We’ve all had our encounters with street hawkers selling tissue paper in this city and this STOMP reader was so irritated by their presence that he is urging the authorities to clampdown on them.

By seeing street hawkers as environmental problems, something that seems to happen quite often here either with our authorities or a section of the public, we forget that these people do it because they need to earn a living. Street hawking offers an independent livelihood for one to get by, especially in these tough times.

And if the comments on the STOMP post it self are anything to go by, it is encouraging to know that just as many Singaporeans disagree with the particular reader and see street hawkers as a reflection of much larger social issues here as well.

Soccer may be the favourite sport of many Singaporeans but  finding a public field to play the game used to be the hardest thing to do!

Tak Giu (2005), a local film by Jacen Tan and his team at Hosaywood tells the tale of three boys and their quest to find a space to play the sport here — a depiction that any Singaporean soccer lover can definitely connect with.

The film helped to open up a discussion on this problem and soon after, the authorities made public fields and school soccer fields more accessible to recreational games.

This was also one of our inspirations when we started on Reclaim Land and we highly recommend you watch the film that is available online on YouTube.

It seems that smokers have “reclaimed” new spaces to light up a cigarette based on this sighting posted at STOMP. “Yellow boxes”, a way to demarcate where smoking is allowed in Singapore, have been spotted in strange places. No one can confirm if these boxes are set up by the authorities but they sure remind me of, Yellow Puff, a piece of conceptual work from local designer Larry Peh.

A group of residents of Bukit Panjang have been farming on state-owned land in their neighbourhood thanks to the cheap monthly rent offered by the Singapore Land Authority (SLA). According to a Lianhe Zaobao report, SLA has been allowing such community initiatives take over these empty plots of land at lower than market rates since 2002 with its Temporary Occupation License. At just three cents per square metre, renting land the size of a soccer field would cost $210 a month as compared to the prevailing market rates of up to $2800.Besides farming, communities have also set up basketball courts, mini gardens and facilities for archery at 190 sites all over the island.

SLA said that rather than let these empty plots that are marked for future use remain unused, it decided to open them up for community use on a temporary basis. The only conditions are that the land is well-maintained and not use for commercial purposes. Currently, it has 14,000 hectares worth of such land, the equivalent of 20,000 soccer fields and you can find a full list of where they are here.

It is great to hear that the state is thinking beyond economics in land use as Prof Ho Kong Chong argued, and it reminds us of our folks in Balik Kampung. We’ll like to hear more communities take the initiative in deciding how to use the space around them. Tell us if you’re involved in such a community or you have plans to start one!

An editorial about street buskers that appeared on The Sunday Times, March 29, 2009

No one should be surprised if buskers bemoan the slew of regulations which confine them to 109 designated spots, including 14 along Orchard Road. After all, the word ‘busk’ comes from the middle Spanish ‘buskar,’ meaning ‘to seek or to wander’. Surely the new rules constitute another symptom of regulation-prone, ‘fine city’ Singapore? Not quite. As Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts Lee Boon Yang has pointed out, busking should be done in an orderly manner ‘without creating disamenities to other users of public spaces’. The restrictions also come after complaints about noise pollution, especially from those performers who use sound amplification. Moreover, such regulations are not new. Ancient Rome banned public performances which parodied the government. Henry VIII in England ordered the licensing of minstrels and players; those who disobeyed were whipped. This, of course, won’t happen here.

It should be asked, however, whether too much regulation is a good thing. Busking, after all, is the free expression of someone’s talent and joie de vivre (for spare change, of course). As such, regulation should be light, and better still, self-regulating. A good dose of the free market might work: a so-so performance will see one’s takings go down; a bad one will see shop owners throwing out buskers altogether for turning their customers off.

Fundamentally, rules should be facilitative and not merely restrictive. A good example of the former is the New York subway’s Music Under New York, which arranges for buskers to perform throughout the underground. This is self-regulating and win-win: buskers get more money (much better than getting mugged at Central Park); commuters get to enjoy the musical interludes (it should be added that the legendary Paul McCartney dabbled in busking at the London Tube). Regulations seek to inject order into the creative chaos that is busking, but in doing so, the creative chaos should not be stifled.

“What happened to old Singapore?” travel writer David Lamb once asked Tommy Koh, chairman of the National Heritage Board.

The professor, aged 72, replied, “We destroyed a lot of it. You have to remember that in the 1960s, we were a very poor country.”

That conversation took place in an interview two years ago for an article in the Smithsonian magazine, and Lamb might be a little too late for this, but a small museum here is now trying to revive old Singapore – if not in its physical sense, then at least through memory. 

Creative Cities is a three-year cultural programme initiated by the British Council to help shape cities in East Asia by bringing ideas and artists and communities from the United Kingdom and this region together. This has resulted in several interesting projects and events, and you can see some of them on the website, one of which is a clip from Endless Cities by D-Fuse. 

To bring people together to explore the cities they live in is something we hope will happen more often. Not only does such discussion help us make sense of this environment we are in, it also allows ideas about how we like the city to become to take flight. Thus far, two events involving filmmakers have already been held in Singapore, we do hope there will be more to come!

Many Singaporeans want to garden in their public housing estate, but like you will find in our story, The gardeners’ city, it is far from easy for them. Some of these issues are also being discussed at a local Internet forum for gardening enthusiasts, and they range from overly-paranoid town councils, their residents’ committees limited funding for such gardening or just trying to find enough people to come together to join the state’s Community-In-Bloom program.

But does gardening like this really pose so big a problem that we should be wary of these gardeners? Fears of dengue breeding, an obstruction to corridors, a fire hazard… a case of extreme imagination or real concerns?

Take a look at what we have seen.

Yes, says economist Edward Glaeser in an interview with The Straits Times today. The professor from Havard University, who studies how cities work, said that density should not be a worry as there are many solutions available like building skyscrapers.

Instead, the question is who are we packing in? Only by having enough “smart people” can the city constantly reinvent itself to thrive. And such innovation in cities have not been very successful when it was implemented top-down. For Prof Glaeser, cities should be planned around human dynamics rather what the state thinks it should look like. 

Such thinking seems to go against how the state has been clearing street hawkers and buskers off the streets of Orchard Road of late. Is there not enough space? Not so, since the streets there were recently widened and renovated. They were reacting to a complaint from the Orchard Road Business Association that these hawkers make the shopping district “low class”. But the street businesses are just people trying to make a living and it is just good business sense to go to a space where they are crowds. That’s why the shops of the association are in Orchard too, so why not try to co-exist?

Welcome to the official site of Reclaim Land: The fight for space in Singapore. After months of working on the ground to produce these stories, photos and multimedia, we’re glad to finally submit this as our final-year project today.

This website would not have come to fruit if not for the help of the following people and we would like to take this opportunity to thank them:

+ Our supervisor, Asst Prof Cherian George
+ Darren, Johnson and Guangzheng for their technical assistance in the multimedia production
+ The academics who gave us their time and insights
+ Interviewees who agreed to share their stories
+ friends and family who spent the time going through the earlier version and offering their advice and critique

Over the next course of days, we have some good news to announce, so stay tuned. Meanwhile, feel free to leave your comments and start a discussion about how to reclaim land!

This website began as a final-year project as part of our degree requirement in the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information. We began working on it since August last year and you can see how far we’ve come from a previous blog that we had.

What you are now seeing is a work-in-progress, and we are trying to iron out all issues to meet our submission deadline on March 24th, 2009. Feel free to look around and let us know any errors you spot or how you think we can improve.

Thanks for visiting us, and do come back again when we officially launch!