterism in a new setting. In having to negotiate the differences of environment and culture, Tiong Bahru’s rising hipsterism can thus be said to negotiate issues of “cultural continuity, difference, hybridity, and/or assimilation” (Mankekar 2005, p. 203), opening the discussion on how hipsterism can be a mediating point between the foreign and the local. The recreation of this neo-Bohemian aesthetic into what is essentially a distinctly Singaporean context allows Tiong Bahru to become a particularly apt setting to “express both ‘oneness’ and ‘otherness’” (Oyangen 2009, p. 329). While the area retains its old-Singapore charms of traditional Chinese wares, hawker fare and garishly outdated clothes shops, the pared-down hipster aesthetic fits congruently with the surrounding International Style architecture, but it also relies on differences of language, design details and economics to place it slightly out-of-step and demarcate themselves as ‘the other.’ It is this out-of-stepness that allows Tiong Bahru, through the conduit of hipsterism, to forge new cultural identities of cosmopolitanism. Perhaps it is the slightness that allows it to be a mediating platform between different cultures. In the case of Tiong Bahru’s hipsterism, the pared-down, gritty aesthetic is a deliberately cleaned up version of neo-Bohemianism, and perhaps can be read as a stylistic choice to blend in with or defer to the existing building contexts of the clean, minimalist International Style. So while the screed flooring and scrap material decoration may be ‘gritty,’ they are always still ‘in step’ with the general context, in that they are still recognisable as exemplars of taste. However, the design details also evince a certain placelessness or timelessness - they are neither of the real Bohemian gritty glamour, nor of the Singaporean local context, making it very hard to pin down what exact era or culture or style they arise from. It is this nebulous quality of the aesthetic that can “empty the artwork of its figurative or decorative character . . . the construction of




meaning was displaced from the object itself” (Allen 1997, p. 119). Where Allen speaks specifically of minimalist artwork, hipsterism’s idea of paring down to a stark essence similarly allows that displacement and subsequent renegotiation of meaning, which allows for a certain flexibility/instability of cultural identities. Thus the hipster aesthetic can be read as a new form of social literacy between the foreign and the local. 5.2 Food as Cultural Mediator The prominence of hipster cafes and restaurants, and even the changes in the nearby Tiong Bahru Hawker Centre and Wet Market aid in the creation of a new social literacy between foreign and the local. The growing presence of Western/foreign food demonstrates the “social, psychological and symbolic meaning of food” (Oyangen 2009, p. 323) in a cosmopolitan context of immigration. Interviews with the expatriate community living in Tiong Bahru indicate that one of the biggest draw factors of the neighbourhood was the cosmopolitan cuisine reminiscent of fare that they could find in their home countries while also being able to sample the local dishes. This seems to indicate that food is a great mediator of cultural differences. In addition, the menus of several hipster cafes such as 40 Hands Coffee tend towards a fusion of Western dishes, but with a strong infusion of local flavours and ingredients. Pancakes with gula melaka syrup and lychee compote, or ‘Croque Madame Mai Ling’ are the rage, and drawing again on Oyangen, food no longer simply expresses “‘oneness’ or ‘otherness’” but instead, illustrates how one or the other becomes blurred in favour of a new cosmopolitanism. It is because hipsterism allows - or even demands - this experimentation, creativity and a certain truthfulness to authenticity that the meaning of food can expand to take on new cosmopolitan cultural identities. Furthermore, the deliberate ‘hipsterification’ of certain conventionally local stalls, for example, the Kopi Museum at the Tiong Bahru Hawker Centre, also demonstrate how hipsterism’s demand for authenticity can further create a dialogue between different cultures. The name of the stall, Kopi Museum, plays off the rise of ‘hipster’ cafes in the area, deliberately recalling the old coffeeshop days and contrasting them against the experience of a hipster cafe. In addition, the word ‘kopi’ retains a strong local flavour, resisting the generic, anglicised word ‘coffee’ that expatriates are wont to use. The stallowner explains that this is a way to keep He also keeps a small display cabinet of ‘artefacts’ from Singapore’s kopitiam history - glass bottles of soft drinks and antique coffee cups stand proudly in this cabinet - seeing it as an educational opportunity, or a way to keep Singapore’s history alive.




Fig. 6.1-6.2. Kopi Museum at the Tiong Bahru Hawker Centre In this way, Tiong Bahru has become a site of mediation between two cultures. Both the local and the foreign undergo a process of ‘culinary acculturation,’ with each one adopting and opening up to the other. Food is an important means of establishing cultural identity, but it is also a malleable medium that can represent the meeting point between two cultures. However, planners and developers would do well to heed Zukin’s call that the displacement caused by hipsterism can ultimately lead to the death of the city that she prophesizes. Edward Relph explains that an authentic sense of place is “a direct and genuine experience of the entire complex of the identity of places - not mediated and distorted through a series of quite arbitrary social and intellectual fashions about how that experience should be, nor following stereotyped conventions” (Relph 1996, p.64). Insofar as hipsterism remains true to its quest for authenticity, the sensitive melding of foreign and local cultures can occur through experimentation and innovation - as evidenced by fusion food menus, for instance. However, after a point, hipsterism runs the danger of becoming a default ‘selling point’ for developers or even independent store owners, become an empty ‘ritual’ that has lost its connection with its original aura, in Benjaminian terms, reduced to nothing but a parody of alternate living. Overblown hipsterism can disrupt the connection inhabitants of a place have with its origins, which in Zukinian terms refers to “the right to inhabit a space, not just to consume it as an experience. Authenticity in this sense is . . . a continuous process of living and working, a gradual buildup of everyday experience, the expectation that neighbors and building that are here today will be here tomorrow. A city loses its soul when this continuity is broken” (Zukin 2010, p. 6). 6. Conclusion In this paper, we have attempted to use the phenomenon of hipster culture as an analytical idiom to examine urban developments in Tiong Bahru, especially temporal and cultural transitions between tradition and cosmopolitanism in Singapore. To a large extent, the materiality of space and everyday living is a crucial feature of this hipster culture, and by extension, of the urban change that is still occurring in the area. While




we have identified the linguistic and aesthetic fashioning of place as some of the mechanisms through which hipsterism operates as a form of cultural stylisation, as well as the demographic, economic and spatial underpinnings of this hipster impulse, there remains much ethnographic work to be done. In particular, (and we were unable to explore this in greater detail in our paper), hipsterism also involves an intimate aesthetic of self-fashioning that becomes a departure point for social comparisons in everyday places of living. It would be productive, we believe, to explore the ways by which hipster culture reproduces and also reconfigures social relations such as class and gender, but also, how urban diversity is restructured through individual practices of distinction and solidarity with others. Here, we are tempted to think about Daniel Miller's extensive array of ethnographic explorations around the lifeworlds of people and their engagements with things or 'stuff', as a good way to approach questions concerning the materiality of self-stylisation. This is, of course, one of the many optics through which we can understand the materialist determinants and effects of hipsterism not simply on a large scale, but also how urban landscapes and meaningful contexts of interaction constitute a valuable material resource for socialisation, integration but also, personal agency.




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The Rise of ‘Hipster' Culture in Singapore: Spatial Transformation in Tiong Bahru

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