Government of water, circulation and the city

Transforming Singapore from tropical ‘backwater’ to global ‘hydrohub’

A thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities

2014

Mark Usher

Department of Geography

School of Environment, Education and Development

University of Manchester Table of contents

List of figures 5

Acronyms and abbreviations 7

Abstract 10

Declaration and copyright 11

Acknowledgements 12

Chapter 1 The urban problem

Introduction 14

The politics of circulation 16

Infrastructure and government 18

Questions of water 19

Singapore: Heart without a hinterland 21

Water security in Singapore 24

History, method, critique 27

Chapter 2 The nature of government

Introduction 32

Nature, truth, power 33

The politics of water 36

Urban water governance 39

The double coding of nature 42

Developing environmental governance 45

Governing circulation 47

Methodological premise of governmentality 51

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Chapter 3 Internal colonisation through urban catchment management

Introduction 56

Catchment management and colonial rule 57

The advent of urban catchments 62

Upgrading the hawker and farming sectors 66

Restructuring along the Singapore River 71

Catchment and the city 79

Phasing out the lighterage industry 84

Conclusion 86

Chapter 4 Diluvian dilemmas: Canalisation and the anti-flood programme

Introduction 88

Anti-flood measures in the colonial era 89

Industrialisation, canalisation and communism 93

Mr Barker’s promethean pledge and the Bukit Timah scheme 99

Flow follows form 104

The turn to security 109

Conclusion 115

Chapter 5 Crisis of closed systems: Drainage, decentralisation and desire

Introduction 117

From hardware to software 118

Techne and telos 123

Blurring the physical and conceptual boundary 129

The drainage covering programme 133

Mosquito control and the coming of community 140

Conclusion 145

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Chapter 6 Birth of the waterfront: Urban design, property and Marina Bay

Introduction 147

Urban water assets 148

Flagship projects and the decentralisation of design 153

Towards a waterfront hub 159

Boosterism and the bay 165

Revalorising reservoirs for a service economy 170

Conclusion 175

Chapter 7 Conduits of conduct: 3P initiatives and the ABC programme

Introduction 177

‘Water is personal’: Individualising responsibility and ownership 178

Launch of the ABC programme 186

Reservoirs and renaissance on the northeast coast 192

Water as a technology of government 196

The spectacularisation of water 201

Conclusion 207

Chapter 8 Politics of the milieu

Introduction 209

Rule and restraint 211

Nature, desire and the limits of control 214

Circulation, logistics and state ontology 218

Liquid state: IWRM as neoliberal technology 222

Reorienting governmentality 225

Towards habitable circulation 226

References 229

Word count: 87,993

4

List of figures

Figure 3.1 Fountain commemorating Singapore’s first water works 58

Figure 3.2 Exponential population growth of Singapore (1824-1967) 59

Figure 3.3 CWCA in relation to territory of Singapore 60

Figure 3.4 Proposed expansion of water supply on mainland and in CWCA 62

Figure 3.5 Kranji and Pandan Reservoir Scheme (circled in red) 63

Figure 3.6 Western Catchments Scheme (circled in red) 64

Figure 3.7 Tiong Bahru Food Centre with stalls in background 67

Figure 3.8 Exponential population growth after independence (1960-2013) 69

Figure 3.9 Bedok Scheme (circled in red) 72

Figure 3.10 Lee Hsien Loong opening Bedok Waterworks 73

Figure 3.11 Concept Plan 1971 with catchment marked in striped green 74

Figure 3.12 Marina Reservoir Scheme (circled in red) 76

Figure 3.13 OCBC Building overlooking the Singapore River 79

Figure 3.14 Average consumption of water per capita 80

Figure 3.15 Increase in the sale of water 81

Figure 3.16 Singapore River and Kallang Basin catchment area 82

Figure 4.1 Partly completed canal at Pasir Panjang 94

Figure 4.2 Outlet in construction at Tampines 96

Figure 4.3 ‘Correction’ of Opera Estate drain 97

Figure 4.4 Mr Barker (right) with Lee Kuan Yew (centre) at Seletar Reservoir 99

Figure 4.5 Discharge measurements being made on Bukit Timah Canal 100

Figure 4.6 Map showing flood gauge distribution 101

Figure 4.7 Twin tunnels below Military Hill 102

Figure 4.8 The first partially closed drainage system 105

Figure 4.9 Incarcerated circulation: Modern drain system at various locations 111

Figure 4.10 Decrease in flood prone areas (1989-2010) 115

Figure 5.1 WWS volunteers on patrol around Marina Bay 121

Figure 5.2 Water conservation logo projected on the wall of a building 125

Figure 5.3 Strategic ambiguity: Signage at WWS headquarters with PUB logo 128

Figure 5.4 Green and Blue Plan showing projected leisure destinations 131 5

Figure 5.5 Mandarin and Pan Pacific hotels overlooking Marina Bay 132

Figure 5.6 Reconstruction works at Stamford Canal 134

Figure 5.7 Hopeful visitors at the Fountain of Wealth 135

Figure 5.8 A typical open drain located at Kitchener Road 137

Figure 5.9 Austere and alienating: A cyclist separated from Sembawang River 143

Figure 6.1 Kampong Bugis promotional material 152

Figure 6.2 Detail from SIA’s Changi bid 153

Figure 6.3 Punggol housing mix with private condominiums on waterfront 155

Figure 6.4 ‘Untapped’ waterfronts at Punggol 156

Figure 6.5 View of the Cost Rhu condominium from WWS headquarters 161

Figure 6.6 Marina Bay and the integrated resort Marina Bay Sands 162

Figure 6.7 The Merlion statue located at Marina Bay 165

Figure 6.8 The Esplanade (centre) with Floating Platform 166

Figure 6.9 Corporate logo for Marina Bay 170

Figure 6.10 World Water Day celebrations at Marina Barrage 173

Figure 6.11 Barrage separating the freshwater reservoir from sea 174

Figure 7.1 Water-based activities at Bedok Reservoir (t) and Kallang Basin (b) 180

Figure 7.2 PUB mascot Water Wally promotional paraphernalia 182

Figure 7.3 Education through entertainment at the Waterworks play area 185

Figure 7.4 ABC Waters projects in construction 187

Figure 7.5 Paddling waters and education hut at Alexandra Canal 189

Figure 7.6 Negotiating the boundary between land and water 190

Figure 7.7 Inviting interaction with a submerged walkway 191

Figure 7.8 Descending steps into the waterway at Punggol 195

Figure 7.9 ABC Waters project at Punggol Reservoir 196

Figure 7.10 Water-venture promoting community values through lifestyle choice 202

Figure 7.11 Marketing waterfront lifestyles at Bedok Reservoir 203

Figure 7.12 The spectacle of water at Marina Bay Sands 204

Figure 8.1 Circular government: Volunteer-led learning at Kallang Basin 217

Figure 8.2 Vertical power: Closed drainage systems as ‘state space’ 219

Figure 8.3 Government through exposure and contact 223

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Acronyms and abbreviations

ABC Active, Beautiful and Clean Waters

ARSM Administrative Report of the Singapore Municipality

APU Anti-Pollution Unit

ASEAN Association of Southeast Asian Nations

BTO Build-To-Order

BTFAS Bukit Timah Flood Alleviation Scheme

BFC Business and Financial Centre

CBD Central Business District

CWCA Central Water Catchment Area

CERFI Centre d’Études, de Recherche et de Formation Institutionnelle

CLC Centre for Liveable Cities

CCC Citizens’ Consultative Committee

CCS City Council of Singapore

CST Common Services Tunnel

CDC Community Development Council

DPVG Dengue Prevention Volunteer Groups

DGP Development Guide Plan

EIC East India Company

EDM Eastern Daily Mail and Straits Morning Advertiser

EDB Economic Development Board

EPHA Environmental Public Health Act

EUP Estate Upgrading Programme

HTP Happy Toilet Programme

HDB Housing Development Board

ISA Independence of Singapore Agreement

IWRM Integrated Water Resources Management

IPRA International Public Relations Association

JRWA The Johore River Water Agreement

LOO Let’s Observe Ourselves

LCFC Low Capacity Flushing Cisterns 7

LID Low Impact Development

MIPIM Marche International des Professionals de L’Immobilier

MBUC Marina Bay Urban Challenge

MPA Maritime and Port Authority

Mgd Million gallons per day

ENV Ministry of Environment

MEWR Ministry of Environment and Water Resources

MICA Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts

NAS National Archives of Singapore

NCE National Council on the Environment

NEA National Environment Agency

NSS Nature Society Singapore

PAP People’s Action Party

PA People’s Association

PSA Port of Singapore Authority

PRISM Public Relations in the Service of Mankind

PUB Public Utilities Board

PWD Public Works Department

RC Residents’ Committees

RAS Restroom Association

SCS Science Council of Singapore

SDC Sentosa Development Corporation

SEC Singapore Environment Council

SFP Singapore Free Press

SIA Singapore Institute of Architects

SIWW Singapore International Water Week

STB Singapore Tourism Board

SSL Straits Steamship Land

ST Straits Times

SO Superintending Officer

SUDS Sustainable Urban Drainage

TSRA The Tebrau and Scudai Rivers Water Agreement 8

UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

UN United Nations

URA Urban Redevelopment Authority

VCU Vector Control Unit

WCT Water Conservation Tax

WPCDA Water Pollution Control and Drainage Act

WSUD Water Sensitive Urban Design

WWS Waterways Watch Society

WHO World Health Organisation

9

Abstract

This thesis will revisit Michel Foucault's original arguments on the ‘urban problem’ and the concomitant question of circulation, which I contend has been disassociated from more general renderings of his concept of governmentality. Throughout the 1970s, and particularly during his lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault would regularly return to the problem of urban circulation; how it has been conceived, calculated and distributed. Foucault would ponder the ways that material infrastructures have canalised people and resources, and naturalised their complex coexistence, in the interests of urban economic restructuring and state aggrandisement. Here, the ‘question of water’ was not only incidental to Foucault’s analytics of government but absolutely integral. Indeed, according to Foucault, whether flowing through rivers, canals, pipes, pumps, sewers or fountains, or stagnating in swamps, marshes and ditches, water has required the especial attention of town planners attempting to optimise the contentious process of urbanisation. Using Singapore as a case study, I will consider how the circulation of water has been administered under the three technologies of power identified by Foucault, with the greater emphasis put on discipline and security. The overarching argument will be that the modern state was consolidated and subsequently decentralised through the material configuration of drainage infrastructure, reservoirs and distribution systems, where governmental programmes have been co-produced with the technological networks of water circulation. Although disciplinary techniques had initially been found effective in terms of pollution control and flood alleviation, counterproductive consequences of concrete modernism quickly emerged requiring a greater uptake of security mechanisms, where government would be increasingly exercised through practices of exposure rather than enclosure. Mosquitoes were now thriving in the subterranean network of drains, valuable land was being wastefully converted into dormant storm canals, whilst people had become socially and emotionally disconnected from water. Released and revalorised, water now serves as a mobile technology of government which can penetrate and pervade the urban form and the everyday life of its inhabitants, centrifugally unleashing the potency of water flows and human desire whilst facilitating Singapore’s transformation into a global city. With its methodological nominalism and commitment to concrete practices, I argue that once reoriented around the urban problem, Foucault’s analytics can advance environmental politics debates by demonstrating that government is a mundanely material process orchestrated through the everyday infrastructure of water management. In so doing, I also shift the emphasis from the urbanisation of nature to the naturalisation of the urban, of circulation and the art of government itself.

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Declaration

No portion of the work referred to in the thesis has been submitted in support of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other institute of learning.

Mark Usher

Copyright i. The author of this thesis (including any appendices and/or schedules to this thesis) owns certain copyright or related rights in it (the “Copyright”) and s/he has given The University of Manchester certain rights to use such Copyright, including for administrative purposes. ii. Copies of this thesis, either in full or in extracts and whether in hard or electronic copy, may be made only in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) and regulations issued under it or, where appropriate, in accordance with licensing agreements which the University has from time to time. This page must form part of any such copies made. iii. The ownership of certain Copyright, patents, designs, trade marks and other intellectual property (the “Intellectual Property”) and any reproductions of copyright works in the thesis, for example graphs and tables (“Reproductions”), which may be described in this thesis, may not be owned by the author and may be owned by third parties. Such Intellectual Property and Reproductions cannot and must not be made available for use without the prior written permission of the owner(s) of the relevant Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions. iv. Further information on the conditions under which disclosure, publication and commercialisation of this thesis, the Copyright and any Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions described in it may take place is available in the University IP Policy (see http://documents.manchester.ac.uk/DocuInfo.aspx?DocID=487), in any relevant Thesis restriction declarations deposited in the University Library, The University Library’s regulations (see http://www.manchester.ac.uk/library/aboutus/regulations) and in The University’s policy on Presentation of Theses

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Acknowledgements

Four years is a long time to spend thinking and writing about the intricate details of drainage. Whilst I cannot think of a better way to spend an evening than discussing the comely contours of trapezoidal canals, oddly, there are number of long-suffering people who may not share my undying enthusiasm. I would like to thank these people for making this period flow somewhat faster than it perhaps would have otherwise. However, I would initially like to thank my supervisors Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw for quite the opposite reason. Without their patience, wisdom and support, I don’t think four years would have been long enough. I will continue to be inspired by their intellect and passion, for which of course I am greatly indebted. Besides the unparalleled level of cerebral stimulation, the wider geography department at Manchester has offered an abundance of bonhomie, banter and brews. In the lowest depths of my ‘deli days’, when the sight of a simple cracker had the capacity to send shudders down my hunched and jagged spine, friends were there to offer moral and culinary nourishment. Jana Wendler has provided much more than delicious flatbreads to help me along the way, which along with Emma Shuttleworth made the writing-up process a grimly mirthful experience. I would like to thank all my fellow postgrads and staff in the department. I would also like to acknowledge the participants who kindly agreed to take part in the research. Of course, without their input the study would not have been possible. In particular, I wish to extend my thanks to staff at the Public Utilities Board (PUB) for putting up with my constant emails and questions. Comparably vital was the funding that I received from the Economic and Social Research Council, for which I am enormously grateful [grant number ES/1903437/1]. In a somewhat different register, I made a number of great friends whilst based in Singapore, all of whom helped to provide an amiable home from home. Since returning to the UK, Barnsy Headquarters has provided a welcome sanctuary thanks to Tom, Flick, Rosalyn, Nat and Alex. My family has been a steady source of support throughout my time in Manchester and Singapore. Ella in particular made the final weeks of my fieldwork unreasonably fun. And thank you Harriet for remaining patient, compassionate and cheerful, even when faced with the prospect of yet another extended reservoir walk in 100 percent humidity.

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Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!

Sail on, O UNION, strong and great! Humanity with all its fears, With all the hopes of future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate! We know what Master laid thy keel, What Workmen wrought thy ribs of steel, Who made each mast, and sail, and rope, What anvils rang, what hammers beat, In what a forge and what a heat Were shaped the anchors of thy hope! Fear not each sudden sound and shock, ’T is of the wave and not the rock; ’T is but the flapping of the sail, And not a rent made by the gale! In spite of rock and tempest’s roar, In spite of false lights on the shore, Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea! Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee, Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears, Our faith triumphant o’er our fears, Are all with thee,—are all with thee!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Building of the Ship, 1849

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1. The urban problem

In the Western imagination, reason has long belonged to terra firma. Island or continent, it repels water with a solid stubbornness: it only concedes its sand. As for unreason, it has been aquatic from the depths of time…Madness is the flowing liquid exterior of rocky reason (Foucault, 1994, p.268).

1.1 Introduction

Michel Foucault stated during an interview with the radical French journal Heredote that geography was absolutely central to his concerns. This affirmation of intellectual allegiance is something which a generation of geographers have been inclined to reiterate and celebrate, in a constant stream of academic articles, workshops and conferences. Indeed, not only does it further validate geographical inquiry as a broadly relevant discipline but confirms one of the twentieth century's most influential philosophers as one of their own. Those perhaps familiar with Foucault's oeuvre would not require this explicit admission from the philosopher himself to appreciate the pertinence of his work to geographical analysis, and vice versa. Whether this concerns the strategic role of architecture and infrastructure in the regulation of industrial society, the relationship between the city and the countryside, territory and the geopolitical movements of tribes, the structural configuration of a landscape formed by language, or the increasing centrality of space to critical inquiry, Foucault's investigations were always deeply and provocatively infused with a strong spatial sensibility. In particular, there is one problematic addressed in his lectures that given its inherently spatial dimensions and environmental focus could perhaps be taken more seriously by geographers. Foucault (2003) referred to this as the ‘urban problem’, by which he denoted:

[The] control over relations between the human race, or human beings insofar as they are a species, insofar as they are living beings, and their environment, the milieu in which they live. This includes the direct effects of the geographical, climatic, or hydrographic environment: the problem, for instance, of swamps, and of epidemics linked to the existence of swamps throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. And also the problem of the environment to the extent that it is not a natural environment, that it has been created by the population and therefore has effects on that population. This is, essentially, the urban problem (p.245)

Indeed, the complex interrelations between urbanisation, population and environment, and how they are normalised and naturalised during periods of economic modernisation and restructuring, continue to ask urgent questions of engineers and planners: How will the city be sustained and linked propitiously to its hinterland? What measures should be taken to administer the coexistence of reticulated flows and exchanges? How can the relationship between citizens and natural resources be configured under processes of urban concentration and through what 14 types of equipment? What form of political sovereignty does this entail? Fundamentally, what must be done to govern circulation and how should the state be implicated in this process? Certainly, the restructuring phase that occupied the thoughts of Foucault was the revolutionary transition from a largely agricultural to urban economy that occurred in West Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In his most famous philosophical works on punishment, medicine, madness, sexuality and government, this rural to urban shift provided not only the historical context for his analysis but a linking substantive thread, invariably and intimately attached to questions of circulation; how it is conceived, calculated and distributed. And indeed, I would argue that not enough has been made of ‘Foucault’s preoccupation with circulation’ (Dillon and Neal, 2008, p.14), particularly in respect to his related interest in urban infrastructure. Drawing on a case study of urban water management in Singapore, I apply Foucault’s analytics of government, explicitly reoriented around his original emphasis on circulation and the urban problem, to the periods of economic restructuring which have shaped the historical trajectory of this island-state. It will be argued that water management in Singapore has been progressively decentralised to an emergent civil society as trapezoidal canalisation has given way to source control techniques, educational and voluntary methods have gradually been emphasised over command-and-control regulation, circulatory exposure has become more prevalent than practices of enclosure, and in the terminology of Foucault, security mechanisms have increasingly supplanted those of discipline. Singapore's contained sovereignty within an urban island setting affords unique analytical opportunities for examining the interconnections identified by Foucault between circulation, government and the city. Foucault’s lectures throughout the 1970s were generally concerned with urban concentration, industrialisation and the associated problems of labour control and sanitary reform in West Europe, which holds immediate relevance for the contemporary situation in Singapore. This introductory chapter will initially address what Foucault was referring to when he identified the urban problem as central to his analysis. It will be contended that the urban problem and the concomitant question of circulation has been disassociated from more general renderings of governmentality, which have tended to privilege either the biopolitics of the population or technologies of the self. Furthermore, and particularly pertinent to the arguments here, I will consider how the issue of water was not only incidental to Foucault’s analytics of government but absolutely integral. The research questions which have guided the investigation will then be outlined and briefly elaborated upon. The chapter will subsequently turn to the empirical context of Singapore, serving to embed the more concentrated historical narrative that constitutes the analysis. The research methods that have been employed to critique the mainstream historical account will thereupon be described and evaluated, complementing a broader methodological clarification in chapter two.

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1.2 The politics of circulation

Given the sheer amount of effort already exercised on describing governmentality as historical trend and analytical approach, I will avoid repeating these arguments in the form of a general discussion (see Dean 2010). As Foucault (2008, p.77) said of state theory back in 1979, ironically enough, governmentality studies has itself become something of an 'indigestible meal'. Instead, this thesis will foreground what I think are relatively unexplored insights, or at least returns, based on Foucault's original insistence on circulation and the urban problem, which I will argue mainstream studies of governmentality have tended to marginalise by privileging questions of population control and technologies of the self (see Bröckling et al 2011). Of course, there have been notable exceptions to this tendency (Rabinow 1989; Osborne 1996; Osborne and Rose 1999; Joyce 2003; Legg 2007; Collier 2011; Bennett and Joyce 2010; Darling 2011; Grant 2014). The literature on calculable territory also develops these ideas in a sustained fashion (Hannah 2009; Elden 2010, 2013), but the specific question of circulation is left analytically and empirically unpacked. With this case study of water management in Singapore, I intend to reorient the question of government around the urban problem by examining how circulatory flow is governed and naturalised under alternative technologies of power. The spatial and political characteristics of each of these modalities of power, and how they specifically impact on circulation, will be elucidated in the subsequent chapter. At the beginning of his Society Must Be Defended lecture series in 1975, Foucault expressed dissatisfaction with the claustrophobic, repetitive and fragmented character of his research. Since 1970, Foucault had concerned himself with the 'disciplines' and the microphysics of power, which involved critiquing power at its most manifest, elementary level. However, partly through boredom and partly through a desire for some sense of overall continuity, he would thereupon attempt to scale-up his analysis from the human body to the social body, towards political economy, military strategy and the state (Foucault 2003). After some initial rather hesitant attempts, the evasive philosopher would finally be liberated from his analytical straitjacket when a third technology of power, security, was introduced at the end of these lectures, where discipline is downgraded and reconfigured accordingly within the broader framework of biopower. Although his work on sexuality did indeed provide a crucial axis between the scale of the body and the population, it was in fact through this problematic of the town and the concomitant question of circulation that governmentality begins to emerge as a central concern. Foucault's philosophical project had previously been focused on the methods through which human behaviour is naturalised and controlled within institutional settings, but during the second half of the 1970s his project was turned towards the town, and ultimately, to the general population; society per se rather than society's 'others'. In this respect, Foucault was not so much concerned with the 'urbanization of nature' (Swyngedouw and Kaika 2000) but the

16 naturalisation of the urban, of circulation and the art of government itself. According to Foucault, the city does not terminally undermine what we think of as 'nature' but normatively inflects what are considered to be natural processes, optimised for the benefit of effective forms of government. At the very heart of this antagonism, between city and nature, government and anarchy, is the notion and management of circulation (Brett 2011). This concerns how people, resources, commodities, money and information are given passage across the physical and metaphysical boundary of the city or state, how 'inside' and 'outside' supply, accommodate and constitute the other, and the lengths that government can and should go to in order to manage these various, reticulated circulations. It is important to highlight that Foucault had not suddenly happened upon the problem of the town and urban circulation during his lectures. Since the early 1970s he had been collaboratively contemplating the role of engineers, urban infrastructure and city parks alongside Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and others (Elden 2008). In one particularly informative exchange from 1973, Foucault (1989, p.106) takes the ‘collective equipment’ [public infrastructure] of the roadway as a case study, which he considered to be ‘one of the elements of crystallization of state power’. In this technology of circulation, Foucault discerned three interrelated functions that could shift and mutate. First, the road facilitates the process of production by allowing transport of materials and labour whilst providing the physical means for payment. The second function is oriented towards creating and augmenting demand, which the road does by linking markets and merchandise, buyers and sellers. Thirdly, the road serves to normalise relations between both supply and demand through encouraging, dislodging, dividing and halting the potential for movement. Responding to Foucault’s interjection, Deleuze affirmed that ‘one should ask each collective equipment what its role is, production of production, production of demand, regulation’, and how it channels, partitions and facilitates ‘nomadism’ within the territory (p.107). And where Foucault was concerned, this general inquiry ought to be directed towards specific questions of ownership, access and types of production. These wider collaborative projects that involved Foucault, particularly the Centre d’Études, de Recherche et de Formation Institutionnelle (CERFI), closely examined the essential infrastructures of urban life- pavements, roads, bridges, communications and utilities- which exercise an affirmative, life-giving but far from benign form of power over the civilian domestic sphere during peacetime (Elden 2008). What concerned Foucault and his collaborators were the everyday tactics of internal colonisation and social control that strategically reconfigure the urban fabric to facilitate processes of government, with architecture, engineering, urban planning, sanitation and public hygiene constituting privileged domains of critical inquiry. During personal interviews as well, Foucault would regularly ponder the ways in which architecture and infrastructure, 'bridges, roads, viaducts, railways' (Foucault, 2000, p.354), have strategically distributed people and things, allowing for the 'canalization of their circulation' (p.361). 17

1.3 Infrastructure and government

Similar to the heuristic role that the institution played for the explication of discipline, the town would come to serve an essential analytical function for the study of governmentality. Foucault is quite unequivocal about the centrality of circulation to processes of government; indeed, governmentality was originally directed towards circulation and the 'material instruments' through which it flowed, from the widening of roads to the navigability of canals, constructed to provision the town and strengthen the power of the state (Foucault, 2007, p.325). Importing ideas from his earlier work with CERFI, Foucault would go on to examine how the domestic capacity of the modern territorial state is augmented by infrastructural interventions into the urban domain, to facilitate and govern circulation through the intricate and detailed reconfiguration of material networks. The growth and control of civilian forces, the internal logistics and politics of distribution, and the safety and utility of the population would come under the strategic ambit of the state, defining and refining ‘the circulation of men and goods in relation to each other’ (p.335). Of particular interest to Foucault, and also to the concerns of this thesis, was the shift from discipline to security, regulation to liberalism, and the implications for the urban governance of circulation. Around the turn of the eighteenth century towns were still largely isolated entities, detached from surrounding countryside by protective walls. According to Foucault (2007), the critical question therefore was how to permanently open up the enclosed town to the growth in trade, people and resources, thereby 'resituating the town in a space of circulation...the problem of the town was essentially and fundamentally a problem of circulation' (p.13). The city can only endure and expand through its relation with its hinterland and other urban centres, through its capacity for attracting, distributing, and indeed, commanding the resources upon which it relies. Infrastructures of circulation have therefore been described as technological mediators between hinterland and the city, acting as essential conduits of the urbanisation process (Graham 2000; Kaika and Swyngedouw 2000). Taking specific examples of urban circulation as entry points into the problem of government- street planning, grain regulation and contagion control- Foucault considers how they were administered under three alternate technologies of power: sovereignty, discipline and security. The analytical horizon for Foucault (2007, p.64) was now, under these modes of power: 'How should things circulate or not circulate?' It would be during this investigation into the techno-urban mechanisms of security that the political-ethical problem of government materialises, which would occupy much of Foucault’s intellectual and political energy up until his death. Whilst the technical concept of population is a key correlate to government in terms of how the state should act on and through its apparent but penetrable naturalness as a living, semi-autonomous phenomenon, this should not be disassociated from the wider urban problem. Indeed, as Foucault (2007, p.23) makes explicitly clear, if the sovereign 'wants to change the human species...it will be by acting on the

18 milieu'. For Foucault, the urban problem and the art of government essentially revolve around the question of nature, both human inclinations and physical resources, and more pointedly the strategic relationship between these domains. This he referred to as the 'perpetual conjunction, the perpetual intrication of a geographical, climatic, and physical milieu with the human species insofar as it has a body and a soul, a physical and moral existence' (Ibid.). Government, in this sense, is an intermediary influence that intervenes in human- environment interactions to achieve favourable and productive ends for society and state. It is a power founded on the continuous, inventive and calculated orchestration of humans in relation to their habitat, to purposefully redefine what can be regarded as natural in the interests of a more effective administration of urban circulation. A reoccurring word in these lectures, 'naturalness', in terms of both human behaviour and environmental conditions (air, waterways, vegetation, topography, etcetera), is entirely accessible to, and penetrable by, a political sovereignty which has been, since the urban problem properly emerged in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, dedicated to this novel project of government. Certainly, an important aspect of this would be the 'thick natural phenomenon' (p.71) of population, or the relation between the state and human bodies, which has received a great deal of attention from scholars (Lemke 2011; Campbell and Sitze 2013). Referred to as biopolitics by Foucault, this denotes the management of the population as a biological species in respect to statistical tendencies (demography) and the self-interest of individuals (political economy). However, this constitutes just one of three key correlates of government, the remaining two being the town and circulation (2007, p.63-66). When the latter correlates are taken into serious consideration, which I argue has not always or even regularly been the case, then we can do justice to Foucault's original assertion that the population can only exist 'bound to the materiality within which they live' (p.21), where government is centrally concerned with achieving 'the right relationship between the population and the state's resources' (p.72). This approach to analysis which unpacks the process of government through the examination of infrastructures of circulation is what I intend to conduct here, specifically in relation to catchment management and drainage. Whereas Foucault focused on street planning, grain supply and contagions to explore urban governance under alternative modalities of power, I will attempt something similar but in respect to water flow.

1.4 Questions of water

My decision to focus on water in this analytical context is neither arbitrary nor coincidental. Of all the circulations that constitute the urban milieu, Foucault (2007) would regularly refer back to water as a 'natural given' (p.21) requiring especial attention from town planners. Rivers, swamps, marshes, floods, stagnant water, potable supply and sewage were all cited by Foucault as central to the urban problem. Of specific significance here, this is a matter of

19

[C]ontrolling circulation. Not the circulation of individuals but of things and elements, mainly water and air...The problem of the respective position of the fountains and sewers, the pumps and river washhouses...How to prevent the infiltration of dirty water into the drinking water fountains...How to keep the population's clean water supply from being mixed with the waste water (Foucault, 2000, p.148).

Urban water was indeed absolutely central to Foucault's concerns and investigations into government; 'co-existences...between men and things, the question of water, sewage, ventilation' (Foucault, 1980, p.150, emphasis added). An intriguing aside to these rather mundane, managerial exigencies, Foucault (2006a, p.11) also asserted that the 'link between water and madness is deeply rooted in the dream of the Western man’. Here, the terrestrial offers concreteness, restraint and reason; the aquatic can but afford transience, transgression and ambiguity. The fluid and fleeting has been a Dionysian adversary to the modernist, Apollonian predilection for the static and sedentary, to all those binary categories and taxonomic orders that have been essential to modern statecraft (Bauman 1991; Scott 1998). Whether permeating, pouring or pooling, water has proven to be an intrinsically intractable commodity to govern over, perpetually evading physical and conceptual containment (Bakker 2003; Jones and Macdonald 2007). The unique characteristics of water, its supreme mobility, mutable materiality and social connectivity, is attracting increasing scholarly attention within the humanities and social sciences, particularly in respect to the cultural and political implications of how infrastructure channels, dams and encloses water (Mosse 2003; Kaika 2005, 2006; Orlove and Caton 2010; Anand 2011; Karvonen 2011; Bakker 2012; Carse 2012; Sneddon 2012; Lavau 2013; Sultana 2013; Gandy 2014). From Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, the life aquatic is at the whim of the passions; lacking direction, altogether irrational, a road, or rather, a river, to inevitable ruin. The shore, however, is associated with integrity and truth, a recurrent trope in literary writings. It is this connection that I aim to explore in this thesis, how conceptions of water have changed in the modern imagination, and what have been the consequences for society and government. For Foucault, water and madness have overlapping histories of division and incarceration, parallel experiences of partitioning practices. The sharp edges of systems of classification were an abiding concern of Foucault, their violent yet intricate patterns of conceptual demarcation that serve to include and exclude according to dominant orthodoxies, and how these structuring forms are physically experienced by human subjects in an everyday register. With his study of insanity, Foucault (2006a) sought to reveal that madness is a contingent construct that has mutated over time in response to more general transformations in the way that society has perceived, divided and organised reality. My argument, reinforced by Foucault's conceptual connection between fluidity and insanity, is that water can also be shown

20 to have a variable history, with its identity shifting in relation to wider political, economic and technological transitions. Foucault (2000) intended to indicate how madness was in large part determined by the changing socio-economic context, namely the birth of capitalism and the subsequent period of urban economic restructuring, which required him to conduct 'a history of psychiatry on the basis of transformations in the modes of production' (p.259). And indeed, like madness, water has under alternative economic regimes been at once a meaningful presence in Singaporean society only to be subsequently exiled to the outskirts of the city, whilst finally being selectively reintegrated back into urban life. Three overarching research questions guide this empirical investigation, which together seek to challenge and develop environmental governance studies whilst broadening our understanding of governmentality. Firstly, has rapid urbanisation and economic restructuring instigated a shift in technologies of power in Singapore analogous to that in Foucault’s analyses? And if so, what have been the central drivers? This directly relates to current debates within the environmental politics literature concerning neoliberal decentralisation, but in the diagnostic register of Foucault’s analytics of government. Secondly, if administrative decentralisation has occurred in the domain of water governance, has this process been facilitated by strategic reconfigurations of the built environment and does it have a specific spatial signature? Here, the mundane components of urban existence such as pumps, pipes, canals, drains and filters become privileged sites of critical investigation as we examine the co-production of government and infrastructure, and the consequential changes in the subjectivity and conduct of citizens. Thirdly, and building on the previous two questions, can a critical sensitivity to the material components of government contribute to our understanding of environmental politics and the wider issue of neoliberalism? As I contend in the subsequent chapter, approaching the issue of decentralisation from a Foucauldian perspective, which distinguishes between sovereignty, discipline and security, may bring to the fore an alternative mode of critique. However, the overriding emphasis in this thesis will be on the latter two forms of power as these speak most directly to the central research questions.

1.5 Singapore: Heart without a hinterland

This case study of Singapore strongly resonates with the problematic being examined in this thesis due to its island geography, rapid urbanisation, population growth and recent experience of economic restructuring. Given its small but constantly expanding land size of 710 square kilometres and severe lack of natural resources, Singapore has frequently been referred to as a country uniquely dependent on cross-border circulation (Olds and Yeung 2004; Oswin and Yeoh 2010). With a current population of 5.4 million, expected to increase to approximately 6.9 million by 2030, immigration will further contribute to the policy challenge of land and resource scarcity. Separated from its nearest national neighbour, Malaysia, by the Straits of Johor, it can

21 be considered a city without a hinterland, or as it has been more romantically re-imagined by former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, 'a heart without a body' (Lee, 2000, p.3). Indeed, Singapore’s old Malay name was ‘Temasek’, which literally, and somewhat ironically given the country’s struggle for potable supply, translates as ‘land surrounded by water’. In 1819, the British sought to exploit the strategic location of Singapore by declaring it a trading post of the East India Company (EIC), signing a diplomatic agreement with the Johor Sultanate. The colonial administration would install and protect an entrepôt form of economy from external interests and aggression, which as an imperial power with ready access to military, geopolitical and economic resources could generally be achieved. However, on gaining political independence as an autonomous sovereign island in 1965, ejected from the Federation of Malaysia and its common market due to a breakdown in diplomatic relations, the incumbent People’s Action Party (PAP) would be charged with overcoming the associated constraints of geographical and political isolation. The transition from a colony to self-governing state was initiated in 1959, when the PAP was first elected in locally contested elections. Lee Kuan Yew was the controversial leader of the PAP until 1990, and is regularly referred to as the ‘founding father’ of modern Singapore. Educated in law at Cambridge University and a skilled orator and debater, Lee would inculcate an appreciation of hierarchy and meritocracy within the political establishment and wider society, championing the value of discipline, toil and corporeal punishment (Mauzy and Milne 2002). An exemplary case of the urban problem and the related issue of government, internal conditions would have to be brought under generalised control to facilitate domestic industrial development whilst the island would need to be inserted into wider networks of international circulation. Dr Sheng Nam Chin, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health, encapsulates this predicament, in what would become familiar phraseology, during a planning session for the original Development Plan:

Speaking from the point of view of geography, we are only a tiny island. We do not have natural resources. There is, in addition, a rapidly increasing population….Manpower is an economic resource, but it differs from national resources in that it is inseparably linked with men who are living personalities…Because of the human element, unless a country's manpower resources, which in the final analysis are most precious, are productively utilised, social and political ills must follow. We believe in democratic socialism, but we are seriously limited by political and economic considerations in respect of land, raw materials and natural resources (Hansard 1961a).

To increase the island’s domestic capacity, which was deemed essential in precarious geopolitical circumstances, Singapore was to undergo a massive programme of export-oriented industrialisation and urbanisation during the next fifty years, upgrading its former status as an entrepôt with accompanying rural economy (Chua 2011). In this quite genuine but strategically augmented environment of emergency, the PAP adopted an interventionist, developmental 22 approach to statecraft legitimated by frequent allusion to ‘national survival’ and the chronic vulnerability of Singapore (Leifer 2000). Economic growth has since been explicitly correlated to the continued existence of the island as a viable and autonomous political entity. Consequently, manufacturing increased from 16.6 percent to 29.4 percent of total output between 1960 and 1979 though accelerated infrastructural and industrial development (Huff 1995). Although a unicameral parliamentary model is in place, legislation and electoral rules have been periodically adapted and political opposition suppressed through sanctions and media interventions, which has effectively ensured the continued incumbency of the PAP (Rajah 2012). The labour force was initially pacified through a range of disciplinary measures, including changes in industrial legislation, productivity drives and provision of public housing which fragmented ethnic and communal enclaves, reduced wage demands and bound citizens to a system of mortgage debt and ownership (Rodan 1993; Chua 2000). Temporary conscription was made compulsory whilst spending on arms and training has been significant. Urban planning has also been centralised in response to the exigencies of land scarcity and justified by a narrative of national vulnerability and elite proficiency (Trocki 2006; Shatkin 2014). Land acquisition policy was amended in 1966 enabling the enforced procurement of private property in the interests of national development, bringing approximately 85% of territory under state control (Shatkin 2014). Environmental initiatives such as tree-planting and park construction have also been formulated within the context of economic pragmatism, implemented to create a habitat attractive to international business and mobile professionals (Neo 2007). Given the scarcity of available land for development, environmental conservation has been a low priority for the government where the aesthetic function has been the overriding concern. Indeed, one of Lee Kuan Yew’s first initiatives involved the greening of outbound roads from the airport to have an immediate impact on corporate visitors (Lee 2000). This outward-looking approach to environmental and urban planning, which is extensively addressed in this thesis, is characteristic of the PAP’s capitalist style of government (Han 2005; Shatkin 2014). Lacking in natural resources, land and critical human mass, a uniquely challenging articulation of the urban problem, Singapore is entirely dependent on external sources and cross- border circulation for its continued existence (Huff 1995; Chua 2011). To insert the domestic economy into international flows of capital, workers and expertise, the state has marketed Singapore as a ‘global hub’ in a variety of different sectors, including education, healthcare, biomedical science, the arts, shipping, air travel, electronics, petrochemicals and water technology. This compulsion to integrate into global networks has only increased as the Singaporean economy was increasingly oriented towards services, knowledge production and tourism, which are particularly dependent on communications, transport and professional links, occurring in an era of intensified competition between cities (Yeung and Olds 1998; Yeoh and Chang 2001). As low-cost manufacturing gravitated to developing Asian countries offering 23 cheaper production rates, Singapore was impelled to upgrade and compete for investment and high-end professionals. The PAP has not deregulated under these pressures but instead assumed greater responsibility for actively ‘worlding’ its industries, switching to high-end manufacturing and processing (Yeung 2000). From the 1990s onwards, governmental practice in Singapore would undergo a coordinated programme of liberalisation, which sought to selectively decentralise responsibility and decision-making authority to private companies, quangos, civil groups and individual citizens (Haque 2004). The state did not relinquish but reconfigure its governmental duties, in some instances adopting a more proactive approach to policy objectives by encouraging entrepreneurialism and self-responsibility (Yeung 2000). The PAP also acknowledged that its formerly paternalistic and disciplinary approach to government would not be appropriate for a service economy workforce (Shatkin 2014). Whereas previously restraint and docility were encouraged, the population would henceforth be governed through aspirational notions of freedom and lifestyle (Teo 2014).

1.6 Water security in Singapore

The question of water must be approached from within this shifting context of urban economic restructuring and governmental shifts. Whilst Singapore receives a high average rainfall of 2400 millimetres a year and is completely surrounded by water, its small size, urban density and lack of aquifers and lakes has made it extremely difficult to capture water for potable supply. Singapore has therefore been ranked 170th out of 193 countries in terms of water availability, positioning it amongst the most water scarce in the world (UNESCO 2006). Until the turn of the millennium, Singapore relied upon two sources of potable water. Imported water from Malaysia has been essential to Singapore's supply, supported somewhat precariously by diplomatic accords. The British colonial administration had earlier negotiated water transfers from Malaysia, in 1927 and 1932, which then enjoyed positive diplomatic relations with the Sultan of Johor, an Anglophile. However, in anticipation of the population increasing by approximately 2 million during the next twenty years, scoping exercises and further negotiations would continue throughout the 1950s. This resulted in two longstanding water agreements with Malaysia in the early 1960s, which were to be eventually written into Singapore’s Declaration of Independence in 1965. Despite these efforts, water rationing was imposed across the island in 1961 and 1963 thereby undermining the prospects of the industrialisation programme, which was deemed vital to the existence of Singapore as both island and nation. Therefore, from the 1970s onwards, local catchment has been gradually expanded into urban areas to augment protected reservoirs in the central conservation zone, with catchment now constituting two-thirds of Singapore's land surface. Moreover, with the departure of the colonial administration, the pipeline connecting the two countries had become significantly

24 more vulnerable, particularly during prolonged episodes of geopolitical posturing. Indeed, the Prime Minister of Malaysia explicitly threatened to sever the water connection if Singapore undermined the sovereign interests of Malaysia (Hansard 2002a). This programme of urban catchment management provides the central focus of the case study, which examines how reservoir construction has facilitated successive rounds of economic restructuring and concomitant regimes of government. In chapter three, the colonial period (1819-1959) of reservoir construction will initially and briefly be considered, where it will be argued that water supply and drainage was developed principally in the interests of British sovereignty. Subsequently, I will analyse the high modernist era (1960-1990) by focusing on the enforced introduction of urban catchments and the disciplinary measures of environmental control this entailed. During a speech in 1971, Lee Kuan Yew instructed that at least 25 percent of daily average rainfall must be collected in reservoirs for water supply. Stringent anti-pollution legislation was introduced as a consequence, which as chapter three reveals also provided a conveniently technical rationale for the phasing out of small-scale industries and gentrification of the city centre, an undeniably political endeavour. The associated canalisation programme will also be central to our concerns, addressed in chapter four, which aimed to reduce flooding whilst capturing water for potable use though disciplinary techniques of segregation and containment. As chapter five demonstrates, the final phase of catchment management (1991-2013) commences in response to a series of interrelated crises resulting from the disciplinary approach to water management and proliferation of closed systems. No longer perceived merely as an input into industrial development, chapter six examines how water began to be revalorised and oriented towards the requirements of a service economy, increasing the value of land and property whilst providing opportunities for recreation, speculative investment and a neoliberal style of government. A process of decentralisation has also occurred in the domain of water management during this phase, considered in chapter seven, as ownership and responsibility over water resources has been increasingly transferred to an emerging, albeit closely administered civil society. In 2003, local collection of water would be legalised whilst reservoirs would be comprehensively opened up to sports and activities the following year. Under mechanisms of security and neoliberal technologies, which function through the exposure rather than enclosure of water, government would be exercised via naturalisation projects, source control techniques and waterfront development. To augment imported water and local catchment, Singapore has increasingly leveraged on advanced water technologies to mitigate its physical and geopolitical constraints and move towards self-sufficiency. Water demand, currently amounting to approximately 380 million gallons per day (mgd), is expected to double during the next 50 years. Furthermore, relations between Singapore and Malaysia reached a nadir in 2002 after protracted negotiations regarding the price of imported water and extensions to existing agreements resulted in political stalemate. 25

A further complication, negotiations over the agreements were entangled with wider bilateral disputes concerning financial loans, airspace, land use and immigration, whilst Malaysia itself was faced with the prospect of water rationing (CLC 2012). State officials in Malaysia were concerned that Singapore was accumulating profits from their existing agreement and therefore placed the greater emphasis on renegotiating water prices, whilst those based in Singapore were keen to reorient the discussion around securing future supply (MICA 2003). Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong expressed concern that continued diplomatic tension over the issue of water brought into question the very ‘existence’ of the country, and suggested Singapore ‘move a little away from our reliance on Malaysia for water’ (Hansard 2002a). In addition to exploring water supply alternatives in Indonesia, which ultimately did not eventuate, desalination and water recycling were progressively introduced to Singapore’s water network. These unconventional sources of supply were gradually deemed economical during the 1990s as the cost of membrane technology decreased by approximately 50 percent, whilst also providing a technological, depoliticised solution to water security. Recycled ‘NEWater’, as branded by the state water authority Public Utilities Board (PUB), was launched in 2000 primarily for non-potable use, although it would be progressively added to reservoirs in greater amounts (PUB 2000). NEWater factories would be brought on line during the next ten years, at Bedok, Kranji, Seletar, Ulu Pandan and the last one at Changi in 2010, bringing the number of facilities to five. Using microfiltration, reverse osmosis and ultraviolet disinfection, these factories currently have the capacity to supply 30 percent of water demand, which is predicted to increase to 50 percent by 2060. Augmenting recycled water, 30 mgd and 70 mgd desalination plants were introduced in 2005 and 2013 respectively, capable of meeting 25 percent of Singapore’s water demand (PUB 2013). With the introduction of NEWater and desalination, one of the water agreements with Malaysia was allowed to expire on the 31 August 2011 with no expected ramifications for supply or tariffs (Hansard 2011a). The second will not expire until 2061 granting the state sufficient leeway to plan and deploy further sources of supply. Reverse osmosis has effectively bypassed the longstanding and arduous obligation of diplomatic negotiations. Furthermore, this reliance on innovative technology provided the means through which Singapore could establish a vibrant water industry and internationalise its domestic economy, whilst opening up opportunities for outsourcing to the private sector. Indeed, there are currently over 130 water companies based in Singapore, attracted to the country by state funding initiatives, dedicated test-bedding sites, shared facilities such as the ‘Waterhub’ and international networking events like the Singapore International Water Week (SIWW). The state has actively sought to world the economy via the water sector, aspiring to status of ‘global hydrohub’ whilst augmenting local supply. In February 2014, Singapore experienced its driest month in 145 years but was able to avoid rationing by operating its desalination and NEWater facilities at full capacity, producing 55 percent of the required water supply (Hansard 2014). Together, these sources are 26 referred to as the 'Four National Taps', which explicitly illustrates the close, mutually constitutive connection between political sovereignty and urban circulation. Surrounded by water and buffeted by geopolitical pressures, economic crises, resource scarcity and frequent flooding, Plato’s analogy of the ‘Ship of State’ could hardly be more appropriate to this island nation.

1.7 History, method, critique

According to Fernand Braudel (1984, p.17), an innovative historian admired by Foucault, endeavouring to produce a total history ‘is like trying to chart a river with no banks, no source and no mouth’. To navigate these whirling torrents of time, Braudel distinguished between three different levels of historical analysis. For long-term patterns such as environmental change, Braudel identified the ocean as an appropriate metaphor with its vast, undulating expanses. Tides would come next, representing the cyclical patterns of social and economic development measured in decades. The next level down would be analogised to waves, signifying the choppy tumult of current events which can be sensed in an everyday register. Although this typology can be criticised for being overly discrete and schematic, it does effectively capture the fluid dynamics of history and the associated difficulties involved with analytical delimitation. The level of analysis that I have intended to compose can be figuratively and literally typified by tributaries of a river, which provides an assuredly more navigable course than an ocean or tide. With the empirical focus of this thesis on the circulation of water, I have attempted to follow its flow through the historical geographical contours of modern Singapore with a meandering fidelity. This approach to analysis has been described by Colin McFarlane (2013, p.500) as applying a ‘metabolic lens’ to empirical contexts, which is ‘concerned not with a particular part of the urban landscape, but with process geographies and wherever they lead’. As will be ventured in the subsequent chapter, scholars of urban water have been undertaking this general project for some decades, particularly within the specialisms of environmental history and political ecology. Foucault was similarly concerned with avoiding general, exhaustive accounts, which instead saw him rendering the task of historical analysis contemporarily relevant by drawing out pertinent themes to achieve specific political objectives (Dean 1994). To produce this form of critical scholarship, which Foucault referred to as the history of the present, archival contents which may have been overlooked or purposefully concealed are brought into academic and public life. The historical methods that Foucault used to perform this exercise in excavation, archaeology and genealogy, are deployed in tandem as they achieve different but complimentary objectives. Whereas archaeology is applied horizontally to texts to examine and reveal their system of veridiction, conceptual underpinnings and rules of formation, genealogy vertically interrogates their political function, objectives and the strategies which

27 govern their existence in the broader social edifice (Foucault, 2007, p.35). In Foucault’s (2002) methodological treatise on archaeology, discourse refers to coherent group of conceptually related and interdependent statements which is governed by a set of enunciative rules, analogous to a ‘world view’ or ‘slice of history’ (p.211), which divides and orders reality in distinct ways, both theoretically and physically. In contrast to what could be considered a more traditional method of historical analysis, the aim here is to reveal underlying frameworks that determine how subjects think, speak and act in a particular time and place, and how discursive parameters shift and mutate (Gutting 1989). Archaeology is not therefore concerned with the reality or possibility of a transcendental truth but veridiction and its historical contingency, and consequently, with the detection of ‘discontinuity’ and epistemological breaks within the development of technical knowledge (Foucault, 2002, p.8). In this study it will be argued that a discursive shift occurred in the domain of water management during the final quarter of the twentieth century, as modern drainage techniques were supplanted by ecological principles of source control. Here, truth claims of hydraulic engineering rather than psychiatry or clinical medicine are therefore subjected to archaeological examination, specifically that regarding canal design, pollution control and water quality. This provides the essential fulcrum for the overarching historical narrative, where an alternative approach to government based on an almost antithetical understanding of urban water was introduced as a result. This discursive shift brought into relation a formerly heterogeneous network of actors, institutionalised a novel body of knowledge and conceptual framework, and privileged an alternative modality of power. Archaeology analyses four aspects of discursive formations to detect recurrent characteristics and points of transformation (Foucault 2002). Firstly, texts referring to the object are collected and the institutional sites from which concomitant statements emerge are identified; the authorities that delimit its development and the grids of specification that serve to classify the object. The water authority, public works department, environmental and urban planning agencies were the key channels of expertise initially, claiming expertise on modern approaches to sanitation and pollution control. However, a broader network of actors consisting of third sector organisations, private consultancies and professional bodies eventually came to be involved in administering water and reforming human conservation practices. And like madness, the object status of water was transformed as a consequence. Second, questions regarding subject positions, what Foucault calls ‘enunciative modalities’ (p.55), are posed: Which individuals have spoken of this object? What are the locations, circumstances and characteristics of these people? How are they positioned in terms of wider networks of techniques and technologies? High-ranking civil servants have assumed privileged positions of influence and authority, alongside environmental inspectors and engineers in various state departments. Again, their status has changed dramatically however as hydrological expertise and hydraulic techniques were reformed in light of shifting ecological and economic principles. Volunteers, 28 professionals and celebrities have increasingly taken on roles of orchestrating between the population and water, which unlike the inspectors exercise power in a networked, depoliticised capacity. Third, the fundamental concepts through which the discourse is formulated are delineated from collected texts. Central to this case study were the contrasting notions of hydraulic segregation through canalisation techniques and water sensitive design practices that advocate integrated, relational approaches premised on open access and stormwater decentralisation. This can be further reduced to practices of enclosure and exposure, both of which entail opposing policies to catchment management and methods of environmental control. Finally, the wider strategies that organise concepts into themes and theoretical perspectives are addressed. Government programmes that seek to institutionalise stakeholder engagement in water management processes receive the greatest attention in this respect. Before this however, a comprehensive clean-up programme that focused on the Singapore River and Kallang Basin is analysed as a generalised strategy of the high modern era, premised on exclusion and confinement. If archaeology is widely considered to be more an interrogative style than an explicit method, this sentiment applies to genealogy even more so given the apparent brevity of elaboration (Hannah 2007). Rorty (1986) therefore conceives of genealogy as a set of negative maxims against notions of progress and purpose rather than a fully constituted method. Indeed, within a genealogical analysis, power relations rather than teleological progress are the central driver of historical change. By tracing the heterogeneous details of descent through which ‘natural’ objects come into existence, from accidents, errors of judgement, misunderstandings, ulterior motives, and most importantly, struggles for power, genealogy serves two interrelated functions. First, the critical intent of genealogy is to debunk the naturalness of objects by revealing their multiple and contingent origins, their all-too-human histories (Foucault 1998a). As Dean (2010, p.4) affirms, genealogy ‘engages in the restive interrogation of what is taken as given, natural, necessary and neutral’. What demands scholarly attention here is the cultural and political context of knowledge accumulation, technological development and universal truth claims, the ways through which ostensibly technical systems of thought are locally produced in singular, possibly random events by human practices and passions (Mahon 1992). I demonstrate in this study how the discursive shift in water management occurred as a consequence of multiple intersecting factors external to engineering, encompassing transformations in economic regimes, governmental strategy and urban planning. Secondly, a genealogical analysis must also attend to the contested emergence of objects by exposing the ‘subjugated’ or ‘disqualified’ knowledges that may have been marginalised by existing technical formations, alongside their subordinated human exponents (Foucault, 2003, p.7). This is essentially an exercise in historical salvage, ‘dredging up what has been forgotten, whether actively or passively. He or she counteracts the prevailing social 29 amnesia by emancipating subjected historical knowledges’ (Mahon, 1992, p.120). The task of the genealogist is to cut through official narratives and recount these struggles to reveal not only the contingency of present discursive systems but their bellicose history. ‘The scholarly skill of the historian’, according to Philo (2007, p.347), is in ‘exposing the everyday combats of the past’ through which contemporary systems gained legitimacy over local discursivities. Through the production of genealogical histories the seemingly technical, logical and inevitable can be rendered political, contested and contingent. In this particular case, I attempt to re-politicise the currently de-politicised representation of ‘The Singapore Water Story’. This is the authorised appellation for a historical narrative that is propagated by civil servants and nominated academics, publicised in official reportage and publications, which emphasise the inexorable progress made by the state in developing Singapore into a first world country. This establishes a ‘Jupiterian history’ in the terminology of Foucault (2003, p.68), which is ‘deployed in the dimension and function of sovereignty’. The most explicit illustration of this intention to centrally administer historical accounting is provided by a widely promoted academic book published under this officially endorsed title (Tortajada et al 2013). The assumption is advanced that water management in Singapore has been guided by ‘non-political policies and strategies’, executed in a manner that has been ‘matter-of-fact, not ideological’ (p.3). Employing the genealogical method, I will argue on the contrary that water management has been an inherently and incontrovertibly political exercise, interlaced with instances of gentrification, territorialisation, ideological polemics, surveillance, social control and suicide. The objective is not to accuse or defame, but to bring to light the inevitably and necessarily political character of historical process and analysis. Water scarcity and environmental pollution have indeed posed very real threats to national development and security, yet this should not exhaust the horizon of inquiry or relegate the everyday concerns of the displaced to the margins of history. To retrieve the required amount of texts necessary for a genealogical investigation an archival and interview analysis was conducted. The archival analysis was conducted in Singapore during a fieldwork period of approximately 18 months, where I was based from October 2011 until April 2013. Access to many of the archival sources was obtained through the purchase of a temporary pass from the National University of Singapore libraries, which held a wide range of state documents from both the colonial and post-colonial eras. Annual reports, technical specification booklets and commemorative brochures were a particularly invaluable resource, whilst conference proceedings and specialist publications from various professional bodies and appointed panels such as the Singapore Institute of Architects (SIA) provided an alternative collection of sources. A process of archival triangulation was conducted by examining annual reports from state departments in respect to newspaper archives (1831-2009) and Parliamentary records (1955-2014), both of which were available through on-line databases provided by the National Library Board and Hansard respectively. Triangulation methods can 30 provide the means to capture the ‘surfeit that spills over and smudges the archive’s policed edges’ (Stoler, 2009, p.19); much like flooding has tested the boundaries of state containment measures. Partial access to declassified state files and communications was obtained from the National Archives of Singapore, which could be viewed on microfilm with special permission. The National Museum of Singapore also permitted access to a selection of documents, most important of which was commemorative materials pertaining to the revitalisation of the Singapore River. Although archival analysis was the preferred method of Foucault, which he famously described in the context of genealogy as ‘gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary’ (1998, p.369), I have supplemented these textual sources with interview data. This was primarily undertaken to obtain information regarding personal experiences that could not be acquired from state documents. First, civil servants would be given an opportunity to personally reflect on their role and relations with those that had been identified as stakeholders in an informal, quotidian register. Those recognised as stakeholders would in turn be asked to expand on their personal involvement in participatory programmes and funding initiatives, occasionally refuting the state’s archived account. The sample consists of high- and middle-ranking civil servants (n=8), industry figures (n=5), third sector employees and volunteers (n=8), and professionals (n=6) who have been directly involved in participatory processes. To protect the identity of participants, their contribution would not be explicitly attributed and interview data would be kept confidential. Informed consent was secured via email exchanges, accompanied by a general information sheet. The sampling technique was not representative but selective, which identified participants on the basis of their organisational affiliation and professional status. A snowballing method was also used to secure contact with further participants within the water sector. Interviews were semi-structured and lasted approximately 90 minutes, with the resulting audio data written into transcripts. Once converted into textual form, the interview accounts were coded in relation to the four categories of archaeological analysis outlined above and subjected to genealogical examination in regard to the broader discursive field.

31

2. The nature of government

The sovereign deals with a nature... (Foucault, 2007, p.23)

2.1 Introduction

With this critical review of the literature, I aim to demonstrate how Foucault's analytics of government can effectively develop and advance current debates occurring within the field of environmental politics, specifically those concerning the transition from centralised to decentralised modes of regulation. Whereas this is generally referred to within the literature as a shift from 'government to governance' (Adger and Jordan 2009; Evans 2012), drawing upon the arguments of Foucault it can be contended that government has never been the exclusive prerogative of the state, and just as importantly, neither has political sovereignty been extracted from more contemporary processes of neoliberal environmental oversight. As Foucault (1998b, p.94) himself asserted, 'there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled'. By liberating this analysis from the 'spell of monarchy' (Foucault, 1998b, p.88), which denotes the tendency in political scholarship to privilege theoretical concerns of rights and law, and to binarise a distinctly manifold political landscape, the focus of inquiry can be constructively recalibrated to take account of material power effects rather than institutional arrangements. In this way, I will suggest that Foucault's distinction between discipline and security can provide a more promising foundation for examining shifts in environmental policy, which encourages us to consider the 'concrete practices' (Foucault, 2008, p.3) of government; their local, spatial and technical manifestations. In this instance, 'concrete' may refer, literally, to the mundane materiality of drainage infrastructure or actual everyday human interactions with water. This should take us beyond the schematic envisaging of ideal modes of governance, institutional typologies and 'juridico-discursive' (Foucault, 1998b, p.39) questions of legitimacy, accountability and justice, which have hitherto commanded the greatest amount of scholarly attention in environmental governance studies (Lemos and Agrawal 2006). Not surprisingly given their intellectual leaning, a more materially-grounded analysis of environmental governance processes has already been advanced by political ecologists. Whilst I aim to contribute to this analytical endeavour and indeed situate the current case study within the field of political ecology, the focus on government, or what Foucault (1982) referred to as power as subjection, as well as dispossession, which Foucault considered to be power as exploitation, will take the analysis away from its more conventional concern with providing a Marxian critique of capitalism (Heynen et al 2006; Peet et al 2011). This revolves around an essentially distributive-prohibitive form of power determining 'who will have access to or control over and who will be excluded from access to or control over resources or other

32 components of the environment' (Swyngedouw and Heynen, 2003, p.911). This thesis will be sensitive to, not limited by, access issues; indeed, power in this case has been exercised specifically through peoples' contact with water. The contention will be made that to adequately understand shifts in environmental governance one should look to wider transformations in economic and political strategy. This has been a common locus of critical inquiry for scholars working within a broadly defined urban political ecology (Cronon 1992; Gibbs and Jonas 2000; Desfor and Keil 2004; Swyngedouw 2004; Brand and Thomas 2005; Perkins 2013). However, I will apply Foucault's analytics of government, reoriented around its original but generally overlooked concern with population- environment relations and urban circulation, which addresses political economy as governmental technology in addition to pretence for exploitation (Ong 2007; Collier 2011). Accordingly, through revisiting and reiterating Foucault's initial arguments, I intend to shift the prevailing emphasis from the 'urbanization of nature' (Swyngedouw and Kaika 2000) to the naturalisation of the urban, from the production of nature to the formation of urban environmental 'norms and forms' (Rabinow 1989). I will first reassert the centrality of nature in Foucault's analytics of government and propose that a close reading of the original lectures should provide sufficient analytical wherewithal to develop scholarship on environmental governance in three critical ways. Accordingly, the relationship between nature and truth will be considered and how this has been challenged by scholars advocating a more critical understanding of society-environment interactions. The review will then turn to government and how it has been conceptualised and exercised in respect to this dynamic, ambiguous relationship, and what this means for political sovereignty. Finally, the preceding discussion will be inflected through Foucault's analytics of government, thereby also reorienting the question of environmental governance around the problem of the urban. By bringing three prominent research areas into conversation- environmental politics, Foucauldian theory and material culture studies- this thesis attempts to uncover, literally in some cases, the complex, multifaceted and inherently political geography of water management in Singapore.

2.2 Nature, truth, power

Foucault (2007) unequivocally confirmed during his Security, Territory, Population lecture series at the Collège de France, 'to act in the political domain is still to act in the domain of nature' (p.47). For Foucault, particularly since the eighteenth century, government has been exercised in respect to society's shifting conceptualisations of nature, on and through the biophysical environment that surrounds those that are governed over. Essentially, to govern is to arbitrate between human inhabitants and their environment, and thereby mediate and naturalise complex coexistences of citizens and circulations. This prerogative therefore becomes particularly urgent when an economy begins to shift from being largely rural to predominately 33 urban, as was the case in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when feudalism was supplanted by capitalism as the primary mode of production (Foucault 2007). Whilst Foucault was specifically focused on the European phase of rural to urban transition, his analytics can be applied to other geographical settings that are undergoing analogous processes of urban economic restructuring. Indeed, the problems that urban industrialisation presents to those charged with coordinating the restructuring phase are much the same: how an urban centre is to be situated within a space of serviceable circulation and thereby sustained over time, whilst ensuring that processes of urbanisation, production and population interrelate propitiously. This complex task of coordinating circulation, referred to by Foucault as the urban problem, entails not only managing flows but ascertaining and facilitating what are considered natural principles and patterns of collective human endeavour, policing and optimising a 'social naturalness' (Foucault, 2007, p.350) that is uniquely urban. Where Foucault (2008, p.16) was concerned, '[n]ature is something that runs under, through, and in the exercise of governmentality. It is, if you like, its indispensable hypodermis'. I will return to Foucault's thinking through of the urban problem once the environmental governance literature that I intend to develop through his analytical framework has been outlined. The underlying premise of my intervention into the burgeoning literature on environmental governance is that Foucault's analytics can significantly contribute to ongoing debates in three critical ways- substantively, theoretically and methodologically. First, in a substantive sense, Foucault was concerned with precisely the same problematic that has preoccupied much of this more contemporary scholarship on environmental governance. By this I mean to say that Foucault was interested both in the nature of government, or how through their active, preferably acquiescent involvement the conduct of citizens is calculated, manipulated and aligned with utilitarian, propitious ends, and the government of nature, which refers to the management of the biophysical surroundings of the population and the circulation of environmental resources. As Foucault (2007) would phrase it, 'the sovereign will be someone who will have to exercise power at that point of connection where nature, in the sense of physical elements, interferes with nature in the sense of the nature of the human species, at that point of articulation' (p.23). This point of reference, I would argue, penetrates to the very centre of contemporary concerns about the strategic interface between human activity and environmental circumstance, academic or otherwise. Therefore, following through on Foucault's insights, environmental governance is not a specialist addendum to politics proper but its very raison d'être. Indeed, as Swyngedouw (2013a, p.6) has more recently proffered, '[e]ngaging with natures, intervening in socio-natural orders, of course, constitutes a political act par excellence, one that can be legitimized only in political terms'. Given the especial significance that Foucault ascribes to nature in processes of government, it is rather unfortunate that his analytics have been criticised for not adequately addressing questions of environmental governance, and more seriously, for being premised on a 34 static, simplistic appreciation of nature (Braun 2000; Goldman 2001; Baldwin 2003; Whitehead et al 2007; Bakker and Bridge 2008). Drawing attention to Foucault's apparent dislike for nature and countryside walks, Darier (1999) declares that Foucault 'never addressed the environmental issue directly' (p.6). In an oft-cited paper Rutherford (2007) goes as far as to say, erroneously it would seem, that '[n]ature was never high on Foucault’s list of priorities...nature was rarely included in Foucault’s analyses' (p.294). Of course, this inaccurate and unfair critique may be a consequence of the prolonged delay that occurred between Foucault's original lectures and the publication of the full English translation (Foucault 2007, 2008). As I have attempted to indicate here, and will go on to argue more vigorously, Foucault's understanding of nature was on the contrary positively dynamic and analytically advanced, conceived not as an essential, external object situated outside of social practice but as historically and culturally contingent. For the moment at least, it will suffice to say that Foucault's poststructural appreciation of nature anticipated research taking place within critical environmental politics concerning the social aspects of nature (Haraway 1991; Latour 1993, 2004; Cronon 1995; Braun and Castree 1998; Castree and Braun 2001; Whatmore 2002; Castree 2005, 2013; Hinchliffe 2007). A project that Foucault was in fact centrally sympathetic and committed to throughout his career, these scholars have attempted to question what is popularly regarded to be natural, to de- naturalise what are ostensibly natural objects, processes and events by tracing their all-to-human histories, and in so doing, undermine the power relations that are consolidated and sustained by these strategic representations. To describe something as 'natural' is to assign to it the status of truth, which will endow upon this object or process an irrefutable reality, even inevitability. For Foucault, what is deemed normal or natural is always considered as such within a socially specific set of discursive parameters and power relations (Bennett 2010). Therefore, any such allusion to a naturally occurring process or object must be treated with utmost suspicion and subject to critique as it serves to justify and legitimise intervention into society, which is itself a historical invention dating from the eighteenth century (Rabinow 1989; Foucault 2003, 2007). To put it bluntly, and no doubt jarringly, neither nature nor society exist outside of history; both are changeable products of their time, place and politics. To use the specific terminology of Foucault, nature has historically served as a site of veridiction and truth-telling, providing an authoritative and effective foundation for political interventions on the basis of 'natural truth' (2008, p.31). According to Latour (1993), as a human society we have never been modern, which is to say that nature and culture have always been inextricably intertwined and, speaking from western society, our propensity to conceive otherwise is a conceptual product of our modernist sensibility to categorise and cauterise. As Latour has spent decades attempting to demonstrate, the world does not consist of two separate spheres, nature and culture, but is composed of imbroglios of human and non-human elements that form configurations that are entirely hybrid, neither wholly natural nor social. Inspired by Latour's theory of hybridity, a growing cohort of 35 critical scholars has set about 'retying the Gordian knot' (Ibid., p.3) that the modernist project has sought to separate. Whilst Latour has been regularly criticised for lacking political teeth, this derivative wave of scholarship can hardly be charged with the same accusation. By accentuating the indeterminacy and plurality of nature, scholars working in and around political ecology have wrenched nature back into the domain of politics, whilst pointing to the possibility of alternative future trajectories that align the human and non-human in more democratic ways (Swyngedouw 2009; White and Wilbert 2009). In this sense, Foucault's erstwhile overlooked arguments on the political constitution of nature can significantly contribute to this ongoing and important debate. This work has not only challenged the determinist depiction of nature on ontological grounds but developed this critique to identify and nullify the political efficacy of its usage, on a second, more radically conceived account (Demeritt 2002).

2.3 The politics of water

Marxism provided much of the intellectual soil that nourished an emerging political ecology in the mid-1980s, which now has long, strongly embedded roots in this tradition (Watts 1983; Blaikie 1985; Blaikie and Brookfield 1987). With its emphasis on socio-economic inequality, scalar interactions and struggle amongst social groups over natural resources, marxian political ecology provided a more sophisticated and politicised understanding of the relationships between humans and their habitat than Malthusian or managerial accounts (Bryant and Bailey 1997). By exposing the 'essential integration of human activities and environmental processes' (Ibid., p.190), this scholarship has purposefully and subversively blurred the boundary between nature and society. Initially tending towards structural explanations of environmental change, from the mid-1990s political ecological research began to pay more attention to poststructuralist questions of competing discourses, subjectivity, everyday practice and process, whilst dedicating greater empirical efforts on urban as well as rural contexts (Bryant and Bailey 1997; Peet and Watts 2004; Biersack 2006). The enduring injustices arising from social marginalisation and the unequal distribution of environmental 'goods' and 'bads' under capitalism continues to command scholarly concern, for good reason too of course, but contemporary analyses are increasingly employing methods and analytics associated with poststructuralism (Forsyth 2003; Peet et al 2011). This has brought political ecology closer to, and more reliant on, the critique that preoccupied Foucault, partly in response to the decline of marxism in the late 1980s (Bryant 1998; Walker 2006). Nonetheless, I would argue that not enough has been made of his analytics given his concern with the same substantive questions. A leading proponent of this form of political ecology, Erik Swyngedouw has been particularly instrumental in advancing the investigation of social nature, or what he dialectically terms 'socionature', by focusing on the material and discursive constitution of the urban environment. Again, premised on the subversive notion of hybridity, the argument is made that 36 the process of urbanisation is one of 'perpetual metabolism in which social and natural processes combine in a historical-geographical production process of socionature, whose outcome (historical nature) embodies chemical, physical, social, economic, political, and cultural processes in highly contradictory but inseparable manners' (1999, p.447). In this rich empirical work, the case for the inseparability of nature and society is not only made significantly stronger through the detailed, historical analysis of socionatural assemblages, but the emphasis is turned towards the city, and particularly important for the arguments of this thesis, water. Through empirical investigations of water governance, Swyngedouw (1997) helped to initiate what was to become a new research agenda by demonstrating that urbanisation is both a political-economic and ecological process. Contrary to the traditional understanding of the urban as the artificial antithesis to nature, this research painstakingly reties the Gordian knot between the city, its hinterland and beyond. The objective is to reveal how absolutely dependent the modern city is on nature, metaphorically and metabolically, for its very existence and continued economic expansion, specifically in regard to water (Gandy 2004; Kaika 2005). Similar to Foucault, Swyngedouw emphasises the centrality of water circulation to the process of urbanisation, which 'is predicated upon mastering and engineering the flow of water' (Swyngedouw, 1997, p.312). For a number of years, Swyngedouw (1999, 2007, 2013b, 2015) has been unravelling the socionatural constitution of the Spanish waterscape that has emerged since the late nineteenth century, showing how water and its infrastructure of provision is enrolled into narratives and practices of national modernisation. Whilst both hydraulic and socio-economic modernisation is invariably cast in a positive light by elites and sympathetic scholars, depicted in terms of emancipation from nature and the overcoming of impediments to progress (Kaika 2006), Swyngedouw reveals that modernity is actually borne out of struggle and ecological exploitation. Political ecology, according to Swyngedouw, must therefore examine how water is urbanised and distributed through politico-institutional systems, which raises 'serious questions about who controls, who acts, and who has the power to produce what kind of socionature' (1999, p.461). In particular, celebratory and technological narratives of hydrological modernisation should be treated with suspicion and subject to sustained critique, as they invariably incorporate parallel, resolutely political programmes that seek to rescale and reconfigure social power relations. This has been approached in two interrelated ways. First, scholars have examined the strategic role that water and hydraulic infrastructure has played in processes of territorialisation and state formation, how spaces of sovereignty are demarcated and negotiated through their physical and discursive mobilisation (Wittfogel 1957; Worster 1985; Sneddon and Fox 2006; Blackbourn 2006; Alatout 2008, 2009; Barnes 2009; McGreevy 2009; Mukerji 2009; Sze et al 2009; Harris and Alatout 2010; Jones 2010; Pritchard 2011, 2012; Rademacher 2011; Carroll 2012; Sneddon 2012; Cohen and Bakker 2014; Meehan 2014). As will be argued in chapter 37 three, an analogous process of internal colonisation was carried out in Singapore during the second half of the twentieth century, which consolidated administrative control of both water and territory on the basis of urban catchment management. On a second count, political ecologists have approached the problem of water governance through a broadly marxian perspective of socio-economic modernisation and urban restructuring, specifically in respect to shifts into and out of industrial production. Running through the centre of this literature is the idea of creative destruction, which refers to the revolutionary character of socio-economic transitions that intermittently and violently occur under capitalism and the concatenated crises it produces (Berman 1983; Soja 1989). The central argument here, which Polanyi (2001) cultivated over half a century ago, is that economic restructuring is never solely about economics but concerns cultural, political and spatial causes, consequences and change. The socio-material embeddedness of economic change has been taken seriously by political ecologists, who have examined how these transitions impact upon, and are indeed facilitated by, water management policy, technology, and increasingly, physical water itself (Loftus 2009a). In empirical studies, the greater emphasis has been put on contemporary and past efforts to privatise water provision in order to increase efficiency and/or profits, which in many cases have sought to reverse, or at least reconfigure, the progressive outcomes of social programmes aiming for more universal, subsidised access during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Swyngedouw 2005a). Examples of such practice abound all over the world, where water access has been reconfigured in accordance with economic restructuring programmes geared towards neoliberal decentralisation and increased private sector participation, in countries as diverse as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Belize, Canada, South Africa, Cameroon, Jakarta, the Philippines, India, Greece, Turkey, England, Wales, Spain and Ecuador, inter alia (Haughton 1998; Loftus and McDonald 2001; Bakker 2002, 2003, 2007; Kaika 2003a; Budds 2004, 2013; Prudham 2004; Swyngedouw 2004, 2013; McDonald and Ruiters 2005; Page 2005; Perreault 2005; Loftus 2006; Wilder and Lankao 2006; Ioris 2007, 2012; Loftus and Lumsden 2008; Wu and MalaLuan 2008; Fisher 2009; Mustafa and Reeder 2009; Sangameswaran 2009; Lankao and Günther 2011; Islar 2012; O'Reilly and Dhanju 2012; Furlong 2013; Nash 2013). As a rough estimate, around 20 percent of the world's urban population is currently supplied by private companies (Bakker 2010a). The World Bank, renowned for its propagation of neoliberal policy objectives in environmental governance more generally (Goldman 2001), has been regularly implicated in acts of water commercialisation and privatisation (Haughton 2002; Goldman 2007; Bakker 2013a). With this authoritative backing, much of the impetus for the privatisation of the water sector rests on the assumption that national states have largely failed to deliver on policy promises pertaining to the universal provision of affordable water. However, in many cases, neoliberal restructuring has been blamed for directly increasing tariffs and disconnections, 38 exacerbating socio-economic inequality, provoking civil disobedience and causing deaths from water poisoning, whilst expected levels of investment have not been forthcoming, particularly in poorer, more marginalised regions (Prudham 2004; Castro 2008; Furlong 2010a; Bakker 2013b). Therefore, it is not altogether surprising that there has been popular and sometimes violent resistance to these reforms by citizens, which has prompted constitutional changes that reinstitute stronger regulation of water, particularly in Latin America (Harris and Roa-García 2013). Certainly, the effects of privatisation are not homogeneous but depend both on the domestic context and the internal management of water companies (Wu and MalaLuan 2008). For instance, as Haughton (1998) illustrated with the case of a privatised water company operating in England, large executive salaries, significant shareholder profits, speculative investment in other countries and sectors, poor public relations and lack of capital expenditure on domestic water infrastructure will likely garner severe criticism from customers and politicians alike. Still, based on what Collier (2011, p.9) refers to as the 'critical conventional wisdom' of neoliberalism, outlined above specifically in terms of the water sector, decentralisation has consistently been portrayed as a homogeneous, coordinated class project to accumulate private capital through dispossession of water and infrastructural assets (Roberts 2008). Here, neoliberalism is understood to entail the rolling back of state regulation and the subsequent introduction of market forces, invariably unfettered, constituting an encroachment into public life or a 'Trojan horse' for global capital (Miraftab 2004). Yet, as Li (2007, p.9) cautions, 'the rush to identify hidden motives of profit or domination narrows the analysis unnecessarily, making much of what happens in the name of improvement obscure'. Therefore, whilst exploitative practices within the water sector are certainly a credible and urgent concern worthy of sustained scholarly investigation, following another Foucauldian anthropologist, Collier (2011), I approach neoliberalism from a different analytical angle, one that conceives neoliberalism as internal to statecraft, constituting a reflexive, variegated style of governmental reasoning.

2.4 Urban water governance

Karen Bakker has been a particularly instrumental interlocutor in this debate surrounding the changing role of the state in water management, shifting attention from exploitative acts of privatisation to the intricacies of governance. By focusing on governance, we are not faced with the false ultimatum between state regulation and evisceration, and moreover, the wider involvement of non-state actors in water management processes is more adequately acknowledged (Bakker 2010a). For Bakker (2003, p.3), in contrast to the prevailing opinion, neoliberal decentralisation constitutes an active effort of 're-regulation' where state capacity is reconfigured rather than relinquished, which can actually necessitate expanded administrative reach. Drawing on a case study of water privatisation in England and Wales, Bakker elucidates 39 how water management has undergone a series of restructurings in accordance with broader socio-economic shifts. During the latter half of the nineteenth century and for most of the twentieth, when much of Europe was experiencing rapid industrialisation and urbanisation, the universal, monopolistic provision of water was pursued by municipal, and later, national, authorities under 'state hydraulic' regulation. Water was cross-subsidised and supplied as a limitless public good and emblem of citizenship on the basis of social equity, which given the scale of this undertaking, proved amenable to centralised investment and command-and-control regulation. Vast infrastructure networks were constructed to consolidate, both technically and symbolically, state ownership and dominance of water, most clearly expressed in the Promethean image of the industrial dam (Bakker 2003; Kaika 2006). Stored in great reservoirs and connected via pipes to all corners of the territory, modern measures made possible through the marriage of engineering expertise, concrete and centralised control, water supply was rapidly, and destructively in many cases, increased to augment economic growth and national security: 'water became, literally, a lubricant for industrialization, urbanization, and agricultural intensification' (Bakker, 2012, p.618). Pioneering Foucauldian terminology, Bakker (2012, 2013a) argues that the state-orchestrated expansion of water supply is not only political but biopolitical. To wit, personal water-use practices, hygiene habits and personal subjectivity are governed through the material entry of water into the everyday life of individuals via technological networks, which provides a strategic, highly mobile medium for grooming, in both senses of the word, a population amenable to modern economic labour (Gandy 2005, 2006a; McFarlane 2008). During the latter decades of the twentieth century, however, the state hydraulic model of regulation was challenged by a market-based approach that commercialises or privatises water management services. This shift was premised on the assumption that states have failed to sufficiently invest in the maintenance and expansion of infrastructure due to low rates of cost recovery, indebtedness, inefficiency and lack of expertise, whilst its supply-side, productivist logic had been shown to have detrimental consequences for ecosystems (Bakker 2010a). This trend was detected in the example of England and Wales by gradually worsening water quality throughout the 1970s and 1980s, which was not in keeping with either EU legislation nor an internationally heightened environmental awareness (Bakker, 2003). In contrast, 'market environmentalism' is oriented around demand-management, conservation and decentralisation, or 'glocalisation' (Swyngedouw 1993), of investment and decision-making capacity to private companies and groups operating on local and international scales (Bakker 2003; Kaika 2003b). The 1990s witnessed a resignification of water as an economic good rather than public right, popularised as part of the Dublin Principles on integrated water resources management (IWRM), which complemented wider sectoral reforms that sought to mainstream full-cost recovery tariffs through metering; abandon cross-subsidisation; commercialise or privatise 40 service delivery to increase competition, fiscal discipline and capital availability; and utilise the expertise and enterprise of non-state 'stakeholders' (Bakker 2010a). Nevertheless, significantly, this has not necessarily involved the coordinated exodus of political sovereignty from processes of water governance (Bakker 2003; Kaika 2003b). What we are also seeing is the adoption of an alternative, neoliberalised style of government based on the institutional uptake of market incentives to internalise production costs and externalities, reconfigured as effectively as possible within an existing infrastructural landscape, rather than outright withdrawal of the state (Collier 2011). Accordingly, this may not always, necessarily encompass the wholesale privatisation and fragmentation of water supply and sanitation services, although differentiated access to infrastructure should certainly bear significant and sustained scrutiny (Graham and Marvin 2001). As Bakker (2003) affirmed with her research on the privatisation of water in the UK, prompted by the 'twinned crisis of finance and water quality' (p.72), the selective introduction of neoliberal rationalities and techniques premised on the efficient use of scarce water, has been far from unfettered. Instead, this process continues to require the active involvement of the British state in order to supervise coordination and competition between different stakeholders, mitigate unequal market outcomes and water poverty, to set price-caps and taxes on profits, provide consumer information, and to internationalise the domestic water industry. By conceiving neoliberalism as an active form of governance, as opposed to being simply a doctrine of dispossession, Bakker has been instrumental in advancing the political ecology of water. The governance of water, according to Bakker (2003), has been integral to, and mediated through, the formation of modern cities and citizens, therefore 'regulatory control over water supply must be understood in the context of rapid urbanization and associated industrialization' (p.43). With the advent of capitalist industrialisation and the concomitant concentration of labours, the need for water supply and sanitation became increasingly acute. As reservoirs began to spring up in the rural hinterlands of major cities undergoing demographic and industrial growth, water changed from being an 'artisanal to an industrial product' (p.42), purified and potable, amenable to corporate control and capital accumulation. Whilst Bakker does not go into great detail regarding this urbanisation of water, other scholars associated with urban political ecology have dedicated themselves to exactly this task. At the forefront of this research agenda, Maria Kaika (2004, 2005, 2006) has closely examined how water is woven into the urban fabric through the ongoing process of socio- economic modernisation. Drawing on empirical material from Athens and London, Kaika (2005) proposes a periodisation which reflects that suggested by Bakker, but with greater emphasis put on its spatial, urban manifestation. Initially, the early nineteenth century was characterised by urban deterioration due to industrialisation, where capital accumulation was prioritised over centralised, coordinated planning. Urban waterways, as a consequence, became sources of disease, decay and disgust, therefore nature was portrayed as something in urgent 41 need of bringing under control. This period was followed by roughly a century of modernist, top-down development, a response which Kaika refers to as the 'heroic moment of modernity's Promethean project' (p.6). This phase centred on the comprehensive containment and channelling of nature through the large-scale expansion of infrastructure and conquest of water, under the direction of state authorities in the interests of national growth. Unless it was flowing out of bathroom taps, spouting from civic fountains or caressing bathers in public spas as domesticated 'good' water, however, its dirtier 'other' was increasingly concealed, particularly where cities had historically suffered from cholera, typhus, or in the case of Singapore, malaria epidemics. Many urban rivers during this phase were diverted underground, in Athens, Brussels and London, or heavily fortified as with the Los Angeles River, to serve utilitarian concerns aligned with industrialisation and the increased demand for water to fuel production and population growth. According to Kaika (2005), '[t]hese projects heralded a new relationship between human beings and nature...the city was reconceptualized as a realm outside the reach of nature's processes' (p.107). Yet, during the late twentieth century, the double crisis of public finances and environmental management occurred, where narratives of ecological degradation, climate change, resource scarcity and flooding continue to undermine the modernist approach to development. Henceforth, nature was reconceptualised as fragile, a source of collective concern that cannot be engineered into submission, compartmentalised and brought under complete, centralised control as previously envisaged. The solution, as Bakker also argues, was to apply neoliberal principles to water management, which involved recasting water as a scarce, valuable commodity that would be most effectively managed by the private sector under market conditions.

2.5 The double coding of nature

Whereas scholarship on social nature has been instrumental in undermining the conceptual binary between society and nature, urban political ecology further develops this project by examining the spatial consequences for the city and its citizens, whilst providing an everyday, tangible basis for critical engagement (Loftus 2012). A central concern of this research is what Swyngedouw and Kaika (2000, p.572) term the 'double coding' of nature, which essentially revolves around the will to enclose or expose environmental phenomena, or what they have termed elsewhere the 'dialectic of visibility/opacity' (Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2000, p.122). This coding has had a schizophrenic effect on modern urban planning and design, where nature is either conceived as pristine, exemplary and truth-telling, or, on the contrary, anarchic, insalubrious and dangerous. In the first instance, nature is worthy of emanating and exhibiting, which urbanists like Ebenezer Howard, Frederick Law Olmsted and Ian McHarg attempted to do by introducing nature back into the city in order to sanitise its streets, physically and morally (Swyngedouw and Kaika 2000). Here, nature as a site of veridiction is applied to urban life to reinstate a 42

'natural' balance and, accordingly, social order. In contrast, in the second scripting, nature requires restraining through rational human intervention. This is a familiar trope within modernism and put into practice by Le Corbusier amongst others, where nature is something to subject to geometric subordination in the interests of human emancipation. In addition to Kaika, the ramifications of this contradictory scripting for urban water have been explored by other scholars. Gandy (2002), for example, provides an illuminating account of increasing penetration of water into New York, which he demonstrates was essential to the modernisation of that city. The metabolism of water occurred in accordance with the 'modernist legacy' (p.17) of organisational centralisation and utilitarian design principles, achieved through the massive, expert-led construction of hydraulic infrastructure. The Board of Water Supply, established in 1905, was staffed by elite engineers who did not merely act as technicians but purveyors of social norms, rationalising the use of urban space (see Gandy 1999). However, like other cities around the world, this 'technological and administrative omnipotence' (Gandy, 2002, p.51) has been gradually circumscribed in response to fiscal and environmental pressures facing state authorities, leading to worsening water quality and the greater uptake of market mechanisms. Increasingly, non-state stakeholders located in the catchment area have been involved in decision-making processes, including environmental organisations, ecologists, logging and agricultural lobbies, real estate developers and property rights activists. Detecting an analogous trend specifically in terms of urban runoff management, Karvonen (2011) critically considers how the double coding of nature has informed decisions regarding the construction of drainage. Up until the 1960s, the approach was distinctly bureaucratic, dominated by engineers and engineering, premised on the 'illusion of independence from nature' (p.1). Progress in the battle against flooding was conceived in technological terms, narrated in relation to the roll-out of hardware- pipes, pumps, canals and dams (Jones and Macdonald 2007; Waley and Åberg 2011). The underlying assumption was that runoff had to be conveyed as quickly and efficiently as possible out of the city, preferably via underground or completely concealed drainage networks, where security was sought in concrete and total environmental control. Whilst the sanitary status of cities improved dramatically as a direct consequence of such measures, the inevitable fall of Prometheus would play out in reoccurring scenes of decreasing water quality due to end-of-pipe conveyance methods, deteriorating ecological systems and soil erosion arising from rapid water flows, and flashy flooding resulting from increased amounts of surface runoff repelled by impervious urban materials. Therefore, from the 1960s onwards, an ecological approach began to make inroads into urban water management, which recognises the complex interrelations between human inhabitants and their environment. Based on the alternative scripting of nature, IWRM systems such as Low Impact Development (LID), Sustainable Urban Drainage (SUDS) and Water- Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD) deploy techniques of source control to integrate the water 43 cycle into urban design. Essentially, this means that they manage both the quantity and quality of stormwater by decreasing the velocity of runoff through a series of technological controls (e.g. bioswales, wetlands, ponds, porous pavements, green roofs) oriented towards the initial point of contact, allowing rainwater to infiltrate into the surface. In addition to engineers, other groups become important players in the planning process, especially landscape architects, ecologists, and where possible, affected communities. Technologically, but also administratively, the management of urban runoff is decentralised under this alternative paradigm. Water, in this respect, is conceived not as a nuisance to be expelled but as a valuable resource to be accommodated and treated through natural filtration, thereby increasing retention time and prolonging the presence of water in the city. This, according to Karvonen, has profound and novel implications for what environmental governance is commonly thought to entail. Instead of governing through modernist demarcation and protection of boundaries, 'these projects interpret cities as relational achievements and suggest how the connections between urban residents and their material surroundings can be configured differently' (Karvonen, 2011, p.32). This shift is commensurate with the neoliberal adjustment in urban governance that has mundanely physical foundations, which sees an alternative mediation between nature and society reconfigured through technological networks and urban design (Kaika and Swyngedouw 2000; Lave 2012; Gandy 2013). Important to note, this 'blurring of boundaries' (Gandy, 2005, p.29) has occurred in line with a capitalist, post-industrial economy, where the renewed emphasis on fluidity and non- structural solutions to urban design has tended to privilege questions of recreation, luxury consumption and individualism (Graham and Marvin 2001; Minton 2009). Emerging spaces within the city, constituted through the purposeful intermingling of people and water, have consequently been designed in many cases to produce a 'disciplinarian geography of controlled leisure and commodified homogenuity' (Gandy, 2002, p.16). Indeed, waterway deculverting, also known as 'naturalising' or 'daylighting', has been celebrated for providing the technical means through which environmental and socio-economic objectives can be achieved simultaneously, allowing for the improvement of water quality, stream hydrology and biodiversity, whilst opening up more land to recreational use and thereby increasing property values and rents by as much as 20 percent (Findlay and Taylor 2006; Wild et al 2011). Waterfront development, a particularly conspicuous expression of this form of urban design, is directly implicated in the process of post-industrial modernisation, occurring in many cities across the world since the 1970s (Malone 1996; Desfor et al 2011). Previously a site of utilitarian warehouses, freight and hard labour, the urban waterfront, growing increasingly anachronistic as a result of socio-economic restructuring, has become a prime asset for elites to brand their cities and internationalise their appeal through mixed-use renewal oriented towards tourism, services and premium property development. London Docklands, Harbor Place in 44

Baltimore, and now Marina Bay in Singapore, are quintessential 'postmodern waterfronts', providing high-end office facilities, housing and entertainment opportunities (Norcliffe et al 1996). This research substantiates a more general argument within urban political ecology which proposes that environmental initiatives such as ecological restoration are closely linked with intentional hikes in property values, real estate speculation, and ultimately, ecological gentrification (Dooling 2009; Ghertner 2011; Curran and Hamilton 2012; Bryson 2013).

2.6 Developing environmental governance

The double coding of nature, which the literature has revealed to be a persistent and profound corollary of the urbanisation process, has acutely shaped the way humans have managed the presence of water in the city, oscillating between political centralisation and decentralisation, centripetal and centrifugal mechanisms of management. This contentious act of orchestrating between humans and their environment in accordance with alternative codings of nature was a substantive, indeed fundamental, concern of Foucault, which he considered to be the overarching stipulation of government. On this premise, I would argue that investigating urban water management through the Foucauldian lens of government has much to offer political ecological research. Theoretically, with its focus on the relatively neglected significance of the city in the politics of nature, Foucauldian analytics can develop scholarship on environmental governance in a second critical way by extending the still developing research agenda on urban water. As urban political ecologists have more recently postulated, the city has traditionally, and problematically, tended to be marginalised within environmental studies, largely due to the modernist tendency to dichotomise nature and the city (Kaika 2005; Heynen et al 2006). Always primed to undermine binary categories, Foucault was similarly sceptical of this artificial dichotomy and sought to demonstrate how the city and nature are in fact historically intertwined. Furthermore, whilst there has been a growing number of scholars applying Foucauldian analytics to the governance of urban water (Osborne 1996; Gandy 2006a, 2006b, Bakker and Kooy 2008; Birkenholtz 2009; Meehan 2013; Bakker 2013a), there remains much scope for more serious engagement with the questions he posed (Ekers and Loftus 2008; Bakker 2012). Indeed, there has been very little made of Foucault's original arguments on human- environment relations, social nature and urban circulation, particularly in regard to the ‘question of water’. Scholars have purported to augment the application of Foucault's analytics of government under the neologism of 'environmentality', 'eco-governmentality' or 'green governmentality' (Luke 1999, 2011; Darier 1996; Goldman 2001; Baldwin 2003; Watts 2003; Agrawal 2005; Yeh 2005; Bäckstrand and Lövbrand 2006; Death 2006, 2011; Brand 2007; Haggerty 2007; Rutherford 2007; Birkenholtz 2009; Mawdsley 2009; Whitehead 2009a; Fletcher 2010; Gabriel 2011; Kusno 2011; Jepson et al 2012; Oels 2013; Ward 2013). This 45 scholarship has been extremely constructive within the field of environmental politics, shifting the erstwhile emphasis within governmentality studies on the 'social' to that of the 'natural' (Rose-Redwood 2006). Environmentality studies analytically link governmental programmes with changing patterns of personal conduct by examining how individuals internalise endorsed forms of environmental values and habits through coercive or non-coercive methods. As Agrawal (2005) proved with his study of forest management in the Kumaon region of India, this form of analysis is particularly effective for investigating decentralisation processes. This research advances the study of environmental politics in two crucial ways. First, what Foucault (1998b, p.82) termed 'juridico-discursive' questions of rights, justice and legitimacy are averted, abstractions dear to political science and philosophy, which has dominated much state theorisation in the field of environmental politics (see Eckersley 2004). Particularly problematic is the tendency to dichotomise government and governance, referring to state and non-state regulation respectively. This false binary logic has given rise to the popular notion within environmental governance studies that the state, the market and civil society constitute separate 'containers' (Evans, 2012, p.15). As Foucault demonstrated, and environmentality studies continue to emphasise, governance has always been a collaborative enterprise between those acting on behalf of political sovereignty and individuals or groups within civil society. Second, environmentality studies corroborate that analysis is not exhausted by the 'domination of nature' thesis (see Worster 1985) which prevails in the environmental politics literature (Forsyth 2003). For instance, according to Bauman (1991, p.15), the modern state governs through geometric fragmentation and segregation of social and environmental phenomena, founded on 'the power to divide, classify and allocate' in thought and practice. Mobility, flux and promiscuity, properties most commonly associated with water, effectively set the limits to statecraft, proving resistant to definitional and physical containment; '[t]his horror of mixing reflects the obsession with separating (p.14). Thus, modernism is the perpetual yet inevitably futile project of ordering and subordinating absolutely everything, including and especially nature, within a geometric grid of intelligibility. Developing this critique further, Scott (1998, p.94) expounds upon the generally negative consequences of modern statecraft, which is characterised by the 'limitless ambition to transform nature to suit man’s purposes'. Echoing Bauman, the inclination here is to standardise and immobilise through techno-scientific expertise all aspects of socio-ecological life, in the interests of expanded industrial production and the comprehensive coordination and 'mastery of nature' (p.4). For Scott, to govern is to pigeon-hole and pacify, to make legible and therefore manipulable from a distance in the interests of surveillance, conscription and charging, necessitating the ruthless, invariably rectilinear demarcation of territorial space. Scott refers to this process of rendering territorial space calculable and controllable through the creation of closed systems as 'internal colonization' (p.83). 46

However, as scholars have alluded to above, modern centralised approaches to regulation based on 'exclusionist environmental control' (Agrawal, 2005, p.205) tend to fall prey to what Deleuze (1992, p.3) termed a 'generalized crisis' of closed systems, prompting a shift from techniques of disconnection to integration, walls to networks, fixity to flow. Indeed, as Foucault proposed, this modern form of government constitutes merely one modality of power, premised on one coding of nature, which he referred to as 'discipline'. This observation is an acute one for it confirms that whilst political sovereignty is often depicted as being asserted principally on the basis that nature is 'an adversary to be manacled, tamed, subjugated, conquered’ (Blackbourn, 2006, p.3), this interpretation of statecraft is severely limited in scope (Li 2005; Bakker and Bridge 2008). In the contemporary neoliberal period, which is a central focus of this thesis, centralised regulation has been supplanted by a more dispersive, relational mode of government that is premised not on the mastery of nature but a recognition of its inextricable connectedness to human processes (Gibbs and Jonas 2000). In contrast to Scott’s argument, Birkenholtz (2008) reveals that the contemporary state in India has tended towards ‘postmodern’ methods in water management, which incorporates rather than rejects the expertise of development agencies, domestic tubewell companies, land managers and Hindu Diviners. Yet, as Birkenholtz contends, government is no less effective for this; rather, it opens up further, significantly more sophisticated opportunities for managing both water and people through the relation that binds them. This changing context has been addressed by political ecologists of water, outlined above, but this is predominately formulated in regard to macro-economic capitalist restructurings, and in regard to exploitation rather than governance. Moreover, whereas the urban characteristics of modern water management have been adroitly delineated (Bakker 2003; Kaika 2005), a comparably spatially sensitive examination of neoliberal administration has been found wanting. In sum, whilst environmentality research avoids some of the limitations associated with alternative approaches to environmental governance, I would argue that Foucault's analytics do not necessarily need to be 'greened' as governmentality has always been centrally concerned with society-environment relations. Once governmentality is reoriented around the urban problem we can appreciate just how instrumental nature, as both concept and resource, has been to the governance and design of cities. More specifically, this is a question of how circulation has been naturalised in the urban domain, which I will now consider in relation to the three technologies of power identified by Foucault.

2.7 Governing circulation

According to Foucault (2007, p.262), under sovereignty, the interests of the state and its territory come first; to ensure through violent means if necessary the 'state's salvation'. This can be seen in a utopian text by Alexandre Le Maître, markedly dedicated to the king of Sweden, which Foucault (2007) argues is exemplary of sovereign circulation. The whole territory was to 47 be organised concentrically around the capital city where the royal court is located, with peasants confined to the surrounding countryside and artisans residing in smaller towns. The purpose of this would be to literally centre the sovereign at the heart of society, to territorialise sovereign interests through conquest of other lands and situate the capital in 'an intensity of circulations: circulation of ideas, of wills, and of orders, and also commercial circulation' (p.15). The emergence of capital cities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the urban manifestation of the then prevailing doctrine of mercantilism, which was premised on sovereign control of circulations- bullion, money, trade, raw materials, labourers- to augment state wealth (Foucault 2007). In this thesis, I do not intend to linger over questions of sovereign control of water circulation as the emphasis will be on discipline and security given their greater pertinence to ongoing debates within environmental politics (see Yeoh 2003). However, it will be contended that it was initially sovereign power that situated Singapore within a wider network of circulation. Based on his historical analysis of the development of modern statecraft, Foucault (2007) posited that sovereign power was found to be qualitatively insufficient for responding to urban, demographic expansion and subsequent industrialisation which occurred in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The rigid juridical framework offered by sovereignty had to be supplemented by a more versatile, continuous and discreet form of government that could penetrate society in detail and as a collective (Foucault 2003). Biopower emerged outside of the juridical domain as a result, with its bipolar attention to both the anatomo-politics of the human body, which became the object of the disciplines, and forming somewhat later due to its greater sophistication, a biopolitics of the population that relied on mechanisms of security (Foucault 1998b). With the large-scale urbanisation, industrialisation and demographic growth of Singapore during the twentieth century, we can discern an analogous process where the narrow concerns of sovereignty, in this case, those of British colonialism, are supplanted by government oriented towards the rigorous development of domestic capabilities, administrative modernisation and national economic growth. Technologically, discipline essentially functions through the organisation and analysis of space. Partitioning practices and the compartmentalisation of individuals into cellular, analytical space are fundamental techniques (Foucault 1977). However, discipline was first and foremost a concerted attempt to circumscribe and control urban circulations through a generalised panopticism, to monitor and protect the means of industrial production (e.g. materials, tools, resources) from theft and tampering, whilst ensuring the social reproduction of labour through public health measures (Foucault 1977). Steps were taken in response to the increasing 'politico-sanitary anxiety' (Foucault, 2000, p.144) around issues of public hygiene and urbanisation, as more people moved to the city in search of work. From the seventeenth to the eighteenth century this was the duty of the police, the first form of state governmentality in West Europe. The police were the sovereign's primary 48 instrument for intervening in the burgeoning urban domain not only to maintain social order but to strengthen the internal capacity of the emerging modern state. The urban milieu presented novel challenges to government which the police were deployed to address: to provision basic needs such as food and water, ensure the population's health through sanitary infrastructure, maintain housing and streets, encourage work and employment; essentially organise and optimise the process of urbanisation. According to Foucault (2007), this eclectic array of issues all come back to the familiar problem of urban circulation, which concerns both the 'material network' such as 'the condition and development of roads, and with the navigability of rivers and canals, etcetera', and 'also the circulation itself...the set of regulations, constraints, and limits, or the facilities and encouragements that will allow the circulation of men and things in the kingdom and possibly beyond its borders' (p.325). Foucault (1977, 2007) describes how these techniques were deployed in towns across Europe, in Rochefort, Kristiania (modern-day Oslo), Gothenburg and Richelieu, which took the geometrical formula of the Roman camp as their model. The rectilinear rigour of these towns built ex nihilo would not merely facilitate but regiment urban circulation, as '[d]iscipline works in an empty, artificial space that is to be completely constructed...reconstructed to arrive at a point of perfection' (2007, p.19). Disorder is that which is fluid and disregarding of geometry, 'the flow that bursts its banks and sweeps away everything before it' (Pinder, 2005, p.70). Disgusted by the urban condition in Western industrial cities, Le Corbusier ([1925] 1987) spoke of nature as something to be mastered by the 'water-tight formula' (p.164) offered by rational urban planning. Indeed, watery evocations were regularly summoned to represent the anarchic adversary of discipline and order, where 'a modern city lives by the straight line, inevitably; for the construction of buildings, sewers and tunnels, highways, pavements. The circulation of traffic demands the straight line; it is the proper thing for the heart of a city' (p.10). From police to modernist architects, discipline is applied to urban circulations of people and natural resources centripetally, to establish rhythms and enclose flows in fixed, predetermined streams whilst foreclosing exchange between inside and outside (Foucault 2007). Here, 'one must eliminate the effects of imprecise distributions...their diffuse circulation, their unusable and dangerous coagulation' (Foucault, 1977, p.143). For discipline is 'an anti-nomadic technique' (p.218); 'it arrests or regulates movements...it establishes calculated distributions' (p.219) to achieve 'as solid separations as possible' (p.220). 'It isolates, it concentrates, it encloses...Discipline allows nothing to escape ' (p.45). As such, the naturalness of circulation does not register where instead the state 'carves out a new division' and brings to bear an 'absolute artificiality' (p.349) on what could be considered natural phenomena. Again, the argument will be made that disciplinary methods of regulation- surveillance, partitioning, containment- were implemented in Singapore to facilitate the management of water and its users, most comprehensively during the period between national independence and the turn of the twenty-first century. 49

Emerging shortly after discipline in the latter half of the eighteenth century, security soon became the predominant form of government in Europe. As with discipline, this readjustment was prompted by the urban problem and the contested issue of circulation under capitalism. But whereas discipline concentrates, contains and controls nature, security mechanisms adapt instead to the reality of natural processes, respects their autonomy and seeks to identify, optimise and work through nature's discernible laws rather then stifle them: the 'the sovereign must deploy reflected procedures of government within this nature, with the help of it, and with regard to it' (Foucault, 2007, p.75). Here, 'nature' enters the political field and so does 'civil society', as an overlapping sphere of spontaneous activity (p.349). Foucault traces this form of government back to physiocratic economics, which posited that population should be approached as a natural phenomenon with its own dynamics, desires and regular patterns of existence, not as something to simply subordinate under sovereign rule. The art of government is to reflectively and effectively calculate when and when not to intervene in this quasi-autonomous domain, to stimulate, steer and secure these natural processes to agreeable ends for state and society. Too much state intervention does not merely constitute infringement of individual rights, but, according to physiocracy and later strands of liberalism, namely neoliberalism, this will invariably serve to undermine the very objectives of government (Foucault 2008). Neoliberalism, the 'other face' (Ibid., p.65) of security, operates on the premise of limitation, through a reflexive and continuous critique of its own methods of government, in terms of both 'the nature of what it does and of that on which it is brought to bear' (p.17). Neoliberalism is exercised therefore at the interface between the government of nature and the nature of government, a focal point of contemporary theorisation on environmental governance. However, in contrast with much of this scholarship, Foucault understood neoliberalism not to entail the violent evisceration of political sovereignty but its enhancement and extension, requiring on the contrary 'permanent vigilance, activity, and intervention' (p.132). Security is statistical, then, as nature is not brought in line with a predetermined norm or space a la discipline but managed in accordance to its own record of occurrence. Essentially, discipline demarcates absolute boundaries whilst security calculates an acceptable range, which 'involves not so much establishing limits and frontiers, or fixing locations' but 'making possible, guaranteeing, and ensuring circulations' (Foucault, 2007, p.29). Discipline is centripetal but security is centrifugal and subsumptive; it promotes the continual expansion of existing systems, opens up processes to extraneous activities or things, thereby '[n]ew elements are constantly being integrated...allowing the development of ever-wider circuits' (Foucault, 2007, p.45). With discipline, 'it separates, it immobilizes, it partitions' (1977, p.205), but security works through freedom of 'movement, exchange, contact' (2007, p.64). Interaction between different spheres of activity is not only permitted but actively encouraged, across industries, institutions, communities, geographies, ecologies inter alia. 50

Initially, urban governance was revolutionised under mechanisms of security, which operate on the premise of 'freedom of circulation' (Foucault, 2007, p.49). Foucault (2007) takes the example of Nantes, a city in West France, to illustrate this technology of power. He describes how consecutive planners attempted to open up Nantes to ventilation, trade and goods, to make it a 'perfect agent of circulation' (p.17). Whilst one particularly idiosyncratic architect proposed to literally construct the town in the shape of a heart, the final design rested on the strategic integration of quays, bridges and roads into the existing site, to facilitate smooth exchange between inside and outside: 'allowing circulations to take place, of controlling them, sifting the good and the bad, ensuring that things are always in movement, constantly moving around, continually going from one point to another' (p.65). Circulation was not a prerogative of sovereignty, neither was it to be fixed by discipline; urban space was instead opened up to a multitude of possibilities, to what Foucault called an 'indefinite series of mobile elements' (p.20). This would include the importation of grain, which up until the mid-eighteenth century was largely under disciplinary duress. To prevent scarcity, strict controls on cultivating, pricing, storing and exporting grain were imposed on harvesters and merchants, therefore the whole production chain was totally planned and restricted. Under security however, scarcity was not an evil to be precluded from urban life but included as a naturally occurring reality. This will reflect upon prices, increasing when grain shortage beckons or decreasing in times of plenty, but circulation when freed from protectionist measures will flow where required through the self-interest of exporters and stabilise grain levels once again (Foucault 2007). This represented a completely novel way of governing under a new regime of truth, a political economy founded on and through nature. The reinsertion of nature does not only occur theoretically but physically, beginning with the anti-urbanism of the physiocrats who shifted the focus of governmentality from the town to the countryside, to the mundane materiality of land, forests and crops (Foucault 2007). These along with all other 'material givens...flows of water, islands, air, and so forth' (p.19) form a new horizon of governmental intervention; nature, both conceptually and materially, enters the social domain and becomes the essential medium through which political sovereignty is exercised. It will be contended that a perceptible shift to security mechanisms is detectable in Singapore's approach to water governance during the latter decades of the twentieth century. Not only did the materiality of water prove to be near impossible to completely contain under disciplinary duress, from the 1990s onwards, governmental practice in Singapore would undergo a coordinated programme of liberalisation, which sought to selectively decentralise responsibility and decision-making authority to private companies, civil groups and individual citizens.

2.8 Methodological premise of governmentality

This brings us to the third critical way, methodologically, that I propose Foucauldian analytics 51 can advance debates within environmental politics, by providing the critical toolbox through which to examine governance processes in greater spatial and technological detail. As Foucault (1998b, p.93) instructed whilst subtly criticising both political science and Marxism, '[o]ne needs to be nominalistic, no doubt; power is not an institution, and not a structure'. In contrast to these more conventional accounts of environmental politics, neoliberal decentralisation can be understood as a mundanely physical process, orchestrated through and made tangible in urban design. Here, we are not exclusively concerned with ownership relations or the commodity form but a close examination of the everyday techniques and technologies that shape individual subjectivity under neoliberalism; how the role of citizens, or increasingly, consumers, is reconfigured as decision-making is decentralised (Rose 1999a, 1999b; Miller and Rose 2008). Whilst there is not a single or correct way to approach this problematic, I will suggest that decentralisation ('government to governance') can be more effectively conceived as a shift from discipline to security, both of which were identified by Foucault as alternative spatial technologies that are internal to statecraft. What is required, according to Foucault (2003, p.30), is an 'ascending analysis of power' that begins with the local, capillary manifestations of government. Aligned with the wider 'practice' and 'material' turns in human geography (Jackson 2000; Latham and McCormack 2004; Whatmore 2006; Jacobs and Merriman 2011), such an analysis would focus on the concrete practices that incessantly and strategically reconfigure the material design of the built environment to facilitate changing governmental objectives, and examine the effects this has on the conduct of urban subjects and their participation in decision- making processes (Braun and Whatmore 2010; Marres and Lezaun 2011). Indeed, as Foucault (2007) proposed, '[t]he state is a practice. The state is inseparable from the set of practices by which the state actually became a way of governing, a way of doing things' (p.277, emphasis added). Moving away from 'why' questions regarding legitimacy, legislation and rights, which continue to preoccupy many political scientists working on environmental governance, to those of 'how' is characteristic of such an approach (Miller and Rose 2008; Dean 2010). These studies advocate a more fine-grained, technological approach to analysis that can provide a thick description of citizens' quotidian encounters with statecraft, its infrastructural and embodied disposition, technical instruments, examination procedures and recording apparatuses (Mukerji 1997, 2009; Barry 2001, 2013; Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Mitchell 2002; Corbridge et al 2005; Painter 2006; Jones 2007, 2012; Weizman 2007; Bennett and Joyce 2010; Fassin 2013; Jeffrey 2013; Joyce 2013; Meehan et al 2013, 2014). The state, according to this perspective, is neither a transcendental pact between rulers and the ruled nor an instrumental tool of exploitation, but an arduously assembled infrastructural achievement (Joyce 2013; Schouten 2013). Timely in arrival, there had been growing criticism of state theorisation, particularly that carried out under the banner of Marxism, which did not take into account the micropolitics of infrastructure and the varied material effectivity of the objects of government (Bakker and Bridge 2006; Furlong 2010b; Otter 2010). According to Monstadt (2009, p.1935), 52

'[s]tudies on the restructuring of contemporary cities and on urban governance have long ignored materiality, in the form of both urban technologies and of resource flows. The shaping of urban (governance) processes by durable physical artifacts...are greatly underestimated'. However, there is now widespread acknowledgement that infrastructure and material flows are intimately implicated in the hard-wiring of political economic agendas and processes of government (Graham 2002; Hodson and Marvin 2009; Collier 2011; Barry 2013). Indeed, material characteristics and design features have the capacity to disrupt, resist, subvert, skew and reinforce social relations (Graham and Marvin 2001; McFarlane and Rutherford 2008). Here, the state is not a referable object or homogeneous effect but a strategic imaginary or 'schema of intelligibility' (Foucault, 2007, p.286), which serves as a metaphysical vehicle for the justification of physical interventions into social life. Indeed, Foucault’s approach is considerably more modest in its undertaking, taking as its analytical field the multifarious, technical but tactile practices that subtly incite and produce effects in subjects, through, for instance, modifying financing procedures or reconfiguring relations between central and local administrative centres (2008, p.77). Power is not exclusively prohibitive or exploitative, but can be productive and supportive of modes of living. Its geography is not only topographical but infrastructural, architectural and logistical, oriented towards the engineering and administration of territorial circulation (Mann 1984; Mukerji 2009; Allen and Cochrane 2010; Guldi 2012; Harvey 2012; Camprubí 2014). Foucault (2007) would bring this methodological ethos to bear on our substantive concerns, where neoliberalism is 'a physics of power, or a power thought of as physical action in the element of nature...It is not an ideology; it is not exactly, fundamentally, or primarily an ideology...it is a technology of power' (p.49, emphasis added). Following Foucault, it will be argued that water provision via capture, treatment and conveyance infrastructure does not only serve to justify the existence of a sovereign and symbolise its relationship with the population, but materially assembles the state, brings it into being, and actively constitutes the subjects over which it governs (Asher and Ojeda 2009; Bennett and Joyce 2010; Guldi 2012). As Ekers and Loftus (2008, p.710) concur, Foucault's 'insistence on analytics that begin from “below” permits an understanding of the state that emanates from the taps, the pipes, and the plumbing, whilst documenting the links between the subtle operation of state power and the workings of everyday life' (see Loftus 2006; Barnes 2012; Carroll 2012; Sultana 2013; Meehan 2014). This form of political analysis would satisfy Bakker and Bridge's (2006) call for increased analytical sensitivity to the material effectivity of environmental resources in motion, which can facilitate, mediate and constrain human practice in different ways depending on their biophysical properties. This asks of geographers to engage with 'the potency of technological objects and more-than-human agents in the fabric of political association and social conduct...the materialization of the political' (Braun and Whatmore, 2010, p.x). Essentially, through the government of nature the nature of government is performed, 53 concretised and consolidated; the state materialises and is naturalised in the process of governing the relations between humans and their environment (Mukerji 2002, 2003; Joyce and Bennett 2010; Pritchard 2011; Joyce 2013; Lunstrum 2013; Peloquin 2013; Ioris 2014). This analytical premise is quite contrary, although I would maintain, entirely complementary, to the Marxist concern with power in a prohibitive-distributive sense, which has hitherto dominated political ecological research on urban water (Budds 2009; Grove 2009; Heynen 2014). Based on Smith's (2010) influential thesis on the production of nature, the definitive touchstone for urban political ecology (Loftus 2009b; Swyngedouw 2009), the overwhelming majority of critique has been directed at the struggle over the metabolism of environmental matter, the urbanisation, concealment and commodification of natural resources (Swyngedouw and Kaika 2000). Even where urban political ecology has been explicitly reoriented around individual praxis and consciousness, the emphasis nevertheless remains on the environment rather than the subject of the everyday, that is, the production of quotidian natures (Loftus 2012; Loftus and Lumsden 2008). With its sensitivity to issues of unequal access, concealment and deception, the marxian critique does elucidate very effectively what Foucault referred to as power as exploitation, meaning the 'general process of limiting access to resources through enclosure' in order to surreptitiously accumulate capital (Mansfield 2007, p.393). Essentially, a wedge is driven between humans and the environment to divide and demarcate property (Vasudevan et al; 2008; Pow 2009; Jeffrey et al 2012; Sassen 2014); the 'intrication of men and things' are administered through severance not governance, as Foucault (2007, p.97) otherwise speculated. Yet, power, always plural and inventive, also operates through partitioning practices and 'mediating technologies' (Furlong 2010b) that reveal as well as conceal, in this case, applying technologies of exposure rather than enclosure to positively impact human behaviour by making users conscious of water. In this sense, power is exercised through the government of subjects by configuring the field of possibility for everyday, ethical practice, articulating and orchestrating the needs, desires and interests of others. As others have argued, the role of water and hydraulic infrastructure in shaping everyday human subjectivity has been by comparison somewhat neglected (Grove 2009; Loftus 2009a; Gabriel 2014). Furthermore, specifically in regard to the literature on 'neoliberal nature' (McCarthy and Prudham 2004; Heynen et al 2007; Mansfield 2008), Bakker (2010b) has called for a more expansive understanding of human-environment relations that goes beyond a political economic critique of capital accumulation and commodification, taking into consideration cultural, material and affective capacities of government. Neoliberalism as exploitation has in other words dictated proceedings whereas neoliberalism as subjection is awaiting more serious scholarly attention (Brand 2007; Ferguson 2009). The role of the state in orchestrating human- environment relations also requires further and more fine-grained investigation than has been conducted previously, especially in terms of neoliberal decentralisation (Whitehead et al 2007; 54

Robbins 2008; Cook and Swyngedouw 2012; Ioris 2014). In light of these various criticisms and propositions, which I believe to be wholly valid, Foucault's analytics of government would appear to offer great potential in the way of developing these arguments with its explicit focus on social nature, government, subjectivity, and everyday practice. By Castree's (2008) estimations, until recently, there had not been any serious attempt to analyse the relationship between neoliberalism and nature. But as we have seen, Foucault was busied with exactly this linkage over thirty years ago, and moreover, proffered that nature was absolutely fundamental to neoliberal governance. To conclude, I intend to examine programmes of territorialisation and socio-economic restructuring, and the alternative codings of nature through which these occur, but specifically in terms of Foucault's analytics of government. In so doing, the focus of critique shifts from the urbanisation of nature to the naturalisation of the urban.

55

3. Internal colonisation through urban catchment management

The aspiration to such uniformity and order alerts us to the fact that modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in imperial rhetoric, as a “civilizing mission”…they strive to shape a people and landscape that will fit their techniques of observation (Scott, 1998, p.82).

3.1 Introduction

Foucault (2006b, p.70) referred to the process by which a state asserts control over its own territory through administrative and juridical measures as 'internal colonization'. Increasingly, this operation would be executed in a disciplinary mode as techniques of spatial organisation were improved and institutionalised in practices of government, characterised by the creep of closed systems into everyday urban life. According to Foucault (2006b), disciplinary mechanisms had been in operation well before they became generalised throughout Europe in the eighteenth century, in religious institutions and colonies overseas, existing 'like islands in the general plasma of relations of sovereignty' (p.66). Subsequently, however, disciplinary techniques came to circumscribe the conduct of increasingly more mainstream, secular groups in urban society: vagrants, beggars, delinquents, sexual deviants, then schoolchildren, the working-class and the bourgeoisie themselves. Applying Foucault's arguments on internal colonisation to Singapore, this chapter will delineate the 'swarming of disciplinary mechanisms' (Foucault, 1977, p.211) as the country urbanised and industrialised. Whereas sovereignty is narrowly concerned with territory as far as it allows the enrichment of the state, in this case, the British state, disciplinary power is exercised on society; it individualises, categorises and subordinates docile bodies to programmes of productivity to groom the population for industrial labour (Foucault 1977). This requires the calculated fragmentation of an intractable multiplicity into clearly demarcated spaces to facilitate surveillance, sanitisation and pacification. To afford centralised observation and coordination by the state, citizens are individually distributed in cells, which will be the focus of this chapter, whilst circulation is delimited by infrastructural interventions, a process that is examined in the subsequent chapter. In the case of Singapore, an island which formerly functioned as a glorified node of colonial sovereignty was gradually transformed into machine for domestic industrial development. This chapter explores the disciplinary period of water governance concentrating on twentieth century, high modernist attempts at reservoir expansion and the enforced introduction of urban catchments. Whilst this was carried out primarily to meet the increasing demand for water supply caused by vertiginous population and industrial growth, this would constitute just one rationale, the official endorsement. This chapter brings to light and critiques a related programme of economic modernisation and gentrification, a strategic dovetailing that 56 has not been adequately addressed in previous analyses of water management in Singapore. As water catchment areas increasingly penetrated the city between 1970 and 1990, formerly dispersed, ungovernable groups such as food vendors, farmers, boat workers and squatters were more effectively circumscribed and controlled, cleared on the authoritative premise of water security. Small-scale, casual industries were phased out or upgraded as they were unable to regulate water pollution adequately on an island that was increasingly serving as a catchment area for potable supply. Using the Singapore River and Kallang Basin as an empirical touchstone throughout, this process of internal colonisation through urban catchment management occurred during the high watermark of a command-and-control approach to water governance. It rendered the territory more legible, tractable and economically productive whilst clearing the way for a subsequent switch to a post-industrial economy underpinned by mechanisms of security, which will be elucidated in chapters five, six and seven.

3.2 Catchment management and colonial rule

When British statesman Sir Stamford Raffles declared Singapore under the control of the EIC in 1819, this small 539km² island off the tip of Malaysian Peninsula was almost entirely covered with rainforest and was sparsely inhabited by approximately 150 people, confined to coastal areas (Corlett 1992). Completed in 1822, the first official town plan intended to open up the island to mercantile trade, subordinate the indigenous population and ensure the 'transfer of ideas, usually one way, from the colonial power to the colony' (Teo, 1992, p.165). The urban form encapsulated in architecture and avenues the 'priorities and prejudices' (Ibid., p.164) of British sovereignty, and significantly, the Singapore River was the central focus. The overriding objective was to establish Singapore as a secure port to challenge Dutch control over Southeast Asian trade and impose British sovereignty. This meant that until the twentieth century there was little impetus to intervene in matters beyond this immediate priority, and this is reflected in the flow of water. Efforts to secure potable water for sojourning ships falteringly began shortly after the establishment of Singapore as a port, when in 1822 a small reservoir was built at the Fort Canning colonial base adjacent to the Singapore River. It did not take long for this modest measure to become dilapidated though, and duly bore the rebuke of Singapore’s chief charge John Crawfurd in 1823 for its inconveniencing of thirsty EIC vessels (Buckley 1984 [1902]). As Hallifax (1991 [1921], p.326), President of the Municipal Commissioners during the early 1900s put it, ‘authorities did not appear to be so much concerned for the supply to the people as for the supply to the shipping'. A subsequent scheme to supply the urban population with 546 million gallons was proposed by colonial surveyor J. T Thomson in 1852, but lack of government enthusiasm prevented its progress (Yeoh 2003). However, in response to a growing population of over 50,000 relying on increasingly contaminated wells and streams, local Peranakan entrepreneur Tan Kim Seng offered S$13,000 57 to the Municipal Government in 1857 to construct the first impounding reservoir near Bukit Timah, Singapore’s highest point (Buckley 1984 [1902]). An important stipulation was that its bounty of water be made available to citizens free of charge, which was accepted by the Straits government the following year. The newly established Municipal Government could not agree on the appropriate location for some years but eventually their ‘lamentable’ hesitation gave way (ST 1859). Moreover, there was significant concern that additional funding would be required to supplement the received amount from Tan, a scenario that was unpalatable to a parsimonious colonial administration. The construction of the first impounding reservoir was finally completed in 1868, although it only came into operation ten years later when the accompanying distribution system was finished. Furthermore, water was only provided twelve hours a day, shrinking to lesser amounts during the dry season, which was largely unfiltered until the second decade of the twentieth century (Yeoh 2003). The reservoir would be renamed MacRitchie after the engineer who expanded the site in 1894 (SFP 1894), which was enlarged again in 1905. Similarly, Tan's philanthropic legacy was assured with the construction of a road complex and river bridge named after him, whilst a cast-iron fountain was erected in 1882 commemorating his civic mindedness (see figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1 Fountain commemorating Singapore’s first water works

Source: Author (2012)

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Bolstered by the 1887 Municipal Ordinance, catchment management was carried out by an increasingly interventionist municipal authority, which was forced to depart from its previous laissez-faire policy due to the inevitable increase in population, urban spread and gradual deterioration of the social environment (see figure 3.2). Nevertheless, as Yeoh (2003, p.86) has convincingly argued, the urban problem continued to be problematised in terms of furthering the interests of British sovereignty, which was constantly threatened by disease, particularly malaria, and poor health arising from insalubrious and hazardous urban conditions. The circulation of air, light and water were explicitly linked to the continued circulation of trade. Most importantly, the supply of water had to be increased in tandem with ongoing development, for potable supply and sanitation. This prompted the construction of the Peirce and Seletar reservoirs in 1910 and 1920 respectively to augment the protected Central Water Catchment Area (CWCA), bringing the number of impounding reservoirs to three (see figure 3.3). This still proved to be inadequate, as an official government report recognised at the time, which alarmingly warned that more capacity would need to be brought on line to maintain the necessary supply of water and avoid otherwise assured catastrophe for the 400,000 inhabitants (ARSM 1920).

Figure 3.2 Exponential population growth of Singapore (1824-1967)

2.5

2

1.5

1 Population (in (in millions) Population

0.5

0 1800 1820 1840 1860 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 Year

Source: Adapted from Saw (1969)

British attention duly shifted to the mainland of Malaysia where there was greater potential for reservoir construction given its relatively undeveloped and larger land coverage. An agreement was reached with the Sultan of Johor, an Anglophile, on the 5th December 1927 to reserve 2,100 acres of land and grant '[t]he full and exclusive right and liberty to take, 59 impound and use all the water which from time to time may be or be brought or stored in, upon or under said land' (ARSM, 1927, p.3). Two reservoirs, Gunong Pulai and Pontian, would be operational by 1932, connected to Singapore by a pipe running along the Johor Causeway. A symbolic but precarious umbilical cord, this pipe would provide 18 Mgal/d of water, with 800,000- 1,200,000 gallons made available to the Johor Government at 25 cents per 1000 gallons (Ibid.). When combined with water obtained from the CWCA, which had seen Seletar Reservoir expanded in 1940, this arrangement was predicted to meet demand for the next two decades. By 1950, total daily consumption amounted to 32 Mgal/day, obtainable from local catchment, which could provide 17.5 Mgal/day, and mainland sources, then importing 14.5 Mgal/day (White et al 1950).

Figure 3.3 CWCA in relation to territory of Singapore

Source: PUB (accessed at www.pub.gov.sg).

In anticipation of the population increasing from 1 to 2 million within twenty years, Sir Bruce White, Wolfe Barry and Partners, an engineering consultancy employed by the British administration, compiled a series of reports in the early 1950s. Their mandate required them to identify additional, internal sources of water supply within the territory of Singapore itself, which would be able to sustain a rapidly increasing population in the event of a disconnection from Malaysia, to essentially achieve a prolonged state of self-sufficiency. Measures such as these were given added urgency by the breakdown that occurred during the Second World War when the pipe was severed by aerial bombardment, contributing to the British capitulation. The quantity of water available from the CWCA was deemed insufficient at the time, which was 'a matter of serious concern to those responsible for the administration of the Island' (White et al, 1950, p.2). The decision to construct reservoirs in Malaysia before having exhausted domestic options was certainly approved by the consultants, given that locally available catchment area 60 would only decrease with further urbanisation whilst the mainland allowed for 'an almost unlimited supply of water' (p.5). To move towards greater water independence, the conclusion was that potential catchment zones were to be found in the western and eastern regions of the island, which could be made amenable to water collection through damming and pumping measures respectively. Although the eastern region did not prove to be viable, rivers located in the west remained a realistic option for the future, necessitating the construction of estuary dams. The consultants asked for careful consideration as shifting to internal sources located outside of the CWCA would inevitably involve higher levels of environmental control to minimise purification costs (p.11). In light of these difficulties, the colonial administration looked towards the mainland for immediate expansion in addition to possibly extending existing reservoirs, the Seletar and Pierce, in the CWCA (see figure 3.4). On the mainland, the Tebrau and Johor rivers were identified as sites for water collection, expected to yield 50-60 Mgal/day and 100 Mgal/day respectively, although development of the latter was deferred due to the political unrest arising from the Malayan Emergency (White et al 1952). During the early 1960s, two long-standing water agreements were arranged between Singapore and Malaysia that would guarantee a sure supply of water to the island. The first, agreed in 1961 and lasting 50 years, established the terms upon which water could be obtained from Gunong Pulai catchment, and the Tebrau and Scudai rivers, voiding the previous agreement made with the Sultan (TSRA 1961). The second, finalised in 1962 and lasting 99 years, ascertained rights to extract 250 Mgal/day of water from the Johor River (JRWA 1962). These agreements infrastructurally and politically bound the two countries together; indeed, water rights were explicitly written into the proclamation of independence from Malaysia that confirmed the sovereign autonomy of Singapore on 9 August, 1965 (ISA 1965). This physical connection was not merely symbolic, although it was deemed representative of the 'close and cordial co-operation' (PUB, 1968, p.4) between the two countries. Geopolitically, state officials from both countries have referred to the pipeline to assert sovereign authority. The PAP suggested there was a risk that 'the water supply will be cut off' if citizens aligned themselves with the leftist political party Barisan Sosialis, which didn't support their proposed merger with Malaysia (Hansard 1961b). Similarly, the Malaysian authorities have eluded to this possibility during periods when doing so has been politically expedient. Domestically, as with other emergency measures that have been enacted on the basis of Singapore's small size, lack of natural resources and isolated geography, the link between water supply and national security has justified the expansion and centralisation of administrative capabilities in toto. Far from being an inconvenience to simply overcome, the necessity to expand catchments into urban areas provided an opportune rationalisation for the state's programme of economic restructuring. 61

Figure 3.4 Proposed expansion of water supply on mainland and in CWCA

Source: White et al (1952), Appendix F

Before independence, local catchment management was largely ad hoc and contained within the uninhabited CWCA, comprising just 11 percent of land area. With the completion of Marina Reservoir and the Punggol-Serangoon reservoir scheme in 2010 and 2011 respectively, bringing the number of domestic reservoirs to seventeen, approximately 67 percent of Singapore is now serving as catchment (see figure 3.5). This is expected to increase to 90 per cent by 2060 with the help of variable salinity technology (MEWR 2009). The social consequences of catchment expansion have been sweeping, but as we shall see, not entirely unwelcome.

3.3 The advent of urban catchments

In 1969, Upper Seletar was enlarged 35 times its original size to keep pace with the increasing demand for water, comprising 800 acres of water surface and 5,300 million gallons. It forms an intricate 13-mile network of artificial concrete culverts that channel water from eight proximate streams (PUB 1969a). Eight years later, Upper Peirce took on the mantle of Singapore’s largest 62 impounding reservoir by almost doubling the water storage capacity of the CWCA from 6,797 to 12,912 million gallons (PUB 1977a). A Water Planning Unit was established in 1971 to carry out feasibility tests for unprotected catchments in urbanised areas, whilst a Pollution Survey Unit was introduced to advise control measures (PUB 1971a). With the release of the Water Master Plan in 1972, which placed added emphasis on achieving self-sufficiency through expanding catchment area from 11 percent to 75 percent, PUB turned its attention to river estuaries in the north and west of Singapore where the stakes were all the more greater. The first project completed in 1975 entailed the damming of the Kranji and Pandan rivers (see figure 3.5), increasing the maximum storage capacity on the island by 42 per cent, although their contained waters were not being fully utilised until 30 months later (PUB 1978). Costing just under S$75 million, with the Asian Development Bank loaning S$25 million, the scheme added another 4,500 million gallons to Singapore’s storage capacity (ST 1972a). The search for suitable estuaries was driven even further afield from the CWCA during the 1970s, resulting in the Western Catchments Scheme that was completed in 1981 at a cost of S$67 million (PUB 1981). This scheme involved the damming up of four separate rivers- the Murai, Poyan, Sarimbun and Tengeh- to create impounding reservoirs capable of storing 31.4 million cubic metres of raw water, and laying 11 km of pipelines connecting them to the Choa Chu Kang Treatment Works (see figure 3.6). Located in unprotected catchments, the water was expected to have a different taste but be completely safe for drinking purposes, whilst requiring more expensive treatment technologies.

Figure 3.5 Kranji and Pandan Reservoir Scheme (circled in red)

Source: adapted from PUB (accessed at www.pub.gov.sg).

The more immediate area surrounding reservoirs would be brought under disciplinary duress. In 1985, PUB sunk S$500,000 into a scheme that would open up two areas around 63

Kranji to recreational activities, including landscaped sites for picnics, a children’s playground and a jetty for anglers whom would be at liberty to exploit the first fishing-friendly reservoir in Singapore (ST 1985a). However, whilst anglers were encouraged to relocate here they continued to frequent illegal sites as they harboured reservations about ‘restrictive rules’ prescribing the type of bait, time of fishing and available locations that served to straightjacket the sport (ST 1986a). The same applies to Pandan where both reservoirs came under ‘constant vigilance’ (PUB, 1970, p.1) by officers in boats and trucks, ready to sanction anyone caught littering, illegally fishing, swimming and breaking any other reservoir rules. A patrol of six rangers was established in 1986 to enforce anti-pollution and poaching legislation in the CWCA, which had expanded to ten by 1995, equipped with scrambler bikes, motor boats and retractable batons (PUB 1995a).

Figure 3.6 Western Catchments Scheme (circled in red)

Source: adapted from PUB (accessed at www.pub.gov.sg).

A second, more pervasive mode concerns the environmental control of water pollution. As catchment and urban areas increasingly overlapped due to the dual shortage of land and potable water, general anti-pollution measures became explicitly linked to water quality and thereby legitimised the stringency of the former (SCS 1980). The fact that the Anti-Pollution Unit (APU) formed in 1970 was placed under the Prime Minister’s Office is indication enough of how important the mitigation of pollutive practices has been to national development and security. Setting the tone for the ensuing decade, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew underlined the importance of curtailing water pollution in the first of his New Year Resolutions for 1971:

We must develop our water resources to the full. We should be able to collect and use between 25% and 35% of the daily average of 700 million gallons of rainfall (95 inches per year) by 1975

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to 1980. This requires stiff anti-pollution measures to reduce mineral particles and acid fumes in the air and extensive sewerage works. All sewage water from toilets, kitchens and bathrooms must go into the sewers; then, the run-off rain water can be pumped into reservoirs (NAS, 2012a, p.407).

Later that year, at the opening of the first ‘Keep Singapore Pollution Free’ campaign, Lee Kuan Yew declared a long-term programme that would rid all waterways of unattractive and harmful agents, as increasing available water resources was seen as ‘a matter of life and death’ (NAS, 2012a, p.589). In a special edition PUB newsletter commemorating the campaign, Seletar’s intake of proximate streams from an unprotected catchment was highlighted as a reason for the introduction of tough new measures (PUB, 1971b, p.4). This included the construction of water-sealed latrines and cesspits, resettlement or demolition of 1,053 pigsties, increased surveillance of the catchment by ‘watchdog services’ and enforcement of the Environmental Public Health Act (EPHA) (NAS 1969). The Ministry of Environment (ENV), set up in 1972, was charged with this monumental task, précised in the Presidential Address to ‘tackle the problems of pollution, to protect and enhance our environment, to increase our water resources…rain water must be collected unpolluted for domestic consumption’ (Hansard 1972a). Given that drainage infrastructure would be now serving to collect water rather than simply to alleviate flooding, it was proposed that comprehensive legislation pertaining to water pollution be revised and given 'sufficient teeth' to ensure the realisation of ENV’s ambitious mandate, which would be achieved through a dedicated parliamentary bill. This entailed the first enforcement action under the ‘Prohibition on Discharge of Trade Effluents into Water Courses Regulations’ since it was introduced in 1971 with 540 notices served on companies, and a near doubling of fines collected from litterers on the year before via the EPHA of 1968 (ENV 1972). With the renewed rigour directed towards water pollution by government officials, one Member of Parliament aired concern about the whole programme. Dr Tan Eng Liang, representing the constituency of River Valley, divulged his sense of misgiving that the new ENV would be heavy-handed in its treatment of Singaporeans, which would bring to bear ‘unnecessary hardship’ on them through ‘over-enthusiasm in the implementation of some of these policies’ and that there should be ‘flexibility in its enforcement as antipollution equipment is very expensive and this may cause a strain on the finances of some small manufacturing firms’ (Hansard 1972b). Nevertheless, the Ministry pressed ahead with its strict programme for pollution containment. This was rationalised by an imaginary of emergency, which concerned the ‘strategic importance of water’ under the ‘vagaries of nature and the whims and fancies of man’ (Hansard 1971). The water authority confirmed in no uncertain terms that ‘environmental control is a matter of survival’ (PUB, 1973a, p.1).

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3.4 Upgrading the hawker and farming sectors

The approach to hawker management taken by the state was undeniably disciplinary, and was a key strategy for alleviating water pollution throughout the 1970s. In their formerly dispersed, illegible incarnation, hawkers were deemed not just a traffic nuisance and visual blight on a modernising city but a public health problem, with their lack of personal hygiene blamed for previous outbreaks of cholera and typhoid (ST 1978). Commencing in 1971, the fundamental objective of the hawker resettlement programme was the comprehensive reconfiguration and subsequent regulation of hydro-social relations that could be neither sympathetic nor sentimental (PUB 1971b). Hawker activity was polluting and clogging up Singapore’s network of drains and waterways with discarded food items and general litter (ST 1972b). Furthermore, the supply of clean water was insufficient for washing, drinking and toilet facilities, causing contamination and spread of disease. State officials had grown ‘frustrated by an uncontrolled proliferation of illegal hawkers’, which could be mitigated trough spatial demarcation, education and enforcement (Hansard 1972a). Firstly, a census was taken between 1968 and 1969 of the hawker population to facilitate the process of licencing and relocation. The new licencing information acquired from the census rendered visible a population of 28,854 hawkers that could now be governed and circumscribed much more effectively than before, whilst those who had failed to opt into this process would be branded illegal. The newly formed ENV eagerly anticipated that the ‘licencing of hawkers will enable the Hawkers Branch to identify, control and contain the street hawkers’ and will allow for ‘more effective planning of raids, better deployment of officers and closer surveillance’ (ENV, 1972, p.32). With an initial sum of S$5 million released to ENV in 1972, licenced hawkers were resettled in large purpose-built centres fitted with sewage connections, piped water, toilet and refuse services, which were subsequently rented out at a subsidised rate of S$35. The first Food Centre was constructed in 1972 in Jurong Town Centre. Comprising 144 stalls, the second followed shortly after in the city centre, with two more opening the subsequent year (ENV 1990a). Currently, there are 107 distributed across the island (NEA 2014). Compartmentalised and assigned to individual booths of around 6 square metres (see figure 3.7), hawkers’ water consumption levels and practices could be monitored and duly mediated by water conservation and sanitation campaigns; ‘an absence of control on environmental cleanliness and standards of personal and food hygiene’ had been resolutely addressed (ST 1978a). More importantly, previously free water was to be charged from 1972 onwards, and the hawker centre with its partitioned stalls and connected pipes made possible this transaction (ENV 1972). As pretext for the introduction of water meters, PUB pointed to careless wastage of water by hawkers which would now be curtailed through self-interest and self-government, whilst increasing revenue for the state (ST 1972c, 1972d). Through what Foucault (1977, p.141) terms ‘the art of distributions’, each hawker was allotted an 66 administrative, cellular space by means of partitioning, from which they were individualised, profiled and ranked in accordance to a grading system based on hygiene and housekeeping. If a hawker failed an initial examination they would be unable to register as a legal food handler.

Figure 3.7 Tiong Bahru Food Centre with stalls in background

Source: Author (2011)

Although the hawker resettlement programme continued to gain acceptance through greater public investment- in 1979 the Urban Redevelopment Agency (URA) set aside over S$80 million for centre expansion (URA 1979) - the transition proved to be far from painless and required close cooperation with the police. During the first decade hawkers began to suffer from a loss of business due to their disconnection from regular clientele and higher rental rates imposed upon them, whilst residents living by centres complained about hawker rowdiness, uncleanliness and continued misuse of drains (ST 1978b, ST 1978c). More seriously, environmental inspectors were subject to sustained abuse and even assaulted by aggrieved hawkers wielding knives (Hansard 1974; ST 1979a). Accordingly, the government’s prediction that by 1976 hawkers would no longer be a major contributing factor to water pollution proved to be somewhat premature, as it was only in 1986 that itinerant hawkers were completely removed from the streets of Singapore and placed in stationary stands (ST 1971a; COBSEA 1986). The problem of unlicensed hawkers operating secretly in Housing Development Board (HDB) estates, bus terminals and places of worship would still remain, requiring tens of thousands of raids each year to forcefully accost them 67 during subsequent decades. Concerned Ministers consistently highlighted enduring tension but tended towards empathy for the hawkers, citing excessive, top-down regulations that seemed incompatible with the everyday kitchen setting and the confrontational approach to enforcement, involving covert surveillance and ambush tactics. Even within Parliament, there was a caricature of inspectors that represented them as uncompromising, bellicose and ‘inhuman’, striding into food centres to demand particulars or ‘hacking and pulling down’ the makeshift stalls of impoverished, unregistered hawkers (Hansard 1976a). Such tactics used by the ‘special squad’ included repainting vans in civilian colours, the use of mufti, passing jail sentences of up to 26 months and destroying seized items such as vehicles and bicycles (ENV 1989a). One Minister even purported that the authoritarian attitude of environmental inspectors had driven a hawker to suicide by jumping from a block of nearby flats (Hansard 1974). Under the new regime, if hawker practice did not comply with the standard protocol of the new food centres then they would be outlawed; there was little tolerance for improvisation when the health of the nation was at stake. Prosthetic gloves had to be worn at all times when serving food which meant that handling money became a huge inconvenience. Once money had been exchanged, hands would then have to be cleansed each time using the installed water taps, which was difficult during peak times. Similarly, preparation of popular dishes such as roti prata and popiah, requiring nimble finger and palm techniques, was rendered almost impossible under new guidelines insisting on contact avoidance (Hansard 1974a). Exacerbating this, all food had to be prepared on-site under the watchful gaze of the environmental inspectors without informal assistance from a third party, traditionally a family member, to allow for individual assessment and grading of hygiene. Indeed, discipline functions through the fixed individualisation of mobile multiplicities, which food centres were constructed to facilitate through strategically arranged walls and unobstructed corridors. Attractive and hygienic, these modern buildings were also key nodes of disciplinary power. With the revision of the EPHA in 1987, enforcement measures would come down on illegal hawkers much more strongly. It was suggested that existing legislation did not provide enough of a deterrent to those that took up illegal hawking in order to attain flexible work hours and gain some level of economic autonomy. The charge was increased from S$500 to S$1000, twice the median gross monthly income, and whilst it was acknowledged that these fines were extremely strict, it would continue to protect against maltreatment of drains (Hansard 1987a). The original EPHA had widened the scope of environmental control by introducing legislation specifically to deter the pollution of domestic reservoirs (Hansard 1968a). In 1975, the ‘Water Pollution Control and Drainage Act’ (WPCDA) consolidated and reinforced this legislation, providing the necessary ‘teeth’ for more effective catchment management. Mr Barker, then Minister for Law and the Environment, pitched the Bill to Parliament as a matter of urgency, which would take the necessary steps towards protecting water resources in what had become a more populous, industrial and urbanised country (see figure 3.8). 68

The Minister declared that existing water pollution laws were ‘inadequate and somewhat obsolete’ for that phase of development, which needed to be replaced by more stringent regulation (Hansard 1975a). These new provisions vested the government with extraordinary and unprecedented leverage over the urban water cycle. First, water could not thereafter be extracted from anywhere on the island without permission from PUB, which was now deemed the state’s exclusive property. Second, in regard to catchments, environmental control over farms, households, industries and other activities was extended in the interests of claiming run-off water for drinking purposes. Where considered appropriate, private owners would be required to construct and fund sewerage and drainage works on their land and maintain any other sanitary facility deemed necessary. Whereas previously only effluent from water closets and select industries was discharged into sewers, the act stipulated that all wastewater must henceforth be discarded in this way and in compliance with regulations regarding maximum concentrations of controlled substances. Inability to comply would result in a fine that would continue to be charged until the problem was rectified or the source of pollution removed, thereby providing a convenient premise for the relinquishment or resettlement of undesirable activities and industries.

Figure 3.8 Exponential population growth after independence (1960-2013)

6.0

5.0

4.0

3.0

2.0 Population (in (in millions) Population

1.0

0.0 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020 Year

Source: Singapore Department of Statistics

Along with hawkers, farmers were one of the first groups to experience the authoritative edge of this legislation in a sustained and targeted manner. Water pollution control had been purposefully extended into the farming sector under the ‘new concept’ and ‘totally new perception’ of unprotected catchments (PUB, 1973a, p.2). Already, pig farmers plying their 69 trade in the catchment area of Kranji Reservoir had been on the receiving end of strict water pollution measures. In August 1974, the year before Kranji reservoir was to be completed, 2,926 farms tending about 30 per cent of the country’s pig population were served quit notices citing the strategic importance and expense of potable water. Informed that they had eighteen months to vacate to non-catchment areas, farmers were urged to cooperate by government members reaching out through the press (ST 1975; COBSEA 1986). However, farmers complained of a lack of information regarding the alternative sites available to them, their size, lease periods and rental prices, which would clearly be essential for their making a decision to continue pig- rearing or finding work elsewhere (ST 1974a). Part of the explanation may be that the government had no real intention of resettling scores of small-scale farmers to alternative sites as they were planning to commercialise the farming economy which favoured large, corporatised companies with available capital. It was concerning this issue that a swirling debate took place within Parliament during the resettlement years. Ministers said to be defending ‘the fundamental principles of democratic socialism’ against ‘capitalist farmers’ pushed for government capital expenditure on infrastructure (Hansard 1974b). In addition, they argued that low-interest loans and subsidies should be made available for small-scale farmers, to protect their livelihood and to de-monopolise the diminishing agricultural sector. A particularly stinging stipulation of the resettlement plans meant that those tending to less than 0.5 hectares would not be compensated for their loss, which was fiercely criticised for discriminating against poorer farmers. One Minister summed up this not altogether unproductive predicament:

In order to comply with the regulations of the Ministry of the Environment…they should not pollute the water resources, they must construct a drain round the pig farms to ensure that there is proper drainage of the filthy water. But it costs a few thousand dollars to build such a sewage system. This is quite beyond the means of the small farmers. (Hansard 1975b)

Nevertheless, the Minister for Law and the Environment pressed ahead with a line of argument that perceived the phasing out of small-scale farmers as a natural consequence of an open economy, based on scientific management methods and more efficient production (ST 1973a; Hansard 1975b; Press release 1975). As Mr Barker surmised; ‘I think the backyard farmer will be pushed out. He is not really a farmer. He lives there with a few fruit trees, rears a few chickens and keeps a few pigs’ (Hansard 1974b). Whilst Minister Barker cites free-market economics and the standard narrative of land scarcity in Singapore as justification, what stands out are his allusions to water shortage as an irrefutable environmental reality. Posturing to the House, Barker deduced that ‘the question is whether they want enough fresh water or enough pigs…they have got to decide what they want. And sometimes the Government decides this for them’ (Hansard 1974b). Almost a year later exactly, the ultimatum is undeniably starker: ‘Water

70 comes first before pigs’ (Hansard 1975b). In response, MP Ho Kah Leong argued that ‘the problem is not so acute that we have to choose between water and pig production’. However, the spectre of water scarcity loomed large over urban planning decisions during this period of national development. A pig population of 217,500 was eventually cleared from the Kranji catchment by 1978. Larger enterprises that could afford cesspits and pig pens adjusted to alternative sites in Punggol and Jalan Kayu, whilst smaller farmers were forced to change profession or farming style without forthcoming subsidies (ST 1977a; ST 1979b). The strategic dovetailing between economic restructuring and catchment management was beginning to be exploited by the developmental state, which provided a conveniently technical basis for overtly political decisions:

The resettling of the pig farms was primarily to clean up the water catchment areas. In the process, the more enterprising local farmers have been encouraged to go into more intensive farming using modern mechanized methods and pollution control (Hansard 1982).

3.5 Restructuring along the Singapore River

This legislation provided the impetus for the biggest single drive in the battle against water pollution, symbolically announced by Lee Kuan Yew at the opening ceremony of Upper Peirce Reservoir in 1977. Just as the New Year Resolutions speech set the tone for the 1970s, Lee Kuan Yew’s reservoir reflections would define the ethos of the 1980s:

It should be a way of life to keep the water clear. To keep every stream, every culvert, every rivulet free from unnecessary pollution. I think the Ministry of the Environment…should make it a target in ten years to let us have fishing in the Singapore River and fishing in the Kallang River. It can be done. Because in ten years, the whole area would have been redeveloped, all sewage water will go into the sewage and run-off must be clean (NASb, 2012, p.387).

Whereas the Western Catchment Scheme was carried out on peripheral coastline territories and the Kranji-Pandan project displaced what were mostly small-time farmers, the comprehensive, clinical clean-up of the Singapore River and Kallang Basin was instead aimed at the geographical and imaginative nucleus of the nation. It was common currency within government that ‘rural people have been troubled by the development of catchment areas and reservoirs’, but given the emphasis put on self-sufficiency this was increasingly accepted (Hansard 1977a). However, the planned shift to urbanised catchments was premised on even greater interventions into the everyday lives of general citizens, executed in areas ever further afield from the original CWCA. The catchment area that would eventually come to serve Marina Reservoir alone was home to one million people. With desalination still too costly to undertake and reused water essentially in the experimental stages, there was little room for manoeuvre in land-scarce Singapore than to expand urban catchments. 71

Environmental control had been a staple component of land-use planning in Singapore since independence, with highly polluting industries sited together at a permissible distance from residential and other sensitive zones. However, when unprotected catchments were envisaged during the early-1970s, it was soon realised that greater control of development and human activities would be required to safeguard collected water from these areas. Policy was therefore introduced in 1983 which installed an urbanisation cap of 34.1 percent and a population density limit of 198 dwellings per hectare to contain future development in water catchments (MEWR 2009). The existing WPCDA was also strengthened in the same year to better protect vulnerable urban catchments from ‘wanton acts by irresponsible individuals and companies’, where fines for illegal discharge of toxic waste were doubled from $10,000 to $20,000, and a prison term of one year was introduced for repeated offences (Hansard 1983a).

Figure 3.9 Bedok Scheme (circled in red)

Source: adapted from PUB (accessed at www.pub.gov.sg)

Developed in parallel with the Singapore River clean-up and completed in August 1986 at a cost of $277 million, the Seletar-Bedok scheme was actually the first to benefit from tighter regulation of urban catchments, comprising two linked reservoirs 11km apart, a treatment plant and stormwater collection system (PUB 1986a). The reservoir expansion programme had veered east from the CWCA to tap unexploited catchments, which would come to supply 136,000 cubic metres of precious water per day (PUB 1984). Bedok Reservoir was initially proposed in 1971 after the HDB had undertaken land reclamation for a new estate at Tanah Merah, which required fill from the Bedok area (see figure 3.9). Feasibility tests on the pit occurred during the next five years which concluded that it could indeed hold water. Nevertheless, its catchment was relatively small, and worse, its runoff would be highly polluted due to the urban character of its surroundings therefore the project was postponed (Hansard 1976a). 72

However, just under three years later it was announced that the scheme would finally go ahead to increase Singapore’s reservoir capacity by 18 million cubic metres (Hansard 1978). This decision would have firstly been swayed by the progress made in controlling water pollution, and secondly, the small catchment of Bedok would be overcome by linking it to Lower Seletar Reservoir which was concurrently created by separating its namesake river from the Johor Straits with a 975 metre-long dam (PUB 1984). Bedok Waterworks was officially opened on 16 October by Lee Kuan Yew’s son Lee Hsien Loong, as Acting Minister for Trade and Industry (see figure 3.10). Unprecedented at the time, much was made of the urbanised character of the catchments that supplied the Seletar- Bedok water scheme, where it was even anticipated that they could be the last reservoirs to be constructed in Singapore (ST 1985b). The scheme necessitated the removal of existing inner- city settlements such as fish ponds, farms, residences and small industries which required one fifth of the whole Seletar-Bedok budget in compensation. This ensured a supply of water similar in quality to that sourced from the CWCA post-treatment. For water sourced from unprotected catchments, ozonation supplemented the standard chlorination treatment process as it is a more powerful purifier. With the development of reverse osmosis technology, caps on urbanisation and population density were deactivated in 1999, permitting Lee Kuan Yew’s vision for turning the Singapore River into a reservoir. The decade-long clean-up of the Singapore River and Kallang Basin, finalised a year after Bedok Waterworks opened, made this achievable. Singapore was being ‘virtually transformed into a huge water catchment area’ (ST 1983a).

Figure 3.10 Lee Hsien Loong opening Bedok Waterworks

Source: PUB (1986b, p.1)

73

Absolutely central to the timing of Lee Kuan Yew’s reservoir announcement was the wider economic context in which the environmental campaign took place. The urban renewal programme that had defined the incumbency of the PAP turned towards the Singapore River during the late 1970s, and therefore its overhaul became a matter of urgency for a changing economic landscape. Since attaining self-government in 1959, the PAP had focused its strategy for rapid modernisation on the Central Area located south of the Singapore River and adjacent to the main seaport. Urban renewal would literally lay the foundations for future economic development by levelling dilapidated high-density slum dwellings which had sporadically sprouted up over decades of laissez-faire colonial rule. Whilst the more immediate outcome of urban renewal was greater availability of safer, sanitary housing for lower-income peoples, clearance would simultaneously free up valuable city centre land for the gleaming architecture of a restructured economy based on services and tourism. The Concept Plan (see figure 3.11), first introduced in 1971 with the assistance of UN personnel, envisaged a ring of satellite towns around the CWCA, decentralised industrial zones and a Central Business District (CBD) that could be planned and built anew to serve a ‘proper economic role reflecting its high real estate value’ (URA, 1989a, p.14). The plan also expected internal water sources to supply fifty per cent of domestic demand on completion, achievable through reduction in water pollution sources and roll-out of drainage infrastructure to capture rainfall for supply (Tortajada et al 2013).

Figure 3.11 Concept Plan 1971 with catchment marked in striped green

Source: URA (accessed at www.ura.gov.sg)

74

To exploit this apparent ‘rent gap’ (Smith 1979), a bundle of essential planning mechanisms facilitated the transformation of the congested entrepôt infrastructure into a total business centre, amenable to the interests of international commerce and finance. These included rent control relaxation to encourage landlords to improve standards of residential and business blocks in line with the objectives of the ‘clean and green’ agenda; forced procurement of private and public property via the Land Acquisition Act; parcelling and locating of prime real estate through the process of land assembly; the sale of sites to private companies on 99- year long leases; to be utilised according to strict guidelines of development control conducive to government objectives (URA 1989a, 2004). Infrastructure such as transport and utilities networks also had to be provided by government alongside burgeoning private development, partly financed through ongoing land sales and annual surpluses. Then under the direction of the newly formed HDB, urban renewal was identified as a long-term project in 1960 that would be executed in line with successive five-year plans. With the building of affordable public housing well under way the board could turn its attention to the city centre two years later (HDB 1960, 1962). It was not until 1967 that private sector involvement was sought for the first time as part of a ‘tandem-team operation’, which saw the first sale of seven sites mainly geared towards the enlargement of the tourism sector (HDB, 1967, p.3). Following on the subsequent year, it was announced that the board’s main focus had been the courting of potential investors for urban renewal (HDB 1968), which would continue to occupy its efforts until 1974 when the URA took over this responsibility leaving the board to concentrate solely on housing provision. By then, the HDB had transformed 121 hectares of squattered land into hotels, shopping centres, eateries, entertainment attractions, office blocks and condominiums, which had begun to form the skyline that has now become emblematic of Singapore (HDB 1974). It should also be noted that initial stirrings for a comprehensive clean-up of the central rivers occurred immediately after the first sale of sites by the HDB, which represented a key milestone in urban renewal. Before the public reservoir announcement there had been previous and ongoing attempts by the government to rid the river of its accumulated filth and clutter, though this was largely an internal matter dictated via personal correspondences between government departments. Lee Kuan Yew first formalised his ambition for an unpolluted Singapore River in 1969, nearly a decade before it was publically announced and contemporaneous with the first sale of sites. In a confidential memorandum, Lee requested a report be drawn up by drainage engineers to prevent further pollution of Singapore’s main rivers, by firstly stopping effluence entering waterways, and secondly, through dredging, canalisation and instalment of sluice gates. This should ensure ‘clean, translucent water, where fish, water lilies, and other water plants can grow, and both sides of the waterway planted with trees, like willows’, and significantly, ‘also provide, during heavy rains, an additional source of water supply which could be pumped to a reservoir’ (NAS 1969). Marina Reservoir, eventually 75 completed in 2010, was initially conceived over forty years previous, and it was this nascent notion that served as a crucial provocation, and rationalisation, for the ensuing catchment clearance (see figure 3.12).

Figure 3.12 Marina Reservoir Scheme (circled in red)

Source: adapted from PUB (accessed at www.pub.gov.sg)

The report was finalised later that year, which emphasised the ‘septic conditions’ of Singapore’s waterways, the ‘ill-defined dirty mud banks’, and that both of these undesirable characteristics were principally an outcome of riverside squatters, derelicts, work yards, hawker- stalls and splintered wooden structures (Ibid, p.1). Whilst it was bad enough that these squalid and sordid abominations traversed, blurred and subverted a hydro-social boundary that was in desperate need of policing, they constituted a waterfront that was hardly representative of the modern, disciplined city that the PAP were so utterly keen to convey to private investors. The unregulated porosity of this boundary was verified by the fact that only half of Singapore’s consumed water found its way into the sewerage system; the other half, fifty million gallons per day, merged with surface run-off and emptied directly into waterways untreated. The most urgent objective identified by the report was control of pollution, from domestic and industrial sectors, and as a result of direct littering. This would be addressed through the demolition or resettlement of uncontainable sources of pollution; the expansion of effective disposal facilities, particularly sewerage; specific legislation that would eventually manifest as the WPCDA six years later; and ‘strong enforcement machinery’ (Ibid, p.5). Up until the mid-1970s, that is before the WPCDA came into force, pollution control was largely restricted to the banks of waterways: the dredging of beds, clearance of abutting or cantilevered structures, canalisation of river walls, provision of riverside bins and surveillance of littering at the water’s edge. After the introduction of this crucial piece of legislation 76 however, government authorities could begin to follow the polluted flows of water back to their original source at greater distances from the actual waterway and its tributaries, which was in line with the objectives of the broader urban renewal programme. The second objective outlined by the report, which concerned the beautification and recreational potentiality of the Singapore River and Kallang Basin, also reflected the ambitions of the renewal department at the HDB. However, it would be the third objective regarding the possibility of water supply and the ‘special significance’ of urban catchment regulation that would furnish the project with the necessary impetus to see it across the political minefield of a large-scale resettlement programme (Ibid, p.12). Therefore, although ‘it was agreed that the problem of pollution had to be taken first and that the PUB could then consider the probable utilisation of the water from rivers and canals’ (NAS 1969), the latter invariably justified the former throughout the entire clean-up process, and its sister project, urban renewal. The URA was inaugurated precisely to accelerate the comprehensive overhaul of the central area and create the ‘Wall Street of the East’ (URA, 1975, p.71). Whilst this process continued in much the same way as before, two significant modifications occurred with the passing of the baton from the HDB. First, considerable emphasis was put on injecting vibrancy into what was quickly becoming a dormant, sterile city after working hours, achievable through aesthetic, environmental improvement of open spaces and construction of inner city residential blocks (URA 1977). Second, assembled land sales to private investors picked up pace in line with the recovery of the Singapore property market in the late-1970s, which saw development occurring in areas hitherto untouched by urban renewal. Through generating $1000 million in investment after only ten years, URA general manager Alan Choe considered Singapore’s experience of renewal to be the sole example of a profit-making success anywhere in the world (ST 1978d). However, the negative consequences of urban renewal were comparably conspicuous. The unsentimental clearance of vernacular buildings came under a chorus of criticism, not merely because of their quaint and unusual appeal but as they provided a historical connection with an indigenous past. Buildings and streets in traditional ethnic enclaves such as Chinatown, Little India and the Arab Quarter may have been preserved in a material sense, but they have become sanitised, caricatured and ultimately disciplined versions of former geographies for the purposes of tourist consumption and city branding (Chang 2000). Then Second Deputy Prime Minister, Rajaratnam certainly did not hold back in his ruminations, whereby he castigated the ‘zeal’ with which private developers and the URA went about redeveloping the old town, amounting to nothing less than ‘vandalism’ (ST, 1983b, p.48). Authentic concerns such as they were, the changing aesthetic of the city was symptomatic of an even deeper shift in its underlying function: to serve a western-style, capital- intensive economy based on a high-end technical, managerial and professional workforce rather than entrepôt trade, and expansion of tourism (Hansard 1981). This is evidenced by the 77 astonishing growth in the financial and business services sector during the 1970s and 1980s. Low-skilled, manual labour and its infrastructure of reproduction had become anachronistic in its current location and capacity in the central area, as had the various industries through which it was gamely employed. The lower socio-economic class would be priced out, if not moved out, to allow for the influx of a worldlier, wealthier workforce fluent in finance, accountancy, insurance and other relevant professions, including their upgraded infrastructure of reproduction based on cosmopolitan city living. The increase in land sales during the latter 1970s property recovery inevitably precipitated further gazetting of undeveloped land in the central region, which in turn hastened the mass exodus of slum dwellers, shopkeepers and petty tradespeople. Although this was tempered somewhat by the insertion of limited public housing in and around the Singapore heartland, applicants holding on for this were deemed ‘choosy’ by the Minister for National Development Teh Cheang Wan, and were effectively threatened with an eight year wait, or alternatively, higher rental prices for flats in further-flung areas of Singapore (ST 1980a). Lee Kuan Yew also advised applicants not to waste their time waiting for flats in the central district (ST 1981a). With soaring land values, continued demolition of old buildings and government- controlled sales to avoid over-supply, it was inevitable that rents would spiral until a downturn occurred during 1983. Expatriates that had moved to the redeveloped central area began to complain of arbitrary rent rises of up to 200 per cent over two years for both office and residential space, prompting them to coordinate petitions for greater government regulation and to threaten leave altogether (ST 1980b; ST 1981b). Some office rents would go on to rise by as much as 400 percent in a two-year period in the early 1980s, leading one journalist to beseech ‘if prawns can survive in the Singapore River, why can’t professionals in the Singapore Republic?’ (ST, 1981c, p.15). The connection made here between the returning of aquatic life to the Singapore River and increasing rental costs in the central area is actually a valid one, for both phenomena are corollaries of the same process, urban renewal. Indeed, whereas incremental progress was considered acceptable during the first half of the 1970s, under the leadership of the URA with its renewed emphasis on environmental improvement in the name of aesthetic and recreational enhancement of the city, the license to rip-up and renovate the urban fabric was impatiently waved at those dwelling and working along the Singapore River. Moreover, the escalation in land sales had brought prestigious new commercial blocks to the banks of the river, including the United Overseas Bank, the architecturally unprecedented OCBC building at 52-storeys and the acclaimed shopping-cum-office High Street Centre (see figure 3.13), which together formed a ‘new skyline along the banks of Singapore River’ (URA, 1976, p.11). The vast expanse of reclaimed land referred to as Marina City was also nearing completion at the mouth of the Singapore River, providing added impetus (ST 1978e). It is not surprising therefore that the river was flagged in the URA’s plans for the first time the following 78 year (URA 1978). The river’s future lay in the service rather than entrepôt economy, where it was to become a memorable, consumable visual feature around which retail, entertainment and cultural amenities could be conceptualised and constructed, to attract both tourists and networking business workers. To fulfil this new function, the river would be realigned and embanked, its bed would be deepened, the lighterage industry would be relocated and warehouses cleared to afford land for the new leisure infrastructure (URA 1982). By 1985, the river had become a clear priority in the URA headquarters. The various initiatives aimed at restoration were eventually consolidated in a comprehensive Singapore River Area Redevelopment Plan that aimed to give it a ‘new economic role’ and ‘identity’ which would complement the broader commercial aspirations of the central area (URA, 1986, p.10).

Figure 3.13 OCBC Building overlooking the Singapore River

Source: URA (1985)

3.6 Catchment and the city

Whilst the development of the Singapore River was clearly crucial to the wider project of urban renewal, the political stakes would have been significantly higher if couched in the rhetoric of economic modernisation alone. Urban regeneration would occur ‘in line’ with the government’s policy on cleaning up the central catchments, almost as a natural addendum (ST, 1982a, p.1; URA, 1982, p.10). Indeed, the clean-up programme came under the direction of the ENV, not the URA. Therefore, not for the first time, the irrefutable environmental reality of water scarcity 79 was emphasised to essentially inevitablise the whole river improvement process, which would serve to depoliticise the replacement of the old with the new throughout the entire urban catchment. With the passing of the WPCDA in 1975, catchment clearance was given legislative teeth just in time for the URA’s accelerated mandate. The campaign was primarily justified by the urgent need for increasing water supply to meet increasing demand (see figure 3.14 and 3.15). This was communicated through a pliable press and government reports which both referred back to Lee Kuan Yew’s original speech that aired ‘anxiety over dry spells and water shortages on the island and emphasized the need to get clean water’ (ENV, 1990a, p.41).

Figure 3.14 Average consumption of water per capita

160

140

120

100

80

60

40 Water per capita in metres in capita cubic per Water

20

0 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 Year

Source: PUB Annual Reports

The front page coverage in The Straits Times national newspaper the day after the speech embedded it within the themes of ‘water rationing’ and ‘drought’ (ST, 1977b, p.1). This was unreservedly underlined in official government writing later that year: ‘The objective of the [clean-up] programme is mainly to further protect Singapore’s water resources’ (ENV, 1978a, p.2). During the ensuing clean-up process newspaper coverage would regularly return to the theme of water security, particularly when the ENV was set to expedite proceedings or a bottleneck was predicted (ST 1978f, 1978g, 1979c). The clean-up programme was spearheaded by one of Singapore’s most ubiquitous and influential civil servants, Lee Ek Tieng, then acting as Permanent Secretary of ENV. Whether managing sanitation schemes as he did in his early career, or overseeing the operations of international financial institutions as was subsequently the case, Lee tended to downplay the political resonances of his projects. Fellow civil servants working on the clean-up project 80 adhered to this same strategy, including Tan Gee Paw who along with Lee received the ‘Clean Rivers Commemorative Gold Medal’ from Lee Kuan Yew in 1987. According to Mr Tan, who would also go on to be PUB chairman, the Master Plan for cleaning up the central rivers emphasised that ‘it would cause a lot of social disruption, the social cost would be very high’, however, they would concentrate on purely engineering issues, thereby avoiding ‘the social, political part, that has to be managed by politicians’ (NAS, 2007, p.65).

Figure 3.15 Increase in the sale of water

600

500

400

300

200 Water in million cubic cubic metres in million Water

100

0 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 Year

Source: PUB Annual Reports

Just days after Lee Kuan Yew’s challenge was articulated in February 1977, Lee Ek Tieng made a request to the Finance Ministry for funds, shrewdly attaching a copy of the Prime Minister’s speech to emphasise the exceptional status of the mandate (ENV 1990a). The ten- year project would eventually go on to cost approximately S$300 million (MEWR 2009); a not insignificant sum for a country still emerging from ‘third world’ status. However, as would have then been known, the investment would be vindicated many times over by a surge in surrounding land values not to mention the political prestige of the PAP. After receiving immediate approval from the Finance Ministry, Lee Ek Tieng and Tan Gee Paw began to arrange the first draft of the Master Plan and remarkably, by April, it was ready. As Mr Barker later confirmed, the plan favoured preventative source control over end-of-pipe solutions, complemented by education and enforcement (Hansard 1977b). It was ventured that the Prime Minister would know whether the project had been successful or not if aquatic life returned to the Singapore River, being a wetter equivalent to the canary in the coalmine. The scale and scope of the project was decidedly daunting. The Singapore River and the 81

Kallang Basin catchments cover 9,300 hectares or one sixth of the total land area of Singapore, which then included approximately half of the country’s urbanised area (COBSEA 1986). The Kallang Basin drains five rivers, the Rochor Canal, Whampoa River, Kallang River, Pelton Canal and the Geylang River, which then converge with the Singapore River in Marina Bay. Given the aspirational branding scheme for Marina Bay, which will be examined in the sixth chapter, the assurance of clear waters from these adjoining waterways would be uncompromisingly critical. With the vastness of this urban catchment a wide range of previously quite innocuous traditions became primarily referred to as ‘sources of pollution’, even though in some cases they were over 2 kilometres away from the central basin. These included 1,110 small farms tending 75, 600 pigs and 1, 250,000 ducks; 4, 926 street hawkers; 46,187 squatters, 21,000 unsewered; 66 boatyards; 390 fruit and vegetable wholesalers; 769 lighter boats; and various other backyard industries (see figure 3.16).

Figure 3.16 Singapore River and Kallang Basin catchment area

Source: ENV (1987b)

Homes and workplaces were represented by conspicuous black dots on government maps to represent their location in relation to the catchment area. According to Tan Teng Huat, Chief Engineer of Pollution Control, the most effective method for public relations was to emphasise the greater good for the nation, first in terms of a cleaner environment and the associated recreational and development opportunities that came with this, and secondly, the creation of water resources that may one day be available to future generations (ENV 1990a). In 82 early 1980 the Environment Minister Mr Lim Kim San warned the squatters, farmers, hawkers and lighter workers in no uncertain terms of a ‘big drive to clean up the waterways’ (ST 1980c). The HDB were charged with rehousing squatters in alternative accommodation within eight years, or even earlier for those located on land gazetted for development; a task made all the more complicated and controversial given that approximately half were on private property that necessitated enforced acquisition (COBSEA 1986). Those eligible for resettlement benefits were offered ex-gratia compensation based on government fixed-rates and prioritised for public housing, which they could purchase under the Home Ownership Scheme with no down-payment required. The clearance of the Kampong Bugis settlement was a key government priority as it was considered a serious ‘eyesore’, ‘fire hazard’ and ‘death trap’, but also ‘one of the main sources of pollution in the Kallang Basin Catchment’ (COBSEA, 1986, p.2). It was composed of rudimentary, high-density housing for 3,000 residents without access to modern sanitation facilities, constructed in close proximity to 150 small-scale industrial sites, five warehouses, 12 boatyards, 50 shops, 12 Chinese temples and other miscellaneous buildings. All catchment- based squatters had been successfully cleared on target by 1986. In a similarly executed spatial reorganisation to the hawker resettlement programme which was itself accelerated as part of the clean-up (between 1978 and 1985 nearly 5000 were cleared from the Singapore River and Kallang Basin catchments), industrial sites lacking a sufficient cordon sanitaire were relocated into flatted factories that were sub-divided into markedly more governable 100 m2 modular units (Ibid.). From here, it would be possible to licence more effectively, meter utilities consumption and supervise activities. Likewise, fruit and vegetable sellers that were previously and hopelessly scattered around the catchment area were amassed in the S$27.6 million Pasir Panjang Wholesale Market in 1984, rendering them and their produce almost completely transparent to the gaze of government authorities (ENV 1984). This capacity for surveillance and regulation through architectural legibility was clearly demonstrated with the on-site outbreak of the SARS virus in 2003. In this instance, the market was immediately closed and all 2,400 workers tracked down, forced on home quarantine by private auxiliary security service Cisco, and with the help of an emergency amendment to the law, they could be charged without the inconvenience of a court appearance (ST 2003a). With the assistance of the Primary Production Department, squatters connected to pig and duck farms had been completely cleared back in 1983 after it had been decided that farming in all catchments would be phased out in order to control water pollution (ENV 1979; ENV 1983). The remaining 3,259 piggeries were offered improved compensation rates and given two years to cease activity, although larger modern farms with at least 5,000 pigs could apply for relocation to Punggol alongside those from Kranji which had been at the centre of an ongoing political wrangle. Similarly, larger farms holding more than 1,000 ducks were permitted to continue if they agreed to construct modern enclosed facilities; any small-scale farms still remaining were threatened with prosecution under the WPCDA. 83

3.7 Phasing out the lighter industry

Amongst all this upheaval, it was the demise of the lighterage industry that prompted the greatest outpouring of public sympathy. Lighterage was emblematic of the traditional industries that had become anachronistic in the city centre, a tenacious and parochial reminder of a past that was not in keeping with the new, future-oriented global city brand. This cut particularly deep for all those involved in the industry, as it was only twenty years earlier that the Singapore River Working Committee officially sanctioned the river ‘primarily as a waterway for the safe passage in lighters or similar craft and the means for the efficient and economic loading or unloading of the goods of trade’ (NAS 1955). The entrepôt economy had relied on a constantly available fleet of lighter boats that would ferry goods between larger ships that could not enter the shallow and narrow waters of the Singapore River and storage facilities located on its docks (Dobbs 2003). Yet, the Singapore River did not flow solely for the economic benefit of merchant traders; it had a secondary, contradictory function that would ultimately take precedence. Whereas trade favours a wide and deep waterway with low velocity for stable shipping, effective drainage of rainfall and sullage requires a fast-flowing, unimpeded river to ensure a self-cleansing system (NAS 1955). Thus, in the interests of achieving a visually appealing river, the lighter boats simply had to go. However, given the romanticised heritage of the lighter tradition and its relation to the cultural identity of Singapore, the clearance had to be executed with judicious sensitivity. The fate of lighterage had been decided and acted upon prior to 1977, whereas the reservoir speech essentially served as a very public warning that marked the beginning of the end for the industry. The objective of economic modernisation was once again addressed in tandem with the imperative of water security, where in this case a waning, laborious mode of haulage that ‘would have died a natural death’ anyway, finally gave way to the ruthless efficiency of containerisation (ENV, 1990a, p.89). At the beginning of the decade, Mr Alan Choe, then head of the HDB renewal department, had prematurely prompted the Lighter Owners’ Association to petition the government with the disclosure that their industry would have to relocate to Pasir Panjang when urban redevelopment reached the banks of the Singapore River (ST 1970a). Whether it was to detoxify an untimely admission or perhaps the coordinated response from the union startled the government, the following year it was announced that the relocation would ‘not take place in the near future’ after all (ST 1971b). This also satisfied the Economic Development Board (EDB) as they had been a consistent cheerleader of lighterage given its historical and ongoing contribution to the economic buoyancy of Singapore. Yet, by the mid-1970s, the national press was reporting an unfortunate double blow of devastating proportions, where a slump in industry activity coincided with an insufficient uptake of jobs by the next generation (ST 1974b; ST 1975b; ST 1976a). This quick turnaround in fortunes may have something to do with the enforced phasing out of lighter builders in the upper section of the Singapore River at the turn of the decade and 84 the growing sense of uncertainty surrounding the industry since the inauguration of containerisation (NAS 1970). With the announcement of the clean-up campaign in 1977, the Port of Singapore Authority (PSA) first turned its attention to the growing number of abandoned lighter boats that were strewn throughout the central rivers (ST 1977c). Rotting and sunken, they were a sad representation of a dying industry and a serious blockage to the circulation of the Singapore River. The same year, the PSA landed another blow on lighter workers when they were ordered to use repair facilities inconveniently located at the Serangoon River rather than at the nearby boatyards in Kallang Basin (ST 1977d). Whilst the incremental ratcheting of riverine regulation had served to strangle lighter activity throughout the 1970s, the clean-up programme provided a robust rationalisation for their eventual displacement. From 1980 onwards, when the ENV shifted their strategy, reasoning for the removal of lighterage would largely revolve around the issue of water pollution. Now, not only was the lighterage industry an embarrassing eyesore, economic irrelevancy and cause of considerable congestion in the city centre, damningly, it was deemed one of the main sources of water pollution in the catchment area (ST 1980d). The Lighter Owners’ Association soon adapted their appeals to the inescapable exigencies of this environmental reality. Aside from initial attempts to transpose blame to the drains that supply the river, the union demanded its lightermen adopt the necessary personal sanitary measures and advocated the instalment of a supervisory body to monitor and mitigate river pollution and oversee the construction of contained warehouses, all of which would have been funded by levies on goods passing through the waterway (ST 1979d; ST 1980e). However, these final throws of the dice were swiftly dismissed as such by the government. By September 1983, with the help of Marine Police and Port Patrol craft, all lighters had been removed from the various waterways that had been their working domain for over a century and a half (ENV 1983). The 800 displaced lighters moved to the new S$25 million facilities at Pasir Panjang, which included a breakwater to buffer the open port’s stronger waves, a repair site, buoys, jetty, canteen, toilets and refuse bins to encourage workers not to transfer littering habits to their adopted location (COBSEA 1986). Yet, echoing the familiar refrain of those exiled by water pollution control, lighter workers complained that their alternative accommodation was inconveniently located, much costlier as their previous site had effectively been free to use, and insufficient for the large number of applicants it attracted (ST 1979d; ST 1982b). Similarly, whilst the last remaining boatyards were encouraged to amalgamate into larger more economically viable enterprises that could afford to maintain adequate water pollution measures such as floating booms and oil interceptors, urban renewal had driven land values up therefore rising rents were soon beyond what the boatyard operators could feasibly manage. Before the end of the 1980s, derelict boatyards were being guzzled up by condominium developers that were to prosper in a new era of waterfront usage (ENV 1990a). 85

Almost ten years after Lee Kuan Yew’s reservoir speech, water quality in the Singapore River and Kallang Basin had improved dramatically as a result. Scientific tests showed that dissolved oxygen levels had doubled, its demand by organic matter had more than halved and nutrient levels had decreased by a factor of ten in some tributaries (COBSEA 1986). The first signs of aquatic life had been reported back in 1980 when hardier species of fish returned to some rivers and canals (ENV 1980). However, it was the sudden appearance of crabs and the aforementioned prawns that caused the biggest stir, epitomised by the crowds of people that turned up wielding rods and nets at the Singapore River after the ‘prawn delight’ news story broke the day before (ST 1981d, 1981e). For the first time in modern history, a regatta was held in 1983 on the Singapore River along with other recreational activities which gestured to the future role of the waterway (ENV 1983). Four years later, this role was officially consecrated during the twelve-day ‘Clean Rivers Commemoration’ in September 1987. This riverside extravaganza, consisting of theatrical performances, watersports, competitions and festivals, marked the success of the clean-up campaign and aimed to instil in the public a sense of pride in their national waterway (ENV 1987a). Orderliness and cleanliness was inscribed in the island’s landscape, and it was this representation of Singapore the Government was eager to express as ‘a clean city and its environment reflects a disciplined and organised society with an efficient infrastructure’ (ENV, 1987b, p.36).

3.8 Conclusion

Catchment management under the colonial administration was characterised by the narrow interests of British mercantile trade, where water supply and drainage measures were prioritised for select European districts and commercial shipping. The intention was to insert Singapore and its circulation of water into wider networks of entrepôt trade, a central requirement of what Foucault termed the urban problem. This served almost exclusively to further the sovereign influence of Britain in Southeast Asia, leading to malarial infestations, frequent flooding and a dilapidating system of public standpipes in indigenous areas, mirroring circumstances in other colonial or dependent settlements (Gandy 2006b; Kaika 2006; Kooy and Bakker 2008; McFarlane 2008). Illustrative of Foucault’s (2007) arguments on sovereignty, water circulation tended to cluster around colonial vantage points during this period, where public infrastructure and territorial connectivity were certainly not prioritised by a parsimonious, extractive regime that refused to assume overall responsibility for a national population. Here, circulation was managed in order to fasten political sovereignty more closely to the territory, augment state wealth and propagate colonial orders and law. The main focus of this chapter was the swarming of disciplinary mechanisms and subsequent proliferation of closed systems that occurred once Singapore became a self- governing nation in 1959. As Foucault argued in respect to industrial urbanisation in Europe, 86 sovereign power was found to be qualitatively insufficient for responding to the logistical and governmental exigencies associated with rapid economic restructuring. An intractable and floating population would need to be transformed into a productive, respectable and amenable workforce for employment in the growing industrial economy (Foucault 1977). This should be understood as part of a longstanding agenda concerning the culling of casual, small-scale and dispersed industries to allow for the corporatisation of socioeconomic activities occurring in Singapore. The argument being made here is that pollution control for the sake of securing water supply has been instrumental in facilitating and legitimising this transition of economic modernisation, constituting a process of internal colonisation by urban catchment management. As catchment was gradually extended into urban areas, various social groups were brought under a general programme of discipline which entailed the resettlement of hawkers, farmers, squatters, grocers and boat workers into enclosed spaces to facilitate centralised distributional supply, surveillance and regulation measures on the authoritative premise of water security. This effectively hard-wired the state into existence, alongside other infrastructural developments, providing the technological means through which land and revenue could be accumulated whilst governmental reach was extended into the everyday lives of the population. According to Mitchell (1991a), the closed systems of discipline are what gave the modern state a continuous impersonal authority and visible material effect, which would rigorously organise space, channel flows and separate mobile elements. Feared and mocked in equal measure, the environmental inspector and reservoir patroller provided the eyes and ears of the state as infrastructural expansion necessitated and facilitated their proliferation across the territory, further impressing upon citizens the administrative boundary between population and water circulation. For the first twenty years of independent rule, groups were separated from the environment in which they worked and lived. When citizens were subsequently reconnected to water, this would be effected under strictly controlled conditions made possible through the production of administrative space and installation of modern plumbing. This provided a techno-political apparatus through which government could be orchestrated from a distance, where the habits of restraint and docility could be inculcated in the conduct of water users through pricing, education and fines. An integrated system of protocols, material infrastructure and practices would also serve to endow the state with ontological solidity and durability (Callon and Latour 1981; Joyce 2013). Thus, in the words of Miller and Rose (2008, p.200), this vast technological system connecting citizens and their intimate habits of everyday life to a centrally administered water network constitutes ‘a machine for government’. The following chapter will consider the consequences of internal colonisation for material water flows and how this further enabled the consolidation of the emerging modern state.

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4. Diluvian dilemmas: Canalisation and the anti-flood programme

The emphasis on making things concrete is a reflection of the value modern culture puts on objects- objects endowed with solidity and integrity. Conventionally, the concrete seems solid, terra firma (Sennett, 1990, p.209).

4.1 Introduction

This chapter continues to explore the nature of disciplinary governance and its material expression, concrete modernism, in terms of the consequences for water itself. Between the 1950s and 1980s, top-down, technocratic solutions prevailed to demarcate and exhaustively police the boundary between water and the city. Rivers and streams were ‘corrected’ and violently circumscribed whilst surveillance and data-gathering technology rendered water visible to state officials even as it descended underground in ever greater volumes. Focusing on anti-flooding measures, this chapter reveals how water was conceived as something to tame and conquer, as part of a programme that was contemporaneous with the general zenith of the modernist approach to water governance (Bakker 2003; Kaika 2005). An aberration to the modern mind-set, flooding became the literal embodiment of Corbusian fears of the fluid, transgressing boundaries and geometric order. During this period, the only acceptable solution was to completely liberate the country of flooding events, to immediately banish water to the sea or at least have it securely incarcerated in concrete. My underlying argument is that concrete is a particularly pliable material, a ‘political plastic’ (Weizman, 2007, p.5), through which administrative centralisation can occur in the interests of state formation and consolidation. A tried and tested technology of modern statecraft, concrete is a ductile yet enduring demarcator, sometimes brutally, of both urban space and social order, which continues to divide, connect, elevate, detrude, exclude, contain, disperse and channel the circulation of people and things long after it initially sets (Harvey 2010; Minuchin 2013). As Forty (2012, p.14) exclaims, 'concrete tells us what it means to be modern...[it] realized the prospect of transforming nature, and of transforming ourselves and our relationships with each other'. An engineer of urban life, the modern planner has at their hands a versatile inventory of possible interventions, to rearrange space and reconfigure relations between humans and their material surroundings in the interests of centralised government. For modernists like Le Corbusier, walls, tunnels, thoroughfares, apartments and parks are marionette strings for the conduct of conduct cast in concrete, where progress is sought through 'hardware' and not a small amount of despotic paternalism, rather than 'software' and the administrative adaptability of more contemporary forms of neoliberal regulation. As Foucault (1977, p.220) asserted, 'the disciplines use procedures of partitioning and verticality’ to divide, segregate and govern through binary logics, to achieve the modernist dream of pure, mono-functional circulation (Bauman 1991; Scott 1998). 88

This chapter focuses on the national canalisation programme, which sought to contain waterways in culverts and trapezoidal drains, symbolising and sustaining an essentially hydrophobic relationship between water and the population (see Kaika 2004). Modernisation would be measured in kilometres of laid or lined canal, enacted by a task force of engineers and evinced by the growing separation between the city and water. During this high watermark of concrete modernism, water wouldn’t just flow but proceed in file; its natural transience would be tempered by the intransigence of state bureaucracy. However, a discursive discontinuity would begin to form with the Drainage Master Plan of 1975, where floodwater was increasingly accepted as a material, statistical reality in the city as security emerged as the predominant mechanism of urban governance. This was a consequence of both the inevitable realisation that nature cannot be completely subjected to engineering expertise and a response to the counterproductive implications of closed systems, namely increased mosquito breeding, littering and loss of valuable land. Henceforth, what was deemed 'natural' and 'normal' occurrences of flooding became open to dispute, between the state, media and the public.

4.2 Anti-flood measures in the colonial era

Whilst in power, the colonial administration had not coordinated a comprehensive plan to mitigate flooding due to its having extractive, narrow interests in the economy of Singapore. Like catchment management, flood mitigation was orchestrated on a largely ad hoc basis. However, on gaining independence and a national population in 1965, the PAP pursued anti- flood measures with prodigious enthusiasm in line with their industrialisation policy, culminating in a comprehensive canalisation programme. The programme was principally aimed at the elimination of flooding that had long afflicted the nation with its anarchic disregard for terrestrial boundaries and human life, although increasingly it would be oriented towards the capture of water for potable supply. Being a relatively low-lying country with 65 percent of its territory sitting less than 15 metres above sea level, Singapore has historically suffered from watery inundations. Rochore Canal was constructed within the first two decades of the settlement being founded to redirect massive volumes of rainfall safely into the Straits of Singapore, which had quickly made the country famous within colonial circles (Little 1848). Buckley (1984 [1902]) delights in his account of a man that attempted to canoe from the Tanglin area, located approximately 3 km inland, to the sea during a period of heavy rainfall. The boundary between land and water in early modern Singapore was far from being fixed; it was entirely changeable and negotiable, suddenly shifting with the tides and turns of the weather. Regular flooding therefore used to be an aspect of everyday life in the port city as was the general presence of water in many areas of town. The Singapore settlement in the mid- eighteenth century, we are told by the surgeon-cum-topographer Robert Little (1848), was characterised by an ‘abundance of moisture’ (p.449) resulting from the perpetual showers and 89 monsoons that frequently crossed its path each year. In these early decades, land surface consisted largely of ‘sand and mud’ brushing up against ‘extensive marshes’ (p.467), which meant for a population of around 3,000 based along the banks of the Singapore River ‘constantly living in swamps’ (p.469). Certainly, the ‘continual verdure’ that thrived on Singapore’s superabundance of water could give the impression of ‘exuberance and fecundity’ to outsiders, but residents complained that its ‘continued sameness’ grew tiresome (Thomson, 1847, p.628). Some years later, American zoologist William Hornaday (1993 [1885]) visiting Singapore for the first time in 1878 quickly bemoaned the ‘mud’, ‘stagnant water’ and ‘dismal mangrove swamp’ that had to be traversed to enter the relative sanctuary of the town, which itself comprised of ‘dingy and weather-beaten Malay houses standing on posts over the soft and slimy mud’ (p.2). However, this would change at the turn of the twentieth century with a greater epidemiological understanding of malaria. That standing water provided an excellent breeding ground for mosquitos had become common public knowledge. One concerned citizen wrote to the Sanitary Board about the ‘disreputable condition’ of drains in Singapore, which in their ‘present state must be a congenial abode of malaria typhoid and other fever germs’ therefore ‘a war of extermination must perforce be waged against them without even so much as a moment’s delay’ (EDM 1907). The colonial administration was consequently forced into action and began to construct a basic backbone of a drainage network that would prevent swamp formation and rain pooling (SFP 1912). Considerable drainage work commenced in Telok Blangah located southwest of the main town, and several streams were trained and deepened on the advice of the anti-malaria committee, initially amounting to S$190,000 (ST 1913). Over the ensuing decades a rudimentary drainage system would slowly emerge consisting of artificial channels and deep, exposed street drains to channel stormwater, whilst some natural streams were concrete-lined, entirely so in select European districts (Dobby 1940). Since these initial measures were first taken, prevention of flooding and elimination of standing water would prove to be a Sisyphean task requiring constant government attention and funding. By the middle of the twentieth century, Singapore was facing what the Public Works Department (PWD) described as an ‘enormous drainage problem’ and the ‘alarming soil erosion’ of earthen banks of conveyance canals, exacerbated by a labour shortage and lack of engineering expertise (ST 1951). Set up in 1951, the Joint Committee on Flood Alleviation therefore recommended that a single drainage authority should be established so as to better coordinate response to flooding, backed by strong legislative powers to acquire land and implement the first comprehensive, island-wide drainage plan (ST 1953). In addition, the chronic lack of technical expertise that was severely hampering the deployment of drainage infrastructure would also have to be addressed, which, like the clogged-up canals that were intensifying urban flooding, posed a ‘serious bottleneck’ to the development of Singapore’s waterways and the literal emergence of a modern city (CCS, 1954, p.32). In 1955 for example, 90 only S$28,229,227 of an available budget of S$41,193,951 was spent by the Engineer’s Department in light of these manpower restrictions (CCS 1955). Against this disconcerting backdrop, the 1950s nevertheless saw unprecedented and year-on-year investment growth in drainage as the relevant departments set about restoring the infrastructure which had fallen into disrepair under the Japanese occupation. Moreover, the post-war expansion of housing estates and roads had also resulted in more impervious land coverage and therefore a reduced absorption rate of rainfall, ‘giving rise to an abnormal increase in the surface water run-off’ (CCS, 1955, p.3). Major improvement works were carried out on the Stamford, Bukit Timah, Orchard Road, Alexandra, Whampoa, Kallang, Geylang and Rochore main canals, others were created anew such as Ulu Pandan, and miles of minor canals and drains were realigned, enlarged, concretised and annually dredged (CCS 1953-1959). A pivotal moment came in 1955 when Mr F. Pelton, an experienced drainage specialist, was flown in from Kuala Lumpur to formulate an urgent anti-flooding plan and head a new department as Chief Drainage Engineer, staffed through an emergency recruitment and training programme (SFP 1954; SFP 1955). The last quarter of 1954 had been the wettest for 85 years causing pervasive flooding, during which the immediate need for an island-wide plan ‘became obvious’ (PWD, 1954, p.30). On discussing the matter in Parliament it was considered prudent to establish the scientific basis of flooding before any further action was taken, which would be ascertained through the appropriate hydrological and topographical surveys executed by Pelton. However, another pivotal moment had occurred in 1955, with the first legislative assembly in modern Singapore to include a majority of locally contested seats rather than colonial appointees. The decision to temporarily stall significant funding for anti-flood measures was taken by the newly established Labour Front Party, whom had won these momentous elections and was governing over a partly autonomous coalition government. A young lawyer for the opposition party, one Lee Kuan Yew, took the political opportunity to deride this decision claiming that it was the product of ‘timidity’ and a ‘completely unimaginative frame of mind’, which could be avoided through increased taxation to fund drainage works and ‘bring home to the people that democratic Socialism can deliver the goods’ (Hansard 1955). In response, a clearly exasperated Labour Front MP replied in mock imitation

$60 millions on flood control! Have it straightaway! Good heavens, give it to the City area alone! Never mind the rest of the island! We have not got a plan yet? Never mind! Spend the money! There is no need to have plans and no need to survey the island! No need to find out where the water comes from and where it goes to! No, just spend the money! Have some boldness, audacity, temerity, courage! Do not run away!" Oh, it was a lovely speech! What he meant by it was just nothing at all. Does he seriously think that we are going to spend $60 millions without having a proper survey and a proper plan? (Ibid, column 1042).

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In response, and with an arrogance becoming of a future leader that would be regularly criticised by other members of the house, Lee Kuan Yew calmly suggested ‘how about getting the plans quicker?’ (Hansard 1955a). The intertwining of partisan politics with the ostensibly technical exigencies of drainage infrastructure was given its bend knot in the very first year of locally contested elections. Nevertheless, despite an almost complete lack of extant hydrological data (PWD 1956c), a report was submitted in early 1957 in which Pelton estimated that it would cost in the region of S$32,740,000 to ‘beat the floods’ that frequently beset the island, which was a figure that astounded the government and did not even include the associated expense of land acquisition (ST 1957). Whereas drainage work had hitherto been piecemeal and temporary, with an explicit directive at hand it could subsequently be carried out in a more focused and organised manner. Administrative capacity of flooding control would be progressively centralised through the roll- out of an extensive drainage system, which in turn would constitute a fundamental if rather mundane component of the wider project of consolidating and legitimising an emergent independent state. Canals, culverts and flood statistics assume a decidedly political role here, particularly when this infrastructure regularly figured in the unfolding of a nascent party politics. Administrative centralisation would not occur immediately however, as whilst knowledge of the flooding problem was no longer lacking on account of Pelton, the necessary funds to implement the schemes most certainly were. Just one year after Pelton completed the survey and formulated his overall plan, the Labour Front Party publically thanked the drainage expert for his three and half years of service that was completed under difficult conditions but admitted to having let him retire, and worse, that none of his recommendations could be executed due to financial restrictions (Hansard 1958a). Exploiting another opportunity for political point scoring, Lee Kuan Yew remarked ‘so much for the Minister's theoretical socialism in the face of hard facts - and wet ones at that!’ (Ibid.). However, it was duly emphasised that when funding did become available Pelton’s plan would be immediately put into action, now estimated to cost S$60 million for flood prevention in the city alone. With funding increasingly made available, Pelton’s guiding philosophy was to be set in stone, or concrete, as it were, which conceived that ‘the main drainage problem was to find a suitable outlet to the sea for flood waters’ (ST 1955). It was deemed convenient and correct to incarcerate the ‘flood menace’ (Ibid.) and promptly convey it to the hinterland where it would be released at a reassuring distance from the sanctuary of the city, to be rightfully returned to the savage swelling and chopping of that aquatic other, the sea. Given Pelton’s professional background in hydraulics, it is unsurprising that this approach finds verification in the ‘structural engineering paradigm’ that has been dominant since the nineteenth century, which seeks to ‘separate water from people’ through ‘infrastructure, such as dams, levees, walls and dikes’ (Kelman and Rauken, 2012, p.144). Evidently seduced by the heroic disposition of the engineering profession, MP Francis Thomas matter-of-factly stated that ‘the nature of the 92 problem…is essentially one of scientific control of vast natural forces’ therefore government ‘must proceed scientifically in this matter if we are to get any useful result’ (Hansard 1955b). Still very much in thrall to the technological sublime after the departure of the Chief Drainage Engineer, Mr Thomas would reiterate this ethos which would serve as a rallying call for what he envisaged to be the strictly scientific development of drainage over the next three decades:

The first point is that we have to get the water right off the land and into the sea, or else we have to retain it in a properly planned and constructed reservoir. It would be useless to approach this flooding problem on a short-term vote-catching basis. It would be fairly easy sometimes to shift the flood water off the land of political supporters and on to the land of political opponents. But I would not wish to do that and I am sure that my honourable political opponents on the Opposition Benches would not wish me to do it to them. The only way to deal with flood problems is by proper overall schemes after a full study of the facts…The problem of flood control will, I am afraid, remain with Singapore for a good many years to come and will involve quite considerable cost and, consequently, quite considerable taxation (Hansard 1958b).

As a result, by the end of the 1950s, the modernist division between city and water, reason and folly, was beginning to materialise in the urban landscape. Although large-scale works were not possible at this point, extensive linking and lining of the existing drainage network over the previous half century had created the foundations for an island-wide vascular system; technological veins would soon be throbbing with contained flows of stormwater, crisscrossing other essential circulations transporting potable water, sewage, traffic, electricity, gas, inter alia. These blue veins had spread out more democratically across the territory during 1958 with the City Council becoming fully elected, which saw the drainage programme start to enter into the poorer areas of Singapore (CCS 1958). However, it wasn’t until the following year that a fully elected government would come into power for the first time in Singapore’s history, which saw the PAP dissolve the City Council and bring flooding alleviation under the purview of the Marine and Drainage Branch.

4.3 Industrialisation, canalisation and communism

Inexperienced and without the economic, political or military backing of the departing British administration, the PAP had the unenviable assignment of maintaining national security during a difficult decade that would see Singapore become completely independent in 1965, acrimoniously jettisoned from the Malay Federation. With this in mind, the inheritance of the colonial drainage network presented both a great challenge and auspicious opportunity for the legitimacy of the new Government. To remain in office in a country with democratic elections now installed, the electorate would expect the PAP to maintain a convincing mastery of floodwater, bringing its intractable, capricious nature under the control of this emerging modern state (figure 4.1). 93

Figure 4.1 Partly completed canal at Pasir Panjang

Source: PWD (1961)

Some of the ground work had in fact been laid and whilst it was nowhere near sufficient enough to be sweated, incremental expansion of the existing network could potentially reap significant political reward. The PAP soon realised that latent in this vast material infrastructure were votes for future elections, and success in the expansion of flood prevention would reflect positively on their campaign. Indeed, Lee Kuan Yew’s tears during a live television broadcast announcing the reluctant separation from Malaysia would not be the only waterworks that would give the government political leverage for re-election. Appearing to be tough on flooding would consequently become an integral part of general government strategy. Lee Kuan Yew made regular visits to rural constituencies to promise drainage provision, much to the chagrin of opposition politicians who accused him of electioneering on the fruits of collective taxation. Language preferred by the colonist administration of ‘beating’ and declaring ‘war’ upon the ‘flood menace’ was duly adopted and exaggerated by the PAP in the ‘battle against the flood problem’ (SFP 1960). The Four Year Development Plan, 134 pages in length and ‘scientific’ in character, laid the foundation for future flood prevention. Launched by the PAP in 1961 to support the policy of rapid industrialisation, it relied on the ratification of foreign loans from the World Bank to support S$871 million of government investment. Besides the urgent issue of finance, the plan requested acquiescence from the labour force, particularly trade unions and communist agitators, ‘to observe a code of conduct which amounts almost to a code of discipline’ (Hansard 1961a). Industrial peace was considered to be essential to the economic restructuring of Singapore. In 94 addition to domestic stability, infrastructural expansion was prioritised as a means through which foreign investment could be secured to reduce Singapore’s reliance on a limited entrepôt trade and employment regime. As one PAP member then proposed, reciting an enduring mantra that still resonates today, ‘[c]apitalists are all realists. They will only invest if there is a stable, social, political and economic situation that is beneficial to them’ (Ibid.). Most conspicuously, affordable housing for a future industrial workforce was to be constructed requiring 40 percent of the overall budget, introduced to replace the existing slums. Infrastructure for increasing water supply was also prioritised for industrial development, which as the previous chapter demonstrated led to a large-scale scoping exercise for catchment expansion. During a period of island-wide rationing in the early 1960s (PWD 1963), this prompted oppositional politicians to predict a ‘riot’ if water was redirected from domestic to industrial consumption as part of the Development Plan. However, of particular interest here, drainage was identified as a central component of industrialisation and agricultural development therefore S$12 million was ring-fenced for its rapid expansion (Hansard 1961a). In the six built- up regions that Pelton earmarked for immediate improvement in his report, drains were carved out, enlarged and concretised to increase discharge capacity and ensure swifter water flows out to sea, necessitating expensive machinery and the relocation of squatter settlements (see figure 4.2). Simultaneously, to prevent cyclical tidal surges from flowing inland from the opposite direction into the city, river gating was installed in places that were at most risk from this invasion of otherness. Now, with the PAP installed and media mollified, it would appear to the public that ‘Singapore’s flood problems are at last getting the attention they deserve’ (ST 1961). By 1962, the PWD boasted that flooding in the city centre had been all but eliminated therefore their attention would be turning towards outlying rural areas (PWD 1962). But as Singapore rapidly modernised, urbanised and populated during the honeymoon years of the PAP, the case for further flood protection became ever more compelling (see figure 4.3). Totalling S$3,265,710, expenditure on drainage in 1964 actually amounted to more than the previous three years put together (PWD 1964). The evident lack of progress made with drainage during the first three years of the Development Plan was, quite predictably given government strategy at the time, blamed on ‘obstruction by squatters which was engineered and encouraged by pro- Communist groups as part of their deliberate policy to frustrate development in the State’ (Hansard 1963a). Settlers of Kampong Kembangan were warned of a ‘Left-wing political plot’ being coordinated by the Rural Residents’ Association to halt a S$15,000 drainage project, through which the Government sought to turn local villagers against the group on the basis that their homes would be left vulnerable to flooding (ST 1962). Pamphlets were distributed by the association accusing the Government of undercompensating those that had been resettled to make way for the drain, whilst suggesting that bungalows were going to be built on the acquired land.

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Figure 4.2 Outlet in construction at Tampines

Source: PWD (1963)

For the PAP, this represented a convergence of the triple menace posed by squats, communism and unruly water, all acting in unison to obstruct modernisation. It is not altogether surprising therefore that the parliamentary representative for Kembangan would be found imploring the Government to improve the standard of living of its population five years later, stating ‘the people in the kampong do not get proper or adequate treatment as compared to people who live in the built-up areas’ (Hansard 1967a). In addition to frequent flooding events, the dilapidated state of the drainage system was preventing water from flowing freely leading to mosquito breeding and accumulation of rubbish. Similar accusations would be made by other MPs of rural, poorer constituencies. The representative for Changi was laughed at during a parliamentary session for suggesting the wealthier Bukit Timah area had received millions of dollars of funding for drainage improvement, largely because ministers tended to buy homes there (ST 1970b). On the other side of the house, opposition politicians were also inclined to exploit this sensitive situation with Mr Chia Thye Poh, a political prisoner of Singapore from 1966 to 1998, claiming that the PAP had been so preoccupied with its ‘anti-Communism crusade’ that drains had been left to clog and collect water resulting in a cholera epidemic, and ultimately, the deaths of two Singapore citizens (Hansard 1963b). This indictment came after a motion of no confidence was rejected in Parliament the year before, coordinated by the leftist political party Barisan Sosialis in response to what they perceived as the ‘Fascist abuse of power’ of the PAP,

96 and ‘their constant invoking of the Communist bogey to threaten and intimidate the peace- loving people of Singapore’ (Hansard 1962). The Government did accept that blocked drains were indeed creating environmental conditions conducive to the large-scale return of mosquito and fly breeding, and therefore announced that water rationing periods during the day would be prolonged to allow for the cleansing of the drainage network (Hansard 1963c).

Figure 4.3 ‘Correction’ of Opera Estate drain

Source: PWD (1964)

In response to recurrent criticism from opposition politicians, Mr Lim Kim San assured ‘it is our objective to see that there is a through flow of water in every public drain and if the Member can bring to my notice or to the notice of my Ministry any specific instance of a drain being clogged, we will send men to see that it is put right.’ (Hansard 1964). An Emergency Cleansing Corps initially consisting of 200 workers was established in 1965 to clear blocked drains, particularly in areas frequented by hawkers, which would be gradually increased to a sizable taskforce of 600 (Hansard 1965). The mosquito problem nevertheless became so acute that concrete slabs covering some sections of the drainage system had to be permanently removed to allow access for cleansing and unblocking of culverts, which unfortunately entailed ‘exposing the bowels’ of the ‘city to the public or to visitors of our fair city’; a measure that some MPs believed was far from appropriate for a progressive, modernising nation (Hansard 1968b).

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Condescending lectures castigating the behaviour of the general public were common during this time, which sought to emphasise the successive association between littering, clogged drains, stagnant water and disease. One particular address on how a localised outbreak of typhoid fever was attributable to the public not washing their hands proved patronising enough for one minister to call it ‘embarrassing’ as ‘residents have been doing this since they were kids’, and instead blamed ineffective drainage infrastructure in the area (ST 1971c). A premium was put on visibly flowing water that was of course contained in fixed conduits, although, as cabinet politicians were frequently reminded by backbenchers, this was a rare sight to behold in many constituencies, particularly rural ones. Many pleaded with the Minister responsible for drainage to ensure a proper flow of water in order to prevent the foul smells that were upsetting nearby residences. Already, this Sisyphean undertaking was proving to be difficult to uphold, and the slowing and stagnation of water provided an all too obvious metaphorical measure for the PAP’s political reputation. However, despite these early setbacks and political standoffs, the PWD would take on a more active role in the years subsequent to independence as economic development was assigned an unrivalled significance in terms of ensuring Singapore’s very survival as a sovereign country and infrastructure was an essential facilitator, including that of flood control (PWD 1968, 1969). After independence, infrastructural and economic development would not be aggravated by a leftist critique as what remained of the Barisan Sosialis party removed themselves from opposition benches due to their inability to contest government policy effectively, leaving all parliamentary seats to PAP candidates until 1981. This was mainly due to the skilful campaign conducted by the PAP to suppress opposition voices through harassment and imprisonment, whilst branding them as communists in the press and in Parliament on account of their socialist sympathies. Furthermore, and somewhat relatedly, the Singaporean economy was profiting from the American presence in Vietnam as part of their global campaign against communism, seeing annual trade with that country increase from S$50 to S$300 million over a five year period, alongside that with Indonesia after diplomatic reconciliation (Hansard 1967b). With the geopolitical and domestic environment as they were, the time was ripe for rapid industrialisation and construction of its supporting infrastructure, with the PWD given an additional fund of S$250 million in 1968 to pursue this agenda (Hansard 1968c). Whereas previously drainage infrastructure had been a strategic locus for ideological clashes and political polemic, canalisation could now be executed in an expediently depoliticised discursive climate of modernisation and scientific progress. Flooding events would instead become the foremost threat to the legitimacy of the PAP, engendering a physical and political effectivity to force change in governmental practice and instigate an unfamiliar brand of public dissension.

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4.4 Mr Barker’s promethean pledge and the Bukit Timah scheme

No doubt buoyed by these propitious circumstances, Mr Barker (see figure 4.4), Minister for Law and National Development at the time, boldly surmised that ‘the real answer to the problem [of development] is to eradicate flooding completely’ (Hansard 1967c). In 1967, Tan Gee Paw, who would go on to partner Lee Ek Tieng in the Singapore River and Kallang Basin clean-up campaign ten years later, had only just joined the PWD fresh from college when he was charged with engineering the first multi-million dollar anti-flood initiative in Singapore. As elsewhere, rapid urbanisation of the Bukit Timah catchment had resulted in increased and more intense instances of flooding, which happened to be the worst in Singapore (PWD 1968). One of the most disruptive in a decade occurred there in early 1967 when six inches of rain descended in eight hours, which saw huge traffic jams, widespread telephone outages and children reportedly washed away by ‘swirling flood waters’ (ST 1967a). A month later, many sections of Bukit Timah main road were submerged under three foot of water, prompting a repeated sense of general panic among residents and stranding hundreds of children in schools until floods receded later that evening (ST 1967b). Unfortunately this flood-prone district would again be inundated by a two foot surge before the year was out (ST 1967c).

Figure 4.4 Mr Barker (right) with Lee Kuan Yew (centre) at Seletar Reservoir

Source: PUB (1968)

In response to this particularly wet period for Bukit Timah, the PWD made an announcement in the New Year which stated their commitment to ‘taming the floods’ and provided an update on the status of mitigation works (ST 1968). Whilst the existing 50,000 foot

99 canal could clearly not cope with the increase in surface run-off, it was not possible to enlarge its width due to adjacent buildings along its length- extensive urbanisation was both impetus and obstacle. The solution was to create two diversion channels that would connect Bukit Timah Canal to the Ulu Pandan River to the west and Kallang River to the east, thereby providing outlets to the sea for excessive rainfall. Given the unprecedented expense of the project, the Bukit Timah Flood Alleviation Scheme (BTFAS) would have to be completed in two phases. Costing approximately S$7 million for seven local tenders, the first phase would take five years to complete when a canalised connection consisting of 10,388 feet of concrete was eventually made between the beleaguered Bukit Timah Canal and the Ulu Pandan River in 1971 (PWD 1972). Indicative of a more robust approach, it commenced the same year that a hydrological survey was taken which was coordinated to collect data for the formation of an ‘overall’ drainage master plan (PWD, 1968, p.39). In line with Pelton’s comprehensive designs on stormwater, it would be conceived on a nationwide basis to ensure the centralisation of flooding alleviation, similar in sentiment to the supply-side Water Master Plan that would surface four years later in 1972 (see previous chapter).

Figure 4.5 Discharge measurements being made on Bukit Timah Canal

Source: PWD (1968)

The resulting hydrological information fed into the planning of the first phase of the BTFAS, where it was essential to secure complete control over the flow of water from 2,670 100 acres of the catchment to the sea, including not only ‘discharge capacity but also to guard against excessive sedimentation, excessive velocities at draw-down conditions and instability of flow’ (Ibid., p.39). Water shouldn’t just flow in other words but follow a predictable path, and come under constant supervision to ensure as such. In 1968, the first hydrometric station was built on the Bukit Timah Canal to record hourly flow rates and discharge volumes, whilst 59 gauges were installed at various waterways across Singapore for measuring flood levels (PWD 1969). The roll-out of data-gathering technology would soon gain momentum with a further six hydrometric stations opened during the next five years (ENV 1973). Whereas Pelton had complained of a dearth in hydrological statistics, graphs and models, with the implementation of these novel recording measures water could at last start to be ‘seen’, its evasive materiality and supreme mobility rendered visible, calculable and therefore governable by the relevant authorities (see figures 4.5 and 4.6).

Figure 4.6 Map showing flood gauge distribution

Source: PWD (1968)

Whilst the first attempt at containing overflows in Bukit Timah was recorded back in 1935 without success, it was confidently envisaged that with the implementation of this first phase flooding in the area would be reduced by 60 to 70 percent, and be totally eradicated with the completion of the second (PWD 1968.). The PWD promoted the project as emblematic and a ‘mile-stone in the technical progress of Singapore’ (PWD, 1971, p.13), as significantly, the entire stretch of this new canal would be cast in concrete and include the largest ever tunnels then constructed in Singapore with an internal diameter of 18.5 feet (see figure 4.7). These tunnels would convey enclosed stormwater for nearly 1000 feet, seeing it descend underground

101 and out of the national consciousness for the first time. Eventually, over a third of this water would be redirected to Pandan Reservoir for water supply. By 1969, the originally ‘sluggish, meandering stream’ Ulu Pandan that was ‘badly in need of re-aligning and general improvement’ (PWD, 1968, p.42), had been transformed into a straightened earth canal ready for the redirected stormwater from the Bukit Timah catchment, creating a hydrological highway headed directly to the sea.

Figure 4.7 Twin tunnels below Military Hill

Source: PWD (1970)

The second phase would not be initiated until 1985 and would take five years to see through to completion, then being the largest project ever undertaken by the environment department, reducing flood-prone areas within the catchment from 142 to 15 hectares (ENV 1990b). The number of tenders put out for its construction was identical to the first phase involving seven contractors, although the associated costs were significantly more substantial coming in at approximately S$180 million. The impetus was very much the same as twenty years before: relentless urbanisation of catchment areas during the heyday of economic development in Singapore had greatly increased surface runoff in Bukit Timah, causing stormwater to travel horizontally through the city, and in larger volumes, rather than vertically into the soil. Despite optimistic government projections pertaining to complete eradication, 102 flooding had continued to beset the area throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s as the whole island experienced something of a decade long deluge. This was due to the rampant urbanisation that occurred during what the UN called Singapore’s ‘decade of development’, and more specifically, extended suburbanisation through the expansion of New Towns under the HDB. To the alarm of the Government, increased flooding was attracting much media attention and regular condemnation from a weary public. Given this developing trend in public opinion, Tan Gee Paw felt compelled to explain that although the first phase of BTFAS did alleviate flooding in the area, it was no longer adequate to keep up with the rate of urbanisation:

We can expect the flood situation to deteriorate as further land development takes place. We are studying this matter carefully as flood alleviation schemes are expensive to implement…Many areas were built in pre-war days without proper drainage plans- land is too low, drains are too narrow. There was no proper authority then to take care of these matters…For the older parts of the city there is just no way we can alleviate flooding (ST, 1980f, p.8).

Sharing the burden of public disclosure, the head of the Drainage Department Ling Teck Luke announced several days later that residents of Bukit Timah ‘must learn to live with floods’ (ST 1980g). And it was against this unfamiliar refrain of environmental realism, begrudgingly acknowledging that unruly water could not be completely banished from society, that the second phase commenced. For the first time in Singapore, a computer programme costing S$850,000 provided the necessary rainfall and runoff modelling data for phase II (ENV 1982), whilst government tenders for large-scale expansion of drainage infrastructure would also provide a timely boost to a flagging national economy. The scheme would involve the reconstruction of 2.2 km of the original Bukit Timah Canal and the creation of a 4.4 km diversion channel connecting it to the Kallang River, which, as with the Ulu Pandan, would be ‘improved’ in order to manage the increased volume of flow. Directly linking the gaze of the state with its apparatus of intervention, a telemetry system was also installed consisting of eight sensors that would not merely collect hydrological data as before but automatically warn the police when water rose to dangerous levels (ENV 1989b). Additionally, smaller subsidiary drains would be widened and developed, including the Pelton Canal, which rather appropriately cemented the legacy of the Chief Drainage Engineer in 3km of concrete. Yet, this act could also be seen as the sympathetic burial of his design philosophy and of colonialist planning principles more generally, where gung-ho concrete modernism would finally be laid to rest in a country where a longstanding faith in total environmental control was in fact wavering. Indeed, whilst government predictions and reportage pertaining to the technological efficacy of the drainage scheme was still undeniably optimistic and resolute, there was a conspicuous absence of the hubris shown at the completion of the previous phase in 1971. It was instead envisaged that the scheme would ‘alleviate flooding’ in Bukit Timah (ENV, 1985,

103 p.19), not totally eradicate it as originally supposed (ST 1966; ST 1969; PWD 1968). Rhetoric did become more convincing as the project was finalised but an enduring sense of unease would continue to check the promethean ambitions of the state drainage programme, which had symbolically admitted defeat to the Bukit Timah floods in the early 1980s. This begs the question of what occurred or was learned during these intervening years that prompted this shift from hubris to hesitation in government communiques. Certainly, the BTFAS is an essential piece of engineering that continues to mitigate dangerous and disruptive transgressions of water into the everyday life of the citizens it protects. However, it is specifically significant to the thesis being put forward here as the two construction phases effectively bookend the high watermark of the modernist agenda for water control in Singapore. Before this period containment measures were largely ad hoc and temporary; subsequent to its passing with the completion of the alleviation scheme in 1990 security mechanisms were increasingly being introduced to bring people back into contact with water. Indeed, during the official completion ceremony of Phase II Minister Ahmad Mattar declared in his speech that future drainage projects would achieve recreational as well as functional objectives (ENV 1990c). With phase I commencing in 1966 and phase II approved in 1985, the intervening period also roughly equates with the temporal focus of the thesis thus far: the reservoir expansion programme and its urban catchment management practices, the hawker resettlement initiative and phasing out of pig and duck farming, the ratification of the WPCDA and the clean-up of the Singapore River and Kallang Basin. All of these initiatives were implemented during this period of high modernism where social relations were severed from water, whilst top-down, technoscientific solutions prevailed under a general programme of discipline. The canalisation programme during these years, which was accelerated under the ENV, epitomised the essentially hydrophobic approach to urban planning and design (see Kaika 2004). As we shall now see, the inevitable shortcomings in achieving the impossible dream of entirely containing the unruly otherness of water are illustrative of the difficulties and delusions of disciplinary modernism, which is as exhausting as it is exhaustive.

4.5 Flow follows form

Riding the wave of enthusiasm that had swelled with the completion of the first phase of the BTFAS, anti-flood measures were fast-tracked once transferred to the newly inaugurated ENV a year later. Another important departure from previous strategy was that drainage would subsequently be managed not merely in terms of flood alleviation but for increasing abstraction of water to be put to further use, potable or otherwise (Hansard 1972c). During its first annual term, to match the enhanced rate of development 52,600 metres of canal was cleansed and 2,540 drainage construction projects were undertaken representing a fifty percent increase on the previous year (ENV 1972). This included the first partially closed drainage system in Singapore 104 that would conserve land space and mitigate water pollution by concealing it underground, adding to the subterranean streams being conveyed from Bukit Timah via the celebrated flood alleviation tunnels (see figure 4.8). This was the outcome of a hydrological report begun in 1969 which had stated with some regret that all stormwater drains then belonged to an open system, and although the cost of a closed network would be approximately two and a half times greater it would contain and protect water more effectively (NAS 1970). The expenditure for this first project would be S$9 million and executed in the Telok Blangah New Town, which coincidentally was the very same area where the first modern drainage infrastructure was constructed by the colonial regime exactly fifty years earlier. Finished in 1975 with the assistance of the HDB, the project illustrates just how much innovation and technology had advanced from the initial foray into flood control at the beginning of the century, whilst revealing that the authorities were increasingly determined to direct water beneath both the physical and conceptual surface (ENV 1975).

Figure 4.8 The first partially closed drainage system

Source: ENV (1972)

More than before, under the ENV the anti-flooding programme would come to resemble a coordinated military campaign, executed by a taskforce of engineers working at the behest of the state. According to Tan Gee Paw, an obvious student of the Pelton school of thought, ‘the battle cry in those days was build the canals, send the water out to sea, relieve the flooding’ (NAS, 2007, p.57). Even with an extensive drainage infrastructure in place, the then Head of the Drainage Department admitted ‘it was a difficult time…the bulldozers were bulldozing down 105 the rural areas, people were being re-sited, and each time the bulldozers come in to do away with the vegetation the floods will come…the situation became quite intolerable’ (Ibid., p.56). The flood of 1969 provided a particularly poignant impetus for the effective containment of unruly waters, which claimed the lives of five people, made 3,000 others homeless and caused S$4.3 million in damage (ST 1987a; MEWR 2009). Seventeen inches of rain fell in one day- the heaviest since records began in 1931- which became deadly when it coincided with an unusually high ten foot tide, producing eight feet of flood waters in some places (ST 1969). A PWD engineer, quick to indicate that the first phase of the BTFAS was nearing completion, confessed that flood alleviation had hitherto not been taken all that seriously at state level. However, with the rapid rate of urban development occurring in Singapore at the time, coupled with the huge social, political and economic fallout from the flood, the engineer considered that the significant cost of better drainage infrastructure would now be entirely justifiable (Ibid.). Indeed, the relation between water and unreason had never been more palpable to the grieving citizens of Singapore, nor had the desire for its incarceration. Following the 1969 storm ‘every heavy shower now alarmed and caused panic to residents in the Bukit Timah area’ (ST 1970c), whilst the HDB promised to make flats ‘watertight’ in response to residents’ constant fear of flooding (ST 1970d). The PAP and their concerned constituency therefore faced an apparent paradox: as Singapore continued to modernise at an unprecedented rate and drainage infrastructure was being upgraded and installed at an equally extraordinary speed, instances of flooding were becoming more frequent and severe. The decade long deluge that subsequently occurred was hardly the outcome that many citizens expected of economic growth and development, and indeed, it would come to resemble something of a slippery sermon on the folly of human progress, akin to the fall of Prometheus in Greek mythology (Kaika 2005). Throughout the 1970s regions across the length and breadth of Singapore- Tampines, Geylang, Changi, Bedok, Tiong Bahru, Rochore, Tanjong Pagar, Potong Pasir, Woodlands, Jurong, Orchard, Bukit Timah, the City Centre inter alia- would be regularly inundated with rising water including areas that hadn’t previously experienced flooding. Floods turned over cars and buses, stranded school children, churchgoers and commuting workers, marooned trails of traffic, damaged houses and offices, induced landslides and uprooted trees, caused injuries from currents, passing debris and pile-ups, and occasionally led to cases of drowning or death by related accidents (ST 1972e; ST 1973b; ST 1974c; ST 1976b; ST 1976c; ST1977e). Incredibly, Farrer Park, an area adjacent to Bukit Timah Road, flooded eight times in just one year, and this was after the completion of Phase I of BTFAS (ENV 1973). Flooding was at risk of becoming a normal aspect of everyday life. At one point teachers would pull on rubber boots or roll up trouser legs in the event of a flood to continue with their lesson, leaving behind a rippled wake in the murky water as they paced through rows of children (ST 1974d). When they were unable to travel to school, children took to the flood waters instead to swim and splash

106 about with their friends, whether this was inside their house or on the street depended on the severity of the storm. Besides wanting to restore some semblance of order to the city-state, the Government moved to capitalise on the public sentiment of suspicion directed towards water to further legitimise its continued incumbency. Given the great deal of distress and disruption that floods were now creating, Tan Gee Paw and the Drainage Department at large had come to the decision that ‘it had to be done almost overnight’ (NAS, 2007, p.57), or with much greater haste at least. Prompted into action, Lee Ek Tieng shirked the Ministry of Finance and took his demand for S$100 million straight to cabinet level whilst granting it special emergency status, just as he would do again for the Singapore River and Kallang Basin clean-up in the interests of environmental security. Proof of the growing reputation of the young engineer, he would entrust the dispensation of the funds to Tan Gee Paw, stating quite unequivocally ‘we got to resolve the flooding’ (Ibid.). The five-year Drainage Master Plan was introduced in 1975 to guide the accelerated development of anti-flood measures, which would be implemented at the considerable cost of S$148 million (ENV 1975). The plan officially reiterated what had previously been professed by the government on various occasions: rapid construction of buildings, highways and other infrastructure combined with the filling in of swamp basins was preventing effective absorption of rainfall and tidal surges, resulting in widespread instances of flooding throughout Singapore. Whilst this could be construed as something of an admission and confession on behalf of the state, this was accompanied by definite plan of action. Where possible, existing drains and canals in areas such as Kallang, Ulu Pandan, Pang Sua, Bedok and Geylang would be widened and reinforced; main rivers would be improved further; and a pre-emptive approach to drainage would be adopted as a preliminary measure for future development. Henceforth, the Drainage Department would have to be constantly consulted throughout all subsequent development proposals, to analyse the hydrological implications of each application, recommend drainage options and stipulate construction requirements (ENV 1975). The passing of the WPCDA the same year would again provide the necessary legislative teeth for the governmentalisation of water, in this context prioritising drainage projects on the basis that ‘a free flow of water’ is ‘essential’ for national development and security (Hansard 1975a). To ensure the free circulation of water throughout the territory of Singapore, substantial new provisions for drainage were enacted that would ‘empower the authority to construct and maintain any drainage system’, thereby requiring private ‘owners to execute any drainage work to provide for better drainage’ (Ibid.). If it was deemed in the interests of the state, private drains could be appropriated by Government or owners may be ordered to improve and expand a drain without compensation for loss of land. Similarly, as the erection of structures over drains and canals may obstruct the flow of water, this would subsequently be restricted or dismantled by state officials in order to restore what was 107 considered to be a nationally sensitive circulation. Whereas in the previous chapter it was shown that the WPCDA extended the reach of government into the everyday existence of squatters, hawkers, farmers and lightermen amongst others, here drains also acted as tentacles of internal colonisation probing into the domain of villagers and construction workers, providing a penetrative and pervasive locus for social discipline and restructuring. The WPCDA incorporated provisions for earthworks that would govern construction workers’ relationship with water. The role of the Superintending Officer (SO) in overseeing work carried out by private contractors on drainage infrastructure is illustrative of the disciplinary approach to water governance adopted during this high modernist period. Certainly, the craftsmanship of external contractors was rarely disputed by the government in their urgent development of Singapore’s drainage system, and their promethean spirit was something to be publically admired and extolled. An engineer himself and Head of Drainage at the time, Tan Gee Paw reminisced that ‘contract after contract were called. The contractors were all busy digging drains, digging canals…there was a contract where even as the contractor was digging the canal, we were planning and designing the canal downstream…the contractors rose to the occasion, I would say, you know. They brought in their machines, we supervised them’ (NAS, 2007, p.57). The essential task of supervision was delegated to the SO, a disciplinary figure who was the representative, embodiment and eyes of the state always located on site. The SO was a prime example of the ‘petty managers of social and subjective existence’ or ‘little engineers of the human soul’ that Miller and Rose (2008, p.5) have identified as key to the enactment of ‘government at a distance’. Operating alongside that of the environmental inspector regulating hawker behaviour in food centres, these minor experts administered peoples’ quotidian encounters with water through the deployment of mundane tools and procedures. All work carried out by the contractor was to be executed to the ‘entire satisfaction’ of the SO, whilst it was the contractor’s sole responsibility to complete the project in a definite amount of time and to a specified standard of accomplishment (ENV, 1978b, p.1). To facilitate the process of supervision, the contractor would have to submit an initial programme for completion and thereafter regular progress reports, which had to be strictly adhered to once confirmed. The contractor was also expected to provide a secure on-site office for the SO, to include a lavatory, washing facilities, utilities, necessary electrical appliances, drawing instruments, car parking, furniture and fittings to the approval of its intended occupant, and be relocated ‘as often as the SO may direct’ (p.5). Mechanical equipment used by the contractor was first to be approved by the SO, who was in a position of authority to suspend temporarily or permanently its use, or to advise the employment of an alternative tool or technique at the contractor’s expense. Besides equipment, working schedules were at the behest of the SO as well, and if deemed appropriate in the interests of safety or expediency, ‘or for any other reason whatever, the contractor shall, when ordered, carry out works or any portion thereof continuously by day and by night without extra charge’ (p.6). At any time during the project 108 that an inspection of the drainage works was demanded by the SO, and subsequently rejected by the contractor, the SO had the authority to access the drainage works without permission and cut out that which was considered substandard. Comparably stringent were the regulations for safeguarding water circulation during general construction works. Again, enforced by authority of the WPCDA, water flows that passed through, over or nearby the site had to be kept clear at all times, and it was the role of the SO to ensure as such. In this respect, ‘every practical precaution to avoid interference with the flow of stormwater through the drain, canal, culverts and other side drains’ (p.6) would have to be taken to avoid blockage. ‘If the SO considers that any temporary structure erected in a drain is obstructing the flow to an extent more than necessary…he may, one hour after notifying the contractor or his representative, employ whatever labour and plants to demolish such structures at the expense of the contractor’ (p.6). Additionally, all ‘methods of controlling the flow of water shall be adequate for this purpose in the opinion of the SO, and shall be constructed in a rigid, workmanlike manner, sufficient to withstand water pressure at its highest level’ (p.7). Any instances of leakage and flooding were to be immediately corrected by the contractor and the associated costs thereby covered, whilst all potholes caused by the works had to be promptly filled. Another minor expert and instiller of hydro-social discipline, the Public Health Inspector made regular visits to worksites to ensure against the presence of potholes which if left unattended would collect water and encourage the breeding of mosquitos. At the parliamentary reading of the WPCDA an MP complained of inspectors’ propensity to be arrogant and reproachful to construction workers rather than being cooperative, citing an example where a foreman was called ‘stupid’ for not realising this could occur, and irritably told ‘these potholes will collect water when it rains, and therefore mosquitoes will breed in them. Do you not understand this?’ (Hansard 1975a). Condescending and commanding, this disciplinary approach to water governance contrasts sharply with the flexible, decentralised style that was adopted from the 1990s onwards, which is explicated in the subsequent chapter. My argument here is that by focusing on the mundane skirmishes that occur between state officials, workers, citizens, engineers and other professionals at the water’s edge, processes of governmental restructuring can be captured in their everyday technical and spatial detail.

4.6 The turn to security

Whilst water governance would continue to be a largely disciplinary affair until the late-1980s, the Drainage Master Plan of 1975 actually marked the beginning of a shift to more flexible methods in one important respect. Here, for the first time, movement towards a loath acceptance that flooding would be an element of urban life in the long-term was perceptible. The same Mr Barker that had less than a decade earlier reckoned the complete eradication of flooding to be not only desirable but wholly realisable made a public statement announcing that it was not 109 economical to enlarge drains to the extent that would be necessary to permanently prevent flooding:

Despite all that is being done to alleviate flooding, we cannot eradicate floods completely. More rain is expected in the next month or so, and if the rain is heavy and coincides with a high tide, flooding will occur. But our floods do not last long and will not reach the proportions of a disaster (Hansard 1976b).

This embarrassing policy flip-flop by the Minister for Law and the Environment was reported in The Straits Times as ‘one of the PAP’s rare concessions to the Almighty’ in an article that compared anti-flood policy to the fable of Noah’s Ark (ST 1976d). The biblical symbolism evoked here is unlikely to have been merely coincidental given that increased flooding in Singapore had seemingly occurred as a direct consequence of unrestrained development, hubris and the gradual displacement of simple rural livelihoods by the vices of urban dwelling (e.g. materialism, individualism, escapism, ‘hippism’). However, metaphysical musings aside, it would be more realistic to explain this shift in flood management strategy not as a repentant confessional but indicative of a fundamental permutation in the art of water governance, the first detectable fissures of an epistemological break that would eventually fracture towards the end of the 1980s. Indeed, cracks were beginning to appear in the modernist project of wholesale hydrological incarceration, quite literally in the cases where disintegrating infrastructure were concerned. From the mid-1970s onwards, the physical and conceptual line that divides people from water would become increasingly blurred. To use the specific terminology of Foucault, water and its users will subsequently encounter, more and more, security mechanisms in addition to those of discipline. Disciplined circulation has its route and rhythm established in accordance to definitively fixed parameters, where here the velocity of water flow should always be limited to a minimum of 1m/sec and maximum of 3m/sec in a concrete drain, with as little curvature as possible (ENV 1976a). This entails the complete enclosure of flows and the foreclosure of exchange across the partition that rigorously divides inside from outside, to achieve absolute separation over mobile elements (see figure 4.9). The resulting ‘spaces provide fixed positions and permit circulation’ that allow one to ‘observe, supervise, regularize the circulation of commodities and money’ (Foucault, 1977, p.148); its aim is to ‘establish presences and absences’ (p.143). The detection of presence and absence relies upon the implementation of a ‘double mode; that of binary division and branding (mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; normal/abnormal); that of coercive assignment, of differential distribution’ (p.199), and the exhaustive policing of the binary partition. In this case, the double mode is provided by the division between water and the city.

110

With the binary sharply differentiated and homogenised into two separate domains, each can be coded for permitted purposes as ‘functional sites’ (p.143) and kept distinct from other ‘forbidden circulations’ (p.144), which in this case refers to pollution and people. In Singapore, up until the late-1980s, water in the city represented a threat to the terrestrial way of life, but with the emergence of urban catchments in the mid-1970s it also had to be safeguarded for potable use. Water had to be quickly captured, incarcerated and conveyed, both to prevent its dangerous intrusion into society and to protect it from contagions resulting from human activity. Essentially, up until this point, to manage the presence of urban water simply meant endeavouring to ensure its absence.

Figure 4.9 Incarcerated circulation: Modern drain system at various locations

Source: Author (2012)

Being nothing short of a milestone in the history of water management in Singapore, Mr Barker’s public statement on flooding strategy in 1976 initiated the first rumblings of an epistemological landslide that would in time create an entirely different physical and conceptual landscape in the process. Water had lived up to its capricious, transgressive reputation, thus far proving to be an almost impossible adversary to contain and expel from society. The PAP’s disciplinary designs on flooding had unsurprisingly been found wanting. The necessarily exhaustive, extravagant and expensive programme for gaining the complete control of water would have to be complemented by mechanisms of security that iteratively react and adapt to its slippery material reality rather than supressing it altogether. Indeed, as Scott (1998, p.257)

111 asserts, ‘the pretense of authoritarian high-modernist schemes to discipline virtually everything within their ambit is bound to encounter intractable resistance’. Under security, and in contrast with discipline, it is not a matter of ‘reconstructing everything or of imposing a symbolic form’ (Foucault, 2007, p.18) on circulation, but allowing and encouraging interaction between wider networks, flows and people. As Deleuze (1992) affirms in his reading of Foucault, ‘organization of vast spaces of enclosure’ (p.3) is the modus operandi of discipline. However, this project has descended into a contemporary state of crisis where ‘forms of free-floating control’ have subsumed and superseded ‘old disciplines operating in the time frame of a closed system…molds, distinct castings’ (p.4, emphasis in original). Using a pertinent turn of phrase, Deleuze posits that ‘everywhere surfing has already replaced the older sports’ (p.6, emphasis in original). Instances of enclosure, division and fixed routine have become less frequent to those of constant modulation, undulation and dispersion; security exactly erodes the existence of boundaries set up under discipline. Consequently, the binary system between permitted and prohibited, absence and presence, city and water disintegrates, a defetishisation of the partition occurs where instead ‘one establishes an average considered as optimal on the one hand, and, on the other, a bandwidth of the acceptable that must not be exceeded’ (Foucault, 2007, p.6). Government intervention into flooding was subsequently guided by ‘not only natural givens, but also on quantities that can be relatively, but never wholly reduced, and, since they can never be nullified, one works on probabilities’ (p.19). Flooding events would henceforth be optimised in terms of socio-economic cost-benefit analyses rather than being extinguished entirely. The PAP came to recognise not only that storms, rainfall and floods are naturally occurring phenomena that must be respected rather than dreaded, but also the fallibility of previously implemented preventative schemes was publically acknowledged. A sure sign of this turn to security is the statistical language that Mr Barker adopts in his public statement, which replaces the erstwhile rhetoric of ‘taming’ floods and scientifically controlling ‘vast natural forces’ altogether. Based on hydrological modelling figures now available, it was calculated that existing infrastructure could indeed ‘cope with average rainfall’, however, it would likely fall short of containing floods during ‘exceptional storms that may occur infrequently’ (Hansard 1976b, emphasis added). By establishing a bandwidth rather than binary of the socially and economically acceptable, flooding at times of exceptional storm periods was consequently normalised. This mantra would be regularly reiterated in the media during the next decade and beyond, as it was almost word for word in 1978, that ‘flooding cannot be totally eliminated’ where during ‘an exceptionally heavy storm, floods will still occur’ (ST 1978h). Unfortunately, this warning would prove to be prescient, if not somewhat understated, when later that year Singapore experienced its severest ever flooding, surpassing that even of 1969. Over half a metre of rain was recorded during a 24 hour period, which amounted to nearly 112 a quarter of the country’s average annual rainfall (ENV 1978a). Flood waters rose close to two metres high in some areas, whilst torrents poured into low-lying housing estates and homes, completely submerging regions such as Kampung San Teng, Potong Pasir, Lorong Buangkok, Kudang, Kinchir and Chuan. The waters stranded citizens on rooftops and in shopping centres, caused massive traffic pile-ups and extensive electricity outages in places like Ang Mo Kio whilst simultaneously charging lampposts across the country, leading to very public electrocutions. It was a dark irony that instead of protecting people from flood waters, bloated storm drains became fatal traps for those caught up in the chaos, rapidly spiriting away those that had fallen into them by force of strong undercurrents. Seven people lost their lives a result of the flooding, more than 1000 were evacuated, approximately 420 pigs drowned and total damages were estimated to be S$5.75 million (ENV 1978; ST 1978i; ST 1978j). Amid this great turmoil and upset, and in contrast to the response of the PWD following the 1969 flood, Mr Barker stuck steadfast to the Government line under parliamentary pressure by reminding the house that the storm should not be considered normal:

Drains and canals are not designed to cope with such rainfall. It is not practical nor economical, from the project cost and land use aspects, to build extra-large canals to meet exceptional or infrequent heavy storms…we can only alleviate, but we cannot eradicate, floods (Hansard 1979a).

A corollary of this shift towards security is that the apparent naturalness of ‘natural givens’ becomes even more a site of continuous calculation, negotiation and political contention, as does the relation between humans and their environment. Indeed, government is the essential arbiter of society’s relationship with the environment and mediator of what is regarded as ‘natural’ or ‘normal’, whilst these parameters are continually contested by those that are governed over. In sway of public opinion, for instance, newspaper editorials would become increasingly critical of the official statistical position that ‘Singapore is by nature flood-prone’ (ST 1984a); a dubious position indeed given that urbanisation had been officially recognised as the chief cause for recent flooding. They accused the Government of normalising flooding in some areas by attributing these instances to exceptional but reoccurring ‘natural’ events (ST 1984b, 1993a). Nevertheless, the turn to security is not to infer an outright rejection by the state of the modernist dream of environmental control. Borrowing again from the bottomless book of aquatic analogies in 1979, one MP likened Singapore to a ‘Ship of State’ that under the stewardship of the ‘steady and experienced hands’ of the PAP, ‘it is safe to say that most things will be within our control, perhaps even the problem of flooding’ (Hansard 1979b). Instead, it marked the beginning of a rude but reluctant awakening, a development that was in fact coexistent with further development of the carceral system for water. Disciplinary mechanisms

113 were not progressively evacuated per se but technologies of security were gradually introduced, which over time transformed the government of nature, and correspondingly, the nature of government. Given that disciplinary methods were more deeply ingrained in the practices of water governance, their application would come more naturally to those in charge of urban planning and design. To this end, the same year of Mr Barker’s statement, flood control was accelerated again to match the rapid development of vegetated land into urban tracts entailing an increased expenditure of S$13.5 million, up from S$3.8 million the year before (ENV 1976b). A significant allocation of drainage funds would go into the cutting and concretisation of artificial sea-bound outlets for where New Towns, industrial estates and Changi Airport were planned in formerly peripheral, largely undeveloped land (ENV 1977, 1979, 1982). To render water more visible to the state 14 new flood gauges were added to the existing 84, whilst 6 rainfall stations were established bringing the total to 9 (ENV 1977). Alongside, remedial drainage work on existing sites was undertaken with a growing sense of urgency, seeing a programme of accelerated investment throughout the 1980s, rising from S$26.7 million in 1980, to S$42.4 million in 1981, to S$53.2 million in 1982, culminating in the approval of an infrastructure development plan consisting of twenty drainage schemes worth S$530 million to be constructed over a five year period, including the second phase of the BTFAS (ENV 1980, 1981, 1982, 1985). During 1987 and 1988 expenditure totalled S$164.3 million and S$146 million respectively, which together positively dwarfed investment figures of previous years (ENV 1987, 1988). With the completion of the clean-up campaign in 1987, the Singapore River and the tributaries of the Kallang Basin were also chalked in for enlargement as part of this big drainage drive, a programme that would run well into the next decade. Then Environment Minister Ahmad Mattar was confident that the 1980s acceleration programme would finally fix the contentious issue of flooding in Bukit Timah, Tanjong Katong, Pasir Panjang and Paya Lebar, and like Orchard Road, Siglap, Bedok, Kallang, Woodlands and Ulu Pandan, he hoped these areas would become relatively flood-free as a result. Speaking towards the tail end of the five- year programme, Mattar announced that ‘the flood problem in Singapore has to a large extent been resolved’ (Hansard 1989a). And indeed, according to his Ministry, flood-prone areas of Singapore had been reduced from 3178 hectares in the 1970s to 354 hectares in 1991 (ENV 1991). This figure had decreased to just 66 hectares in 2010 (see figure 4.10). Unlike his predecessor, however, who of course didn’t have the same benefit of historical hindsight, Mattar’s reports on departmental progress were inevitably coupled with the disclaimer that floods could only ever be alleviated and not completely eliminated, particularly when under ministerial pressure to promise otherwise (Hansard 1992).

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Figure 4.10 Decrease in flood prone areas (1989-2010)

Source: PUB (2010)

4.7 Conclusion

Focusing on the physical flow of water itself under disciplinary government, this chapter has examined how flooding was increasingly incarcerated in a concrete prophylactic in order to centralise administrative control and enhance the logistical capacity of the state. This coordinated expansion of drainage infrastructure was a mundanely technical instrument of land control and territorial unification, a subtle expression of ‘material power’ (Bennett and Joyce 2010). Although investment in drainage was increased during the 1950s, which the Joint Committee on Flood Alleviation advocated, island-wide canalisation would be facilitated by financial assistance from the World Bank and trade agreements with America in the early 1960s. With the local threat of communism adequately mollified around this time, development of the drainage system could be significantly accelerated during the following two decades. Particularly significant was the construction of the first underground drainage system in 1972 at Telok Blangah, which provides a concrete indication of the prevailing approach to governing relations between the population and their hydrographic environment, a key component of the urban problem. A material state effect was further consolidated through the separation and containment of water, physically concretising an administrative boundary, which was subsequently channelled to protected reservoirs for charged distribution (Mitchell 1991a). Cleary, this period of centripetal water management was predicated on the essential features of disciplinary power- segregation, surveillance and correction. As Mukerji (2009, p.2) argues in regard to the construction of the Canal du Midi in seventeenth century France, large engineering projects

115 such as canal systems exercise an anonymous and inexorable form of power through which territory can be progressively colonised and rendered logistically tractable. As Foucault (1989) suggested in respect to roads, this capacity to channel, facilitate and regulate flows throughout the territory is directly constitutive of the modern state. In contrast to sovereign power, which requires symbolic and spectacular displays of authority to enforce extractive rule selectively over territory, this distinctly technical, logistical and subtle form of power operates through networked technological connectivity. The circulation of water was progressively geometrised, where its rhythm and route was predetermined by state officials according to standardised specifications. Not unlike Haussmann’s boulevards, the rectilinear regularity and controlled curvature of canalised waterways afforded unimpeded views of fixed routes, allowing for the installation of hydrometric stations and telemetry sensors, whilst prospective canals could be rapidly planned and priced. As Foucault’s collaborators at CERFI proposed, ‘it is a vital concern of every State not only to vanquish nomadism but to control migrations and, more generally, to establish a zone of rights over an entire "exterior," over all of the flows traversing the ecumenon…which restrict speed, regulate circulation, relativize movement’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p.385). As previous scholars of water governance have observed, nature was something to be fettered during this period of high modernism, and subject to centralised, hierarchical control (Gandy 2002; Kaika 2005; Karvonen 2011). However, irrespective of the intention to scientifically control natural processes as previously stated by civil servants, it would ultimately prove impossible to completely eradicate flood events from Singapore. Tension and dispute would continue to colour many decisions made over subsequent attempts at flood control, whether it was appropriate to investment in further canalisation or accept the ‘natural’ reality of urban water. Drawing out from the specific issue of flooding, the following chapters will reveal how this marked shift was indicative of much broader crisis of containment that required a greater uptake of mechanisms of security. And indeed, this was not solely a problem of fiscal responsibility or political ideology but technological capacity and the physical limits of centralised control. A state effect that had been achieved through infrastructural enclosure would be gradually supplanted by an immersive form of government exercised in a horizontal rather than vertical register.

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5. Crisis of closed systems: Drainage, decentralisation and desire

Fluids travel easily. They 'flow', 'spill', 'run out', 'splash', 'pour over', 'leak', 'flood', 'spray', 'drip', 'seep', 'ooze'; unlike solids, they are not easily stopped…These are reasons to consider 'fluidity' or 'liquidity' as fitting metaphors when we wish to grasp the nature of the present, in many ways novel, phase in the history of modernity (Bauman, 2000, p.2).

5.1 Introduction

Fluidity, as the passage above proclaims, is a feature that is commonly associated with the period of neoliberal restructuring and socioeconomic modernisation that occurred over the previous three to four decades. The old mould of solid modernity oriented around territorialisation, border defence and sedentarisation, has gradually melted into a liquid configuration that privileges movement and flexibility, thereby dismantling walls and perforating the boundaries that divide, enclose and segregate (Deleuze 1992; Hardt and Negri 2000). This grand narrative of societal change, so entrenched in contemporary social theory, could be critiqued for its simplistic and epochal overtones, and of course, so it should be. Walls are going up in some places as quickly as they come down in others (Newman 2006; Brown 2010; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). Therefore, to pursue the connection between fluidity in this metaphorical sense and in a literal register, as does this and the next two chapters, could be deemed somewhat speculative, perhaps even contrived. But as Foucault suggested, there does endure an intriguing association between the physical and conceptual aspects of water. Furthermore, as I will argue, a perceptible shift has taken place in the way that water has been governed in Singapore, orchestrated by state officials using analogous terminology to that in this wider theoretical literature on neoliberalism. ‘Hardware’ has been increasingly supplanted by ‘software’, whilst the greater emphasis is now put on lifestyle, aspiration and ownership rather than correction and restraint. This speaks to the wider debate on the urban institutional transition from centralised, managerial governance to an entrepreneurial, corporatised style, which has been widely criticised for being more open to influence from business elites, private companies and high-end professionals (Harvey 1989; Cox 1993; MacLeod et al 2003; Ward 2003; Swyngedouw 2005b; MacLeod 2011). The subsequent chapters that examine the commercialisation and spectacularisation of water are particularly relevant to this debate. In the analytical language of Foucault, however, what we are seeing is an increased reliance on mechanisms of security and a concomitant devaluation of those functioning through discipline. The advantage of using the analytical framework provided by Foucault, as opposed to alternative models of analysis that attempt to capture this transition, is its methodological commitment to the nominalism and contingency of concrete practices. The everyday spatial politics of socioeconomic restructuring take precedence over overarching temporal or structural 117 explanations, as contended in chapter two, which brings to the fore mundane, technical questions of government in addition to those pertaining to exploitation. Rather than taking common notions such as neoliberalism or postmodernity as analytical givens, Foucault (2008, p.3) would instead ‘pass these universals through the grid of these practices’. This is what I intend to achieve with this chapter by focusing on the changing material configuration of drainage infrastructure and the shifting conceptualisation and strategic role of water under a more neoliberal style of government. This chapter first considers the change of telos in the government of society- environment relations, identifying three related shifts in configuration, method and motivation. To scrutinise in greater detail the escalating tension between the governmental objectives of discipline and security, premised respectively on either the enclosure or exposure of urban water, the chapter subsequently concentrates its focus on the seemingly mundane debate surrounding the drainage covering programme. Although disciplinary techniques had been effective in terms of flood alleviation, there quickly emerged counterproductive consequences of concrete modernism requiring greater uptake of security mechanisms to reactively reconfigure the mono- functional drainage system. Beginning with mosquito control in this chapter, I will examine how the art of government has been refined as a consequence, where stakeholders have been encouraged to assume personal ownership of this resource in direct contrast to the former policy of bringing water under the exclusive purview of the state.

5.2 From hardware to software

It was during the tenure of Ahmad Mattar when the discursive discontinuity in environmental management was officially recognised and institutionalised in governmental practice. This shift in policy had been coming for some years. Gradual transition had already been occurring within the Environment Ministry but not in the conscious, coordinated manner that would become standard procedure from the 1990s onward. The statistical existence of urban water had been normalised through the defetishisation of the hydrosocial boundary, as described in the preceding chapter, but now the other features of security outlined by Foucault would begin to inform policy to a much greater extent. Where drainage infrastructure had previously formed mono-functional circulatory channels under a general regime of enclosure, urban planning and design measures would transform these areas into poly-functional spaces amenable to multiple uses. This would afford a relational rather than divisionary style of government that functions through the voluntary participation and aspirations of subjects, and the opening up of circulations to wider networks. A central consequence of this shift has been the profounder penetration of environmental elements into everyday urban life. This revised planning protocol would adopt a number of measures that were understood to be conventionally environmental in character; managing stormwater through integrated source control practices, restoring habitats to increase 118 biodiversity and protect ecosystems, exposing culverts in the interests of mosquito control. However, similar to the disciplinary regime that preceded it, this environmental agenda would be aligned with a distinctly political programme that sought to utilise valuable land more productively, reflect a global city more persuasively, and enable a more subtle, effective form of government that functions through the presence rather than absence of water. In a telling turn of phrase, Mattar affirmed that the objective was to shift attention from the ‘hardware’ of environmental management- infrastructure, concrete and regulation- to subtler types of ‘software’ that would engage the public and make them ‘feel for the environment’ (ENV, 1993a, p.2). Disciplinary measures such as fines, surveillance and standards had been instrumental to the operations of the Environmental Ministry earning it great plaudits and awards for its achievements, Mattar maintained, but further improvement would be made by adopting a people-oriented approach that encouraged environmentalism as a lifestyle choice and corporate vision. Hailed as a ‘watershed for environment management and policies’ (ENV, 1990b, p.1), domestically, emphasis shifted to public education, participation and the inculcation of environmental values in the population. Internationally, Singapore would be projected as ‘an environmentally conscious and responsible nation as well as a centre for regional and international environmental conferences, seminars and workshops’ (Ibid.). The Singapore Green Plan (ENV 1992a) was the first formal blueprint for urban sustainability, which consisted of six strategic thrusts: public education; clean technology; resource conservation; local environmental protection; international cooperation; and ‘green’ research and development. Whilst each of these specific policy thrusts have been essential to Singapore’s programme of sustainable development, it was the underlying ethos of the plan, its utopian horizon or ‘telos’ (Dean 2010) of government, which has subsequently had the most far- reaching effects. First, in terms of configuration, a dual decentralisation or ‘glocalisation’ (Swyngedouw 1993) of environmental regulation was institutionalised in governmental practice, partially shifting responsibility and legitimacy away from the central state ‘upwards’ to international organisations and forums, but also ‘downwards’ to private companies, communities and individual citizens. At the international level, more emphasis was placed on regional institutions such as ASEAN, UN accords, knowledge transfer across countries via workshops and conferences, and transnational networks of environmental technology advocates. The strategy was to encourage sustainable development through environmental policy that would simultaneously ‘transform Singapore into a global city’ (ENV, 1992a, p.47). The ‘downward’ shift involved selectively decentralising responsibility to domestic stakeholders, executed within a neoliberal framework of responsibility, aspiration and ownership. An essential component of this drive involved having ‘private and business organisations take on major roles in promoting environmental consciousness and environmentally responsible behaviour (p.41), especially through public-private partnerships. The National Council on the Environment (NCE), which would be retitled Singapore 119

Environment Council (SEC) in 1995, was a non-profit NGO specifically set up to orchestrate this transition, managed by local entrepreneurs and business leaders. Acting as an umbrella organisation for environmental groups operating in the third sector, the SEC would take the lead in organising annual national-awareness campaigns on environmental issues, whilst devising appropriate themes for public education programmes. Mattar’s speech, delivered at the inauguration of the private voluntary group in 1990, argued that responsibility should not be ‘left entirely to the Government…it should be a shared concern of all Singaporeans’ (ENV, 1991, p.6). This would include the Managing Director of McDonald’s Restaurants, SEC’s first appointed Chairman, and other board members from Hong Kong Bank, Mobil Oil, Cold Storage supermarket chain, Parliament and the Environment Ministry. Decentralisation, implemented through this broadly defined framework of neoliberal ethics, was meticulously planned and far from unfettered. And indeed, as Foucault adroitly demonstrated, this does not fatally negate the premise of neoliberal government or imply a weaker version operationalised through counterfeit measures. In the 1990s, the third sector in Singapore was embryonic and amateur, particularly in the environmental domain (Francesch- Huidobro 2008). In contrast to what much of the literature on environmental governance proclaims, development of an active if not spontaneous civil society would in fact require strong and sustained intervention from the state, what Joyce (2013) terms ‘organised freedom’. Publicising itself as the most recognised environmental NGO in Singapore, SEC was ‘primarily set-up by the Government’ to ‘reach out [and] touch as many segments of society as possible…to spread the sustainability cause’ (int#13). A relatively small organisation which until 2012 consisted of less than 10 employees, it oversees a number of voluntary market-based initiatives such as labelling certification schemes for schools, manufacturing, catering, offices, retail and construction, and administers a number of award programmes. Revenue is accrued through its Green Labelling Scheme, corporate sponsors and smaller certification programmes, but state financial support continues to be critical in the form of contracts with PUB and ‘seed money’ from other governmental authorities if a project is deemed viable (Ibid.). Aside from monetary support, there are also strong informal ties between state officials and SEC board. The current CEO was formerly the press secretary for the incumbent Environment Minister, who is ‘a phone call away’, whilst Government authorities hold some sway on board recruitment to ensure they are ‘people who they trust and who they know, or who they are comfortable with’ (Ibid.). Similarly, the Waterways Watch Society (WWS), a second strategic product of the decentralisation programme, has direct access to various state officials:

I just had lunch with the CEO of URA. I’m having dinner with the CEO of PUB on Thursday night…I will call and say, ‘can we meet?’ And he says ‘oh fine, fine’. And he obliges me. So, you know, these kind of links we have and I think it’s important (int#9)

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The founder and current Chairman of WWS registered the organisation in 1998 with S$50,000 of seed money from the Environment Ministry, whilst grounds and facilities were provided by state authorities under the Merdeka Bridge that crosses a section of the Kallang River. Previously employed in the burgeoning banking sector, Heng gradually gravitated towards environmental best practices. As a consequence, he served on the Government Parliamentary Committee on the Environment between 1995 and 2000, where the plan to establish the WWS originated, and sat on the board of PUB from 2001 to 2005 (ST 2013). Dependent on donations from state authorities, corporate organisations and individuals, the yearly running costs amount to approximately S$100,000, to maintain a fleet of bicycles, buggies and five motor boats, to provide a basic allowance for a flexible volunteer pool of 250 members, whilst pest control, insurance and utilities are basic requirements (int#9). Educational programmes are conducted with schools and private companies during the week, mainly at off- site locations, although WWS are more renowned for their reservoir patrols of Marina Bay and Kallang Basin which take place on Saturday and Sunday (see figure 5.1).

Figure 5.1 WWS volunteers on patrol around Marina Bay

Source: Author (2012)

Whilst it is recognised that state authorities cannot provide a ‘blank cheque’ for WWS operations, if a structured programme is devised, audited and endorsed then funds will be forthcoming (int#9). Learning Trails administered by PUB, which will be elucidated in chapter seven, is a primary example of this arrangement. Weekly reports including photos of litter

121 hotspots and offenders are submitted to PUB, NEA, NParks, Singapore Tourism Board (STB), Maritime and Port Authority (MPA) and the police force, prompting enforcement action if a situation becomes particularly problematic (Ibid; Hansard 2000). Networking sessions are also organised by the Environment Ministry to facilitate interaction between NGOs, senior civil servants, corporate sponsors and the media, under a preconfigured framework of collaboration (int#9). Important to note, these varied and strategic connections between state agencies and NGOs are not entirely concealed but have tangible, material traces. At the WWS headquarters, NEWater is made available to thirsty visitors and volunteers, the Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has a patrol bicycle named after him, whilst members are not disinclined to wear PUB shirts at public events. Evidently, the institutional boundary between the state and the third sector is complexly and purposefully blurred, arguably bringing into question the ‘NGO’ status overtly bestowed upon these institutes. Indeed, NGOs such as Nature Society Singapore (NSS) that has enjoyed prolonged independence in a squeezed third sector are wary of SEC, which one member considered to be a ‘quasi-government body, really…something the Government set up to be an environmental organisation on their side’ (int#12). An alternative, more nuanced perspective on these institutional arrangements would be that it substantiates Foucault’s arguments on the inextricable interconnectedness of political sovereignty and civil society in processes of government. Here, ‘[c]ivil society is not a primary and immediate reality; it is something which forms part of modern governmental technology’ (Foucault, 2008, p.297). However, due to a changing political landscape it has proven expedient to underplay these links. Approval ratings of the PAP have been steadily declining with the expected abatement in economic growth and advance of opposition parties such as the Workers Party, whilst diplomatic relations with Malaysia and Indonesia have become undeniably strained. The strategic direction of environmental management has also necessitated a more subtle, socially- embedded approach to government. Appearing to be autonomous and apolitical will therefore improve the governmental capacity of these conveniently hybrid organisations, administering voluntary and market-based instruments as opposed to antagonistic top-down regulation. As one high-ranking representative of SEC proclaimed:

We have actually tried to our best to cut as many cords as possible to the Government, because I think that the more independent we are, the more credible we are going to be in the eyes of the public. It’s not going to be any use if people kind of think of us as another Government arm (int#13).

As will become clear during this and the next chapter, this strategic and selective programme of decentralisation has been orchestrated through and indeed facilitated by the intricate reconfiguration of the built environment and physical introduction of water into urban

122 areas. This has resulted in a complex assemblage of environmental subjects, institutional arrangements and infrastructural components which has extended the reach of the state into everyday public life, networked through processes of political sovereignty and not in opposition as popularly implied.

5.3 Techne and telos

This brings us to the second general shift, which concerns the style and methods through which the art of environmental government is conducted, what Dean (2010) refers to as ‘techne’. The Green Plan acknowledged the ‘limitations of the regulatory approach to modify behaviour’ (ENV, 1993b, p.13), and instead advocated a reconsideration of the then ‘punitive’ system in favour of a more subtle approach that works on the basis of participation, not compulsion and fines (ENV, 1992a, p.47). Rather than relying on coercion, dissemination of information would henceforth provide one of the principle means for orchestrating the conduct of conduct, through the school curriculum, media and visitor centres. The Green Plan envisaged that there would be ‘a properly structured system to impart information and values on the environment to the individual through his developing years to adulthood’ to ensure that ‘knowledge and values so permeate the society that environmentally responsible behaviour becomes habitual and is accepted as the universal norm’ (ENV, 1993b, p.14). Environmental learning would not cease at secondary school but continue into tertiary education, the military and the workplace too, whilst desirable conduct within the population at large was to be encouraged via national awareness campaigns now coordinated by the SEC, inevitably aligned therefore with the interests of the business community. Another technology of inculcation that had functioned ‘via the grassroots’ for past government programmes- including political pacification of voters by the PAP- were the community centres located at the physical and cultural centre of all New Town complexes. In this case, they could ‘serve as a conduit to promote environmental consciousness’ in an ‘indirect but effective way’ through neighbourhood events and associations (Ibid, p.18). Certainly, since the 1970s there had been ongoing efforts to inculcate responsible water use practices in the population through such methods and shame those who would regularly be referred to as ‘water wasters’ (ST 1971d). The ‘Water is Precious’ public awareness campaign was first launched in 1971 in response to a serious drought that occurred the same year. The public were threatened with rationing and asked to collectively reduce water consumption from around 130 to 90 mgd (ST 1971e). An 8-day exhibition was held at the Victoria Memorial Hall in December whilst a block tariff system was introduced to deter excessive water consumption (PUB 1972). With the help of radio, television and the media, Minister for Education Mr Lim Kim San communicated his message that ‘[s]aving water must become a daily habit with us’ (Ibid, p.3). The ‘extra-curricular’ conservation programme continued throughout the early 1970s along with the ‘Keep our Water Clean’ campaign, with cartoon ‘filmlets’ produced for schools and community centres (PUB 1973b). Water wastage, such as washing cars or gardening with 123 potable water, was increasingly deemed ‘anti-social’ (ST 1977f). To facilitate educational programmes, measures that were distinctly centralised and infrastructural would also have to be taken. Public standpipes were significantly reduced from 218 in 1971 to just 2 in 1975 (PUB 1975). In parallel, household meters were increasingly introduced in order to record consumption levels and a documentary was released to encourage customers to take readings and thereby assume personal responsibility for water use. Installation of some types of water- saving device was to be made mandatory, such as thimbles, self-closing taps, constant flow regulators and low capacity flushing cisterns (LCFC), with which architects and engineers were urged to familiarise themselves. Water prices and tariffs would be periodically revised over the ensuing decades to continually adapt management practices to the reality of ‘limited water resources for development’ (PUB, 1981, p.2). This was partly to dissuade profligate water usage but also to increase revenue for expansion of the water network and cover the rising cost of treatment under a general policy of cost recovery, adopted in line with the stipulations of World Bank loans regarding financial discipline (Tortajada et al 2013). Production costs for water had risen dramatically, from S$15.6 million in 1963 to S$113.6 million in 1982 (ST 1983c). In 1981, focusing largely on education and publicity, a Water Conservation Plan was introduced to reduce the consumption levels of the top 4 percent of domestic customers, using 16 percent of total domestic supply, and the upper 7 percent of non-domestic consumers, accounting for 75 percent of total water sold (PUB 1981). In response to water consumption increasing by 28.1 percent in 5 years, from 192.5 million cubic metres in 1975 to 246.7 million cubic metres in 1980, consumers were threatened with higher prices unless demand was ‘checked’ (ST 1981f). This was part of a ‘carrot and stick’ approach to water conservation where the ‘thrifty pay smaller increases while the water wasters bear much heavier rates’ (ST 1981g). A full-time team of 12 ‘water watchers’ was established within PUB to ‘keep a close watch on consumers’ habits and water consumption’ (ST 1981h). To relieve the burden on the central state, particularly profligate consumers were encouraged to employ a dedicated on-site water controller to make daily meter readings and devise water-saving initiatives (ST 1981i). Financial incentives and educational campaigns were playing an increasingly central role in changing the water use practices of the population, alongside more regulatory and infrastructural measures (Hansard 1983b). Throughout the 1980s, the ‘Let’s Not Waste Precious Water’ and ‘Let’s Save Precious Water’ campaigns continued to disseminate conservation principles, whilst recurrent anti-litter publicity programmes sought to protect the integrity of waterways (see figure 5.2). The hierarchical authority of the state would manifest intermittently, in coordinated newspaper headlines such as ‘PUB will prosecute water wasters’ (SM 1983a), ‘Watch it, you water wasters’ (SM 1983b), and ‘PUB to builders: Don’t waste water or else…’ (ST 1983d). The longer term objective, however, was to ‘help consumers to practise water conservation until it becomes second nature with everyone in the Republic’ (Hansard 1983c). 124

For instance, industries would be given tax breaks for installing water-saving equipment voluntarily (ST 1983e). By the end of 1983, the Water Conservation Unit had visited 7,500 water consumers which had previously been identified as large users, across all sectors. Due to these efforts, more than 70 percent of large users had reduced their water usage by 11 percent by the following year (PUB 1983). In 1987, a water conservation course was also introduced for secondary school students to educate them on the preciousness of water in a classroom setting (PUB 1987), although schoolchildren had been receiving training on the intimate details of how to shower, brush teeth, water plants and wash dishes since the early 1980s (ST 1981j).

Figure 5.2 Water conservation logo projected on the wall of a building

Source: PUB (1983)

These educational and incentive-based measures oriented towards demand management continued to be implemented into the next decade and quite clearly indicate a dynamic more complicated than exploitative, profit-seeking price hikes, to wit, government. Capacity to launch emergency conservation campaigns was tested in 1990 when Singapore experienced a period of decreased rainfall, which in turn saw consumption levels drop from 1.1 million to 977,000 cubic metres per day within the space of a month, avoiding the necessity of water rationing (PUB 1990). Periodic campaigns were nevertheless deemed inadequate in the face of increasing water 125 demand therefore a Water Conservation Tax (WCT) was introduced on the 1 April 1991 to augment an existing 5 percent tax on water bills. This required residential households to pay a 5 percent tax on the ‘excess amount’ of water above the threshold of 20 cubic metres, whilst a 10 percent tax was levied on the non-domestic and shipping sectors for all water used (Hansard 1991a). This was couched within a broader, annual educational programme titled ‘Save Water Campaign’, publicised through CD-ROM games, a TV programme, interactive exhibitions, school seminars, public talks and the creation of a cartoon character called ‘Captain H²O’ (PUB 1995b, 1996, 1997). In 1998, this would be given the lucid, but somewhat awkwardly, phrased slogan ‘Turn It Off. Don’t Use Water Like There’s No Tomorrow’ (PUB 1998). A major pricing review was undertaken in 1997 which aimed to recalibrate the conservation message by reflecting the marginal increase in cost of unconventional sources such as desalination (PUB 1997). Additionally, the WCT would henceforth be comprehensively applied to all water consumption to instil ‘a new philosophy which regarded even the first drop of water as precious’ (MEWR, 2009, p.166). Scarcity, as Foucault explained, is a mechanism of security and fundamental principle of neoliberal government which encourages calculative and prudent conduct under the permanent threat of shortage. Indeed, as it was announced at the start of the conservation drive, ‘it is time for Singapore householders to watch their faucets’ with ‘economy and care’ (ST 1972f). Forms of flexible governance oriented towards encouraging behavioural change through individual voluntarism and self-interest have therefore been pursued since the 1970s, albeit interlaced with more punitive measures. However, in accordance with the general shift in environmental management, educational and information-based measures were given greater precedence within a more sophisticated and penetrative techne of government. Periodic and didactic, the conservation message that water is valuable and should not to be wasted or polluted was failing to linger in the public imagination, necessitating more continuous, ingrained methods of engagement at the community level (MEWR 2009). Then Acting Minister for Trade and Industry, Lee Hsien Loong announced that ‘water conservation must not only be a campaign but must be a way of life, because this is a problem which will never go away from us’ (Hansard 1986). Managing water demand in negative terms of personal sacrifice was unappealingly disciplinary, and worse, limited in efficacy and scope. Future strategy sought to decentralise and hence depoliticise the contentious issue of demand management, orchestrated through the application of neoliberal principles of lifestyle choice, empowerment and ‘community’ (Rose 1999b; Schofield 2002; Herbert 2005). By sharing the responsibility of resource protection with the community, which impresses upon the behaviour of citizens much more intimately, continuously and inclusively, state officials can to some extent avoid being cast as adversarial agents of enforcement and exclusion (Agrawal 2005).

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This was the central impetus for the formation of WWS, which provides an ostensibly apolitical, elastic and socially-embedded network through which the art of government can be more delicately exercised. Bureaucratic and balkanised, state authorities are considered to be ‘very territorial’ and incapable of crossing physical and administrative borders, which means ‘there’s only so much they can do’ (int#9). In contrast to this ‘old-fashioned’ model, WWS is not constrained by strict jurisdictional boundaries and can instead traverse and bridge different sectorial domains. Moreover, as one of its members asserted, ‘we don't represent a Government organisation, we represent a volunteer group…people don’t see us as political, which we’re not’ (Ibid.). The optical apparatus of visibility and surveillance is comparatively mobile and discreet, whilst the potential for antagonistic encounters is significantly reduced:

Because we are here 6 days a week, we run programmes, we are on the boat, on the bicycle…people begin to understand that when they come to this reservoir. They see, I wouldn’t say vigilante group, but there’s a community watch group…as I bring in more of these people, even when they’re off duty, they know what to do, what’s right and wrong. They know who to call if they spot something, which some of my members are now doing. They will call me at any point in time or they will send me an MMS photo (Ibid.).

This form of casual deterrence offered by volunteers contrasts sharply with the authoritarian status of the environmental inspector and SO, whilst still dispersed and mobile, tended to invite conflict and incite resentment. Indicative of the ongoing interplay between discipline and security, there have been proposals to equip designated volunteers with enforcement cards that would grant them authority to reprimand and escort offenders. According to WWS, this would prove beneficial for state agencies as ‘they’re not everywhere, we are’ (Ibid.). Nevertheless, there are legitimate concerns that doing so may expose volunteers to dangerous situations whilst undermining their current reputation as independent citizens. In the longer term, this could jeopardise the apparent neutrality of the WWS as an organisation, which currently enjoys a conveniently ambiguous status (see figure 5.3). Lack of state funding is also undermining the operations of the WWS and this subtle form of government:

If they were smart, they would be pumping a lot of money into us. Why? Because we’re the conduit in-between. We’re in-between; we actually blend in with the people and the Government. And in today’s experience- you’ve read the newspaper- the Government isn’t very high in standing (int#9).

Official recognition of territorial and political constraints also instigated the establishment of SEC. In the late 1990s, Singapore was once again cloaked in haze originating from forest fires in Indonesia, threatening the health of its population and its ability to attract inward investment. To negotiate solutions to this archetypal transboundary issue, bilateral 127 discussions and regional meetings were organised to facilitate communications between Singapore and Indonesia (Hansard 1998a). However, demonstrative of the shift in environmental government, to avoid worsening already sensitive international relations SEC was leant upon as an ostensibly autonomous geopolitical broker:

They found it really hard to take the Indonesian Government to task because of the ongoing relationship between the Governments. So what they did was they asked SEC to step in, they gave us all the satellite pictures, they gave us everything that was possible, so we’re the ones who took it up with the Indonesian Government…Imagine if people had known that we were a Government-related organisation? We were independent, or seemed to be independent (int#13).

Figure 5.3 Strategic ambiguity: Signage at WWS headquarters with PUB logo

Source: Author (2012)

And again, the flexible networks that such organisations afford qualitatively extend the reach of government whilst reinventing the exercise of political sovereignty and redefining the meaning of territory. Indeed, SEC has regional contacts and operations in countries as diverse as Oman, Malaysia and Uzbekistan inter alia, which its members intend to reinforce and enlarge through initiatives such as the Green Labelling Scheme and Asian Environmental Journalism awards, to ‘strengthen and mark our territory’ (Ibid.). On the domestic front, the strategically depoliticised and diffuse configuration of SEC enhances the penetrative capacity of

128 governmental programmes, constituting a markedly more sophisticated, less confrontational form of internal colonisation:

We are going to be able to get a mass of people at a snip of a finger, because we have got our networks. Whereas if the Government tries to get people behind them, I think right now, there will be resistance because of political changes…It’s not just the expertise but it’s our ability to reach out to a wide segment of people very quickly (Ibid.).

These dispersed networks of government are not only institutional but infrastructural in composition, extended and reconfigured through material interventions in the built environment. Indeed, this change in strategic direction entailed a third shift that involved the leisurization of waterways, and as will be argued in the subsequent chapters, the commercialisation of urban space. Far from being a dry, scientific document on the ecological state of Singapore and technical basis for sustainable development, the Green Plan was primarily concerned with how to improve the physical environment ‘to meet the increasingly affluent population’s expectations of a higher standard of living’ (ENV, 1993b, p.9). As an aspiring global city with a post-industrial preoccupation with lifestyle and property development, the recreational value of Singapore’s green and blue spaces would be given precedence to attract highly-mobile, highly- skilled professionals, whilst also increasing land values. This revised representation of Singapore also entailed the orchestrated acquiescence of the population to maintain this global city image, as both gracious, modern urbanites and entrepreneurial green consumers. Accordingly, the telos of environmental government changed from ‘disciplined workforce’ to ‘proactive population’ (ENV, 1992a, p.47), where the state no longer wanted Singapore’s environmental landscapes to constitute and reflect an orderly and subordinated society groomed for industrial toil but a fun-loving and leisurely people primed for the service sector. The emphasis would be put on active not docile bodies, recreational rather than regimented behaviour, where this shifting reflection of nation can be seen down at the water’s edge. Once perceived as exemplary spaces of disciplined nature, sites of pure and secure circulation and illustrative of social order, the presence of vacant, enclosed waterways were no longer befitting of the global city image and the land requirements of the service economy.

5.4 Blurring the physical and conceptual boundary

The Green Plan proposed a more integral, interactive role for water in the city, not something to be foreclosed and feared, or even begrudgingly accepted as a material reality, but as a positive source of engagement and enjoyment. Through surveillance and enforcement, protection of local catchment areas remained a crucial concern of course, but they would be ‘modified and upgraded to aesthetic waterways to allow for recreational activities’ (ENV, 1992a, p.11). This new way of conceiving and engaging with water was to have far-reaching consequences for

129 urban planning more generally. The revised Concept Plan (URA 1991a) Living the Next Lap: Towards a Tropical City of Excellence, which would guide development for the next quarter of a century, had the regulated reintroduction of water to urban life as a fundamental policy objective. Whereas the original plan, introduced in 1971, focused on basic priorities of industrialisation, slum clearance and immediate urban renewal, this revised version outlined initiatives for the development of a service-oriented global city. Alongside proposals for extensive land reclamation and industrial, commercial and residential decentralisation from the CBD, significant emphasis was put on the expansion of leisure opportunities for a ‘world-class city…which wraps itself around the waters of Marina Bay’ (p.6). Of course, the water supplying the artificial bay was no longer polluted and foul-smelling due to the clean-up programme that was completed in 1987. It was envisaged that ‘all Singaporeans will apply their shoulder to the wheel of improvement to make Singapore more of a tropical island playground, an enchanting and stimulating Asian city’ (URA, 1991a, p.40). Fun, it would seem, is serious business in the global city. The strategy was for Singapore to become an ‘internationally renowned playground’ (p.34), a competitive city of culture or ‘entertainment machine’ (Clark 2004) that would encourage economic development and urban revitalisation through the influx of knowledge professionals and an expanding leisure industry. According to the Concept Plan, the service economy was booming across the world as people had ‘begun to take the business of enjoying themselves more seriously’, which was ‘true of Singapore as anywhere’ (p.32). The spending power of the population increased dramatically over the previous two decades as had their the expectations for entertainment and culture opportunities, through domestic growth and professional immigration, and the plan affirmed that ‘Singapore’s future depends on attracting and retaining more talent’ by providing ‘an appealing, varied and stimulating environment in which to live and work’ (p.18). Whilst this emerging overlap between business and leisure could be considered rather unsettling, perhaps even insidious, this sense of unease was certainly not shared by the commercial players looking to profit from this fruitful fusion of culture and economy. Feedback from the private sector was overwhelmingly positive, exemplified during a business seminar on the Concept Plan, where it was announced that leisure was a ‘new growth industry’ to be promoted by the Government, which was set to receive ‘substantial investment’ (URA, 1991b, p.1). The ‘Leisure Opportunities Plan’, a new layer to urban planning, identifies ‘desirable types of leisure activities and maps out possible sites for development’ that will enhance ‘Singapore’s global city and regional hub positioning’ (URA, 1991a, p.2). To this end, the Government would capitalise on Singapore’s reputation as an exotic island, namely through extending and developing its waterfront spaces by providing more beaches, marinas and water-based activities, thereby encouraging a ‘tropical lifestyle’ of ‘fun and leisure’ (p.3).

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Figure 5.4 Green and Blue Plan showing projected leisure destinations

Source: URA (1991a)

Thus, it was primarily in this sense that the ‘Green and Blue Plan’ (URA 1991a) was conceived; to provide a basis for leisure activities, and concomitant commercial opportunities, rather than to ensure environmental protection or sustainable development (see figure 5.4). Greater access to the waterfront was an essential part of this, ‘to create ‘an increased sense of “island-ness”…a city that embraces the waterline more closely as a signal of its island heritage…with waterbodies woven into the landscape’ (p.4). Accordingly, coastline tracts would be doubled from 140km to 300km, the Singapore River was to undergo a programme of regeneration and high quality waterfront communities with more private housing would be established in Simpang and around the Kallang Basin, through which ‘developers can maximise the closeness of the water as they sculpt the town’ (p.22). The working waterways of just a decade earlier, Singapore River and Kallang Basin, would be reimagined within this new mode of environmental government, based on the regulation of lifestyle rather than labour. The tentative, largely aesthetic programme to open up waterways to additional activities was instigated as far back as 1979, when 2.4km of Ulu Pandan canal was landscaped for jogging and walking (ENV 1979). The following year beautification of the larger canals was undertaken, principally Kallang River (ENV 1980). Shopping arcades along what is now Marina Bay, the Merlin shopping complex and a food centre at Boat Quay were considered attractive additions to the waterfront in the early 1970s, as was the East Coast Expressway in 1981. However, the central waterfronts were still the domain of dockworkers, and more

131 disconcertingly, petty gangsters, drug addicts and smugglers of liquor, cigarettes and marijuana, which were targets of a police operation ‘to flush out undesirable elements from the waterfront’ (ST 1984c). It was during the mid-1980s as the Marina Centre was established on reclaimed land fronting Singapore River and Marina Bay that the waterfront would become the recreational resource it is currently, with the Mandarin and Pan Pacific hotels boasting unparalleled coastal views (see figure 5.5).

Figure 5.5 Mandarin and Pan Pacific hotels overlooking Marina Bay

Source: Author (2012)

The Marina Centre was considered an essential linkage that reconnected the land and the sea. Extensive land reclamation and the rising popularity of Orchard Road had undermined this historical affinity, prompting architect I.M Pei to tempt people back to the waterfront with his Raffles City complex then comprising the tallest hotel in the world (ST 1986b). A new park and promenade was also opened around Marina Bay that were publicised by photos of strollers, joggers and anglers nestled amongst palm trees and placid waters, marking a new era of waterfront living (ST 1987b). There was an imaginative reconnection and return to the water during the late 1980s, riotously reawakened by mass swims, powerboat races and the appearance of pleasure cruises in Singapore River and Marina Bay. Comprising public and private actors, the Waterbodies Design Panel was appointed in 1989 to revise existing guidelines for planners, architects, engineers and developers when

132 building at the water’s edge. Whereas up until the mid-1980s waterways had been developed as functional, generally undesirable sluices for rainfall and oftentimes refuse, they would undergo an aesthetic revolution in line with the shift to a service economy. The new guidelines advised the incorporation of waterbodies into the urban environment to achieve two key planning objectives: to enhance commercial and recreational locations such as cafes, bars and sport centres, and reinforce Singapore’s status as garden city (URA 1993a). To achieve this, a multi- disciplinary approach would be adopted that includes the expertise of landscape designers, architects and town planners in addition to engineers, which also utilises natural materials such as stones, vegetation and water itself to soften and blur the sharp edges of concrete through careful contouring. Little mundane technologies of security that permit passage of water, geotextiles, gabions and mattresses, would begin to redefine the waterfront. Formerly confined, the circulation of water was not only beginning to seep into the surrounding physical environment but into the lives of those that reside there, providing a strategic medium for the exercise of power. Waterfront design would seek to incorporate footpaths and bridges where possible to allow ‘people to get close to, and enjoy, the water’ (URA, 1993a, p.10). To assist this transition, statutory requirements relating to land use would be relaxed to encourage development of what were considered ‘compatible water-side activities’ (p.13). Indicative of this neoliberal style of relational government, the panel deduced that ‘treatment of the water’s edge determines the sort of relationship that can be established between the landscape and the water’ (p.25). A situation that would have previously been abhorred by Singapore’s modernist planners, a pond in Toa Payoh was identified as informative of this approach where ‘the edge of the water…is allowed to overlap with the pavement between low and high watermarks so that the edge is always in flux’ (p.25). The edge condition was a site of much calculation and deliberation for the panel; how the spatial continuum between the terrestrial and aquatic affects the ambience of a waterfront and the behaviour of visitors. The strategic opening up of Singapore’s waterways in the interests of government, property development and internationalisation will be taken up in the next chapter. The remainder of this chapter will concentrate on the complex interplay between discipline and security that would continue to manifest in the everyday urban environment of drainage.

5.5 The drainage covering programme

Whilst we can clearly see that a fundamental permutation in environmental government occurred during the last two decades of the twentieth century, exemplified by waterways being progressively opened up to extraneous processes and practices, there nevertheless remained enduring tension between the objectives of discipline and security. Indeed, as Foucault (2007) was at pains to emphasise, different economies of power are not simply supplanted but imbricated, adapted and revalorised. This can effectively be brought into sharp relief by 133 calibrating our focus on the animated debate surrounding drainage management that rumbled on under the radar of these more conspicuous programmes of environmental reform. At the beginning of the 1980s several infrastructural initiatives were implemented where the effective enclosure of water underground was the desired outcome. This was prompted by the success of the closed drainage pilot project in Telok Blangah in ensuring water quality, followed by similar schemes at Bedok and Ang Mo Kio New Towns (ENV 1980). The most celebrated of these was perhaps the covering of the Stamford Canal that drained the prestigious Orchard Road central shopping area, allowing the PWD to landscape over it and create a pedestrian park in its place.

Figure 5.6 Reconstruction works at Stamford Canal

Source: ENV (1978)

Reconstruction works costing S$32 million began on the canal back in 1978 and were completed ten years later, during which a subterranean system of box culvert drainage- large enough for a single-decker bus to drive through- was constructed along the length of Orchard Road (ENV 1988). Originally conceived to alleviate flooding in that area, by widening the canal from approximately six to ten metres and deepening it from two to three metres, the project soon mutated into a more aesthetic assignment (see figure 5.6). By paving over the quickly ‘disappearing canal’ (ST 1984d) pedestrians would be able to walk and shop from one end of Orchard Road to the other. However, the first half of the 1980s actually saw the canal overflow on a number of occasions causing widespread flooding in the Orchard area (ENV 1980, 1984, 1985). Whilst the ministry maintained that the canal was purposefully ‘designed with a capacity

134 to cater for a rainfall intensity statistically equivalent to a once-in-five year storm’ (ST 1984e), those residents affected were left wondering why this had not occurred before when the canal was shallower and narrower. Some speculated that the project team had been focusing instead on the new pedestrian mall that would cover over it (ST 1984f). Around the same time, in 1980, approval for a vast 8000-metre network of closed pipe conduits and box culverts was granted to service the much-flaunted Marina Centre located on reclaimed land adjacent to the mouth of the Singapore River (ENV 1980). An extensive thirty metre-wide canal would provide the backbone to this hydrological grid, which was duly covered over in order to provide a continuous promenade for tourists and shoppers (ENV 1988). Then unprecedented in scale, water would be quickly conveyed underground to protect the image of this highly prestigious complex of malls, hotels and convention centres, where its presence was only permissible spurting out of the ‘Fountain of Wealth’- recorded as the largest fountain in the world by the Guinness Book of Records in 1998- to supposedly bestow riches on those visitors who touch the auspicious cascade (see figure 5.7).

Figure 5.7 Hopeful visitors at the Fountain of Wealth

Source: Author (2012)

Closed drainage would not be restricted to the luxurious or lucky for long, but would instead be extended into the public and private housing estates that dotted the Singaporean landscape as part of a comprehensive improvement programme. Here, ‘improvement’ invariably

135 implied concreting over the neighbourhood drainage system. Indeed, during the latter years of the 1980s before the change in direction was announced, open drains routinely came in for a negative press. Not only were they condemned as an ugly blot on the landscape that required large swathes of scarce land, but vilified as a lethal hazard that also served as a sprawling refuge for the criminal and unsavoury. An inadvertent destination for clipped cars, curious children, drunkards, the elderly and infirm, whilst murder victims have regularly been retrieved from Singapore’s drains, decomposing and occasionally dismembered, along with fugitives, asylum seekers and drug addicts. The addition of stormwater during periods of heavy rainfall only increased their capacity to injure and kill, which they often would. Drainage infrastructure represented what Kaika and Swyngedouw (2000, p.136) have referred to as the 'dystopian underbelly of the city'. Therefore, principally in the interests of preventing water pollution but also to open up more land for greater utilisation, the campaign to cover drains in Singapore’s housing estates and litter-prone areas did not require much public persuasion. Around the turn of the 1990s drainage in Tanjong Katong, Serangoon and Hougang New Towns was also covered, followed by popular areas located towards the city centre that were affected by littering, Jalan Besar, Geylang, Alexandra and Little India, completed in 1992 (ENV 1988, 1990b, 1992b). Given the progress made in the public domain, the decision was taken in 1995 to initiate pilot projects in private housing estates as taxpayers living in these areas were also entitled to covered drains, and with it, appreciating property prices (Hansard 1995a). As part of the programme, unsightly concrete channels that tended to collect refuse and silt would be replaced by beautified walkways, made possible by systemically covering over local drainage networks (see figure 5.8). Three years later, MP Shriniwas Rai aired his concern that whilst the state had publically announced that private properties were to be upgraded negligible headway had in fact been achieved, whereas the ‘HDB has actually closed the drains [in public housing estates] and they are very tidy and neat. If the same could be done to the private housing estates, it would beautify the estate. They could put some potted plants and it would be greener and nicer...If it is feasible, I would urge him to do it all over Singapore’ (Hansard 1998b). In 2000, in line with the advice of Mr Rai, the Estate Upgrading Programme (EUP) was launched to cover 146km of old drains in private estates as part of a general thrust to improve the nation’s drainage, which had hitherto been directed towards old roadside drains since 1996 (PUB 2001). The timing of the initiative prompted one minister to claim it was in fact a cynical tactic by the Government that was ‘irretrievably linked to politics’, deployed to convince those fortunate enough to be able to afford private accommodation to vote for the PAP in the next election ‘in a direct bottomline way’ (ST 2000a). The official reason for broadening the programme, however, was an apparent surplus in state finances collected from the population as a whole, although the government felt obliged to assure residential blocks located in constituencies won by the opposition Worker’s Party that they too would be considered. This 136 was a clear repudiation of the sort of infrastructural politics the PAP had been accused of before in regard to other development projects. Nevertheless, over the ensuing years public infrastructure such as parks, lighting, roads and CCTV would be continuously upgraded within private estates whilst drainage would be covered. By 2013, the government will have spent approximately S$163 million on fifty estates, to the benefit of approximately 40,000 households (Press release 2010). Cracked, mouldy open drains in private estates had been a sign of government neglect and a rallying point for community disquiet, particularly when they witnessed adjacent HDBs receiving automatic periodic upgrades.

Figure 5.8 A typical open drain located at Kitchener Road

Source: Author (2012)

Although not included in the EUP, the Opera Estate Drainage Scheme was another landmark initiative for a private estate that had water descend beneath the ground in large volumes. Completed in 2002 at a cost of S$46 million, the scheme primarily concerned flood alleviation rather than the prevention of water pollution. The original canal was no longer adequate for the increase in surface runoff resulting in frequent flooding, with fish reported to have swum into residents’ homes (PUB 2002). During the 1990s the estate was flooded on 137 average around six times a year, inundating seven key roads and adversely affecting in the region of 87 private homes (ST 1996a). When the scheme commenced in 1996, it was the first of its kind in Singapore according to the district’s MP Abdullah Tarmugi, which necessitated ‘a whole new approach to alleviate the flooding problem’ (ENV, 1997a, p.4). Similar to the Bukit Timah situation, it was not possible to sufficiently widen the outlet canal as houses had been built along its length, therefore to overcome this problem engineers would construct a subterranean retention pond underneath a local school field and provide a pumping station above. During periods of average rainfall, stormwater would collect in the canal and flow by gravity out to sea, as with regular systems. However, in the event of excessive rainfall, stormwater would overflow into a second tier below the main canal to be transferred to the retention pond until water levels stabilised again, where it would subsequently be pumped back into the outlet canal and out to sea. As was the policy at the time, the outlet drain was covered over and transformed into a linear, landscaped park for jogging, cycling and strolling, but again, recreation would be encouraged through the absence not presence of water. During this longstanding programme of covering over drainage infrastructure, from the initial trial at Telok Blangah in 1972 to the completion of the Opera Estate Drainage Scheme exactly thirty years later, an evacuation of water had occurred from the everyday experience and imagination of the population. This has been a propitious development indeed in terms of flooding alleviation, as was revealed in the previous chapter. The latest hydrological survey indicates that flood-prone areas will be reduced to just 40 hectares in 2013 following an accelerated drainage programme costing S$175 million. Remarkably, considering the widespread instances of flooding only some two decades ago, this equates to around 0.0005% of Singapore’s overall territory (Hansard 2012). In these low-lying areas that have historically been adversely affected by tidal movements- Jalan Besar, Chinatown, Boat Quay, Rochor Road, Geylang, Paya Lebar, inter alia- it has been deemed uneconomical to completely alleviate flooding until the area is scheduled for redevelopment when the ground-level can be raised in conjunction. Intermittent anguish has and will continue to be expressed by communities and their MPs following flash floods, but warnings and site visits are much more frequent and effective than before. On 19 December 2006, 366 millimetres of rainfall fell in a 24-hour period during the third heaviest storm ever recorded in Singapore, yet flooding only occurred within 15 hectares of land (MEWR 2009). Progress has not come cheaply however: since Independence capital expenditure on drainage infrastructure has passed the S$2 billion mark. However, whilst water circulation has been competently circumscribed over the last thirty years, there have also been counterproductive consequences associated with this modern, disciplinary approach. From a broadly ecological perspective, the concrete canalisation of waterways and reservoir expansion programme has been detrimental to the habitats of aquatic wildlife by disrupting the regular flow of rivers and streams. The NSS (2009, p.3) argue that 138 there is an urgent need to refrain from ‘tidying up’ inland waterways as not only are concrete canals unattractive, the official policy ‘to reduce flooding by allowing the water to flow to the sea faster’ results in the reduction of marine and coastal habitats. The NGO advocate a naturalisation programme to encourage displaced flora and fauna to re-colonise these shoreline spaces and marine habitats. Although the Government commenced an island-wide initiative to naturalise waterways in the late-1980s, this was oriented towards recreational and aesthetic outcomes rather than conservation; ‘it’s an impetus in terms of enhancing the value of housing’ (int#12). There has also been growing concern directed towards the hydrological aspects of canalisation and rapid conveyance of stormwater, both in terms of its negative impact on water quality and expected incapacity for managing the increased volume and intensity of rainfall resulting from climate change. According to PUB, the existing drainage system is ‘static’ and unresponsive, essential but emblematic of the disciplinary approach premised on hardware (int#1). A ‘revamp’ of this approach is required to ‘improve resilience’ and ‘work closely with stakeholders’ in order to respond more flexibly (Ibid.). The second, more immediately vexing problem for the state concerned the counterproductive consequence of containing water to protect it from contamination leading to increased levels of litter in drains and canals. Shortly after the completion of the Singapore River and Kallang Basin clean-up, MP Goh Chee Wee protested to Parliament that people were ‘sabotaging the good work’ of the project team by discarding litter into the ‘open drains which find their way into the rivers’, contributing to the 72 tonnes that required collection every month from Singapore’s waterways. Kallang River alone would channel and collect enough rubbish to fill two trucks every day (Hansard 1990a). The official message to deter the public from littering had changed since the 1990s, as pollution did not merely threaten water supply but the aesthetic value of rivers onto which their houses increasingly faced. To prevent litter entering the water network in the first place then, the design of drains were to be reconsidered to reduce the need for frequent cleansing (Hansard 1997). Increased grating was incorporated into drains to catch litter before it entered waterways whilst float booms were installed across rivers to prevent debris travelling downstream. Nevertheless, by the end of the decade ten trucks a day were loading a dripping, foul freight of discarded urban detritus, whilst residents were complaining of blocked drains containing weeks-old beer bottles, drink cans, tissues and whatever else had been deemed disposable by passers-by (Hansard 1999a). Again, the immediate impulse was to enclose drains ever more tightly, but techniques of exposure would begin to gain credence as it was surmised that people had become alienated from water, an unfortunate upshot of concrete modernism. Neoliberal decentralisation would be enacted through the material reconfiguration of urban water infrastructure:

There needs to be a strategy of engagement with the larger population so that they take responsibility to keep the catchment clean…Changing hard concrete, changing canals into rivers,

139

changing reservoirs into lakes which people can enjoy. By enjoying that environmental asset, they’ll get closer to water and hopefully build a relationship and therefore value water (int#1)

A third problem complicating further that of litter was that the policy of covering drainage channels was linked with a rise in mosquito numbers and outbreaks of dengue in Singapore. Although the WHO had officially registered Singapore as a malaria-free country back in 1982, the Aedes mosquito that serves as a vector for dengue thrives in urban environments- and significantly, clean water- rather than the swampy, marshy conditions that its malarial cousin prefers, the Anopheles. The threat of malaria has since been largely contained thanks to the large-scale clean-up of Singapore’s waterways and an ‘epidemiological surveillance regime’ that has successfully detected and counteracted any potential outbreaks of malaria (MEWR, 2009, p.77). Unfortunately, this approach is inappropriate for the containment of dengue-carrying mosquitos which can breed in mere millimetres of stagnant water that may have collected in gutters, drains, household containers and plant pots. Since 1966 with the establishment of the Vector Control Unit (VCU), it would be fair to posit that legislation and public education programmes directed towards dengue containment have been successful. However, during the 1990s, instances of dengue significantly increased in Singapore and in other countries due to higher levels of urbanisation, migration and tourism. Taken together, it could be said that Singapore was suffering from what Deleuze (1992) referred to as a crisis of closed systems, therefore technologies of security would be increasingly introduced.

5.6 Mosquito control and the coming of community

As part of the state’s programme of ‘source reduction’ (i.e. elimination of breeding grounds for Aedes), drains would become a key target of surveillance alongside that of mosquito distribution and local climatic conditions, and if necessary, reactive and pre-emptive search-and-destroy operations. The greater blame was nevertheless put on the domestic sphere by ENV, as it was suspected that Aedes did not breed in Government-managed drains and preferred household conditions instead, much to the surprise and suspicion of the public. Accordingly, new legislation was introduced in 1992 that allowed citizens to be fined if their homes were identified as breeding grounds (ENV 1992b). Homeowners were reminded via the media that it was an offence to breed mosquitos on their premises which could result in a fine of up to S$1000, a three-month prison sentence, or in some cases, both (ST 1992a). Residents were encouraged to refrain from watering plants, perform regular spot checks and to inform ENV if mosquito breeding was detected. Door-to-door inspections by environmental officers were stepped up throughout the 1990s, as was the comprehensive public education programme on dengue prevention. However, just under a year later, Town Councils were facing the difficult decision as whether to continue with the long-term policy of closing drains to prevent litter entering into the 140 system, or to leave them open and remove existing covers to allow easier access for flushing given that clogged drains had indeed been found to aid Aedes breeding ‘on some occasions’ (ST 1993b). Councils at risk of dengue outbreaks such as Toa Payoh, Tanjong Pagar, Yishun, Tampines and the City Centre, reluctant players in an emerging politics of the milieu, were forced to consider a mass removal of concrete drain covers that had recently been laid at great public cost. Permission was granted by ENV in some cases whilst in others it was denied, suggestive of the tension between the longstanding preference for covered drains that looked decidedly neater and the more recent proposal for opening them up to allay concern about the possibility of dengue epidemics. Evidently, there was a growing sense of uncertainty surrounding a situation that could foreseeably deteriorate without effective governmental intervention. Deteriorate the situation did steadily throughout the decade with no sign of abatement when in 1996 an outbreak occurred between September and December, resulting in 3,128 cases of dengue- a 56 per cent increase on the year before- and four deaths (ENV 1996a). From this point the outbreak would be much more difficult to contain given that breeding grounds had been driven from private homes and were now developing in outdoor areas. Town Councils began to remove drain covers wholesale to facilitate surveillance and flushing operations, but this time it was on the direct advice of ENV (ST 1997a). Minister for the Environment, Yeo Cheow Tong, was not exactly reticent about the uncertainties associated with their carrying out the government of circulatory coexistence:

How does the measure to remove drains covers reconcile with the earlier measure, which is to ask that drains be covered up? Sir, we have asked for the drains to be covered up earlier on in order to prevent littering of the drains. But what we have found is that the covered drains actually lend themselves even better to mosquito breeding. Between the two problems, it is more important that we tackle the mosquito problem. Therefore, we have asked for the drains covers to be removed. We have come out with other measures which should help us prevent the littering problem from getting out of hand and preventing the litter from getting into our water reservoirs, etc. (Hansard 1998c).

Drains were not by any means the only source of concern, with gutters, gulleys, discarded receptacles and anything else that could hold stagnant water also offering comparably conducive abodes for developing mosquito larvae. Workshops and seminars were organised by the Government to bring experts together from various professions- architects, planners, epidemiologists, pest control inter alia- to devise and design quick-fix solutions to the problem. Nevertheless, drains, which had never enjoyed much sympathy from the public, would remain the most visible and reproachable culprit whether they remained closed or open. MP for Cheng San, Heng Chiang Meng, asked for the policy of covering drains to be reinstated as ‘besides protecting the integrity of our water resources, it has also the added advantage of protecting the 141 residents in our housing estates. Since the removal of such covers, accidents of residents, especially the older folks, falling into the drains have increased’ (Hansard 1999b). In response, the Environment Minister ensured that his Ministry would attempt to navigate a policy trajectory that satisfied both concerns by affording Town Councils an element of flexibility to decide which segments to cover and which to leave open, but ultimate responsibility for the consequences would be theirs. Technical solutions were also implemented. A minimum gradient was stipulated for future drainage installations so that water would be less likely to accumulate (Hansard 1998b). More impressive, a porous geotextile lining called ‘Enkadrain ST’ was introduced by ENV engineers to allow water to percolate through to a sub-soil layer where steep gradient reconstruction was not possible, thereby keeping drains relatively dry. After two successful pilot demonstrations in October and November 1997, their installation was rolled out to eight more locations in April the following year, and subsequently incorporated into the repair programme of the Drainage Department (ENV, 2000a, p.8). Drainage engineer Lim Meng Check acknowledged that lining drains with Enkadrain ST would cost 10 percent more than conventional methods but they would filter water, prevent mosquito breeding and only require cleaning once every week rather than alternate days, thereby alleviating the manpower shortage (ST 1999a). This porous drainage concept would garner much praise and win prestigious awards for the engineers that installed it, and deservedly so; it was at the forefront of an entirely new way of thinking about infrastructural design. Concrete, reassuringly impermeable and immovable, terra firma epitomised, had proven to be too unyielding, too precise, too modern. Trapezoidal drains, concrete culverts and thick-set walls belong to that of discipline, of austere institutions of containment, the prison, barracks, factory or madhouse (see figure 5.9). Yet, as Deleuze (1992, p.4) reminds us, ‘everyone knows that these institutions are finished’ where instead mechanisms of security act ‘like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point’. And indeed, this modest little technology encapsulates rather well the momentous conceptual transition that Foucault explicated during his lectures. Partly because of this and other preventative measures, whereas cases would continue to rise the following two years after the 1996 outbreak- 4,300 in 1997 and 5,258 in 1998- they would drop to the more manageable level of 673 patients in 2000 (ENV 1997b, 1998, 2000b). However, design features of HDB and private housing that were conducive to water pooling - canopies, deck roofs, bamboo fittings and covered drains- persisted due to a lack of available funding for upgrading (Hansard 2001a). Therefore when the next dengue outbreak occurred in September 2003, emphasis duly shifted from hardware to software and residents were drafted as part of the integrated approach to environmental management formalised during the 1990s. Once the source was identified at the Braddell Heights estate, grassroots organisations and thirty volunteers from Residents’ Committees (RC) were mobilised to distribute educational pamphlets door-to-door. By mid- October, the outbreak was under control. 142

Figure 5.9 Austere and alienating: A cyclist separated from Sembawang River

Source: Author (2012)

Already, Dengue Prevention Volunteer Groups (DPVG) comprising 600 people had been established during the year to educate their fellow residents about how to prevent mosquito breeding in the first place. Whereas it would take state authorities operating autonomously three weeks to regain control, with grassroots involvement it was calculated the timescale could be reduced to just ten days. Consequently, ‘community support and participation’ was increasingly emphasised, which saw state authorities ‘notify the grassroots advisors, grassroots organisations and medical clinics in the affected areas much earlier than its past practice’ (Hansard 2004a). The ‘Mossie Buster’ initiative went even further and recruited schoolchildren to the cause, which Minister for the Environment Lim Swee Say was delighted to report ‘if we look at their faces, they were really keen and interested in what they were doing’ (Hansard 2004b). Similar in sentiment, the ‘Mossie Attack’ four-month community programme was launched in April 2004 at ten constituencies, bringing together DPVGs, grassroots organisations, residents and maids in group sessions to ‘learn how to look out for breeding grounds, and to get rid of 143 stagnant water’ (Ibid.). This programme would be extended to all 84 constituencies during the next year, with a particular interest in recruiting maids to the cause, as ‘only with active community involvement will we be able to keep the number of dengue cases to the lowest level possible’ (Hansard 2004c). The neoliberal precedent was now well established for future outbreaks, and this would be truly tested when Singapore suffered its worst ever dengue epidemic in 2005 that resulted in nineteen deaths. Whilst 4000 dengue prevention volunteers were primed for intervention, along with the Community Development Councils (CDC), Citizens’ Consultative Committees (CCC), RCs and grassroots groups that had received extra funding and briefings from the NEA, the preferred scale of action for detecting and removing stagnant water was the household. Accordingly, outreach efforts were accelerated by means of poster and pamphlet distribution at popular commuter points, whilst home educational kits were disseminated to 70,000 landed families (Hansard 2005a). By September an unprecedented 10,237 dengue cases had been recorded, attributed to rising temperatures, the increased strength of the virus, lower immunity amongst the population, greater biting rates, mosquito adaptation to alternative niches, and more controversially, outsourcing of drain-cleaning duties to private contractors. Under immense pressure to rectify a situation that was quickly and fatally spiralling out of control, the Environment Minister refused to return to the manifestly disciplinary techniques that were being advocated by other MPs. One particularly extreme suggestion involved ‘sheltering, isolating and ring-fencing all these patients’ in ‘special isolation shelters so that we can house all these suspected dengue and dengue-infected patients in these buildings’. Another MP encouraged ‘self-quarantine’ for the infected as ‘a way to break the breeding cycle of the mosquito’. In an exchange bearing remarkable resemblance to Foucault’s (2007) discussion of disease control, Professor Yaacob Ibrahim brushed off these recommendations and instead preferred self-management of risk, to ‘protect yourself from mosquitoes, it does not mean you have to quarantine yourself from the society’ (Hansard 2005b). Neoliberal mechanisms of security were now standard operating procedure based on citizen participation and ‘the information and the knowledge they need to combat dengue’ themselves, circulated through the ‘Campaign Against Dengue’ and a new website dedicated to prevention methods (Ibid.). Whilst these soft, remedial measures were proving to be adaptable and effective, the enduring problem posed by drains appeared extraordinarily unwieldy and intransigent in comparison. Static and austere, not everything in the contemporary city is speed, signs and spectacle. As part of the dengue prevention programme, drains were being cleared and cleansed more frequently, and their design was open to debate in light of the decade-long upsurge in dengue cases. In some cases, not only were they awkward to maintain but completely inaccessible, such was the case with three-story gutters, car park drains and covered drains in private and public housing estates. PUB and NEA were still searching for a long-term solution to these underground bunkers for mosquitos, which could only be flushed intermittingly and 144 with some difficulty. A ten-year plan was conceived that would have drains opened up where practically possible, and subject to accelerated maintenance works ‘to make sure water flows, that the larva does not collect and the dengue mosquito does not breed’ (Hansard 2005c). The outbreak would be largely brought under control by the beginning of 2006 but another epidemic would originate in Bukit Batok the subsequent year. However, a responsibilised brigade of community volunteers now made for rapid and flexible response, assisting by drilling holes in ashtrays, filling in tree holes with cement, land depressions with top soil, and detecting other places where water could collect. They would also be encouraged to monitor and provide feedback on the performance of private contractors charged with maintaining the steady flow of water through Singapore’s network of drains (Hansard 2008). Going forward, MP Tharman Shanmugaratnam reiterated that ‘the grassroots are a central part of the effort to fight dengue’, where ties between local volunteers and residents delivered dengue prevention measures ‘more intensely down to the community’ (ST 2007a).

5.7 Conclusion

This chapter has focused on the policy and technological shift from ‘hardware’ to ‘software’ in processes of water governance that occurred during the early 1990s. Avoiding the overtly epochal terminology that characterises much of the scholarship on economic restructuring and neoliberal decentralisation (Bauman 2000; Hardt and Negri 2000), it was demonstrated that security mechanisms came to supplant those of discipline in response to a general crisis of closed systems and monopoly control of water resources. As revealed in the previous chapter, flooding had proven too persistent to effectively eradicate thereby undermining the perceived capabilities of the centralised state, whilst canalisation technology had also enclosed large tracts of valuable land, threatened biodiversity and water quality levels, and alienated citizens from water circulation leading to recurrent instances of littering. The crisis of mosquito control provided the central focus of this chapter, which I have drawn upon at length to examine in close detail the enduring tension between security and discipline. The argument here is that a momentous shift in the way that water is administered, and urban governance is exercised more generally, can be detected in the rather mundane details of the drainage debate, where its infrastructure of circulation was made more accessible to a wider spectrum of the population. Community groups, schoolchildren and concerned citizens would earnestly and carefully scour these disreputable drains of disease and dirt for litter and mosquito larvae, whilst constantly checking their own conduct but also that of other volunteers. The removal of concrete drainage covers directly facilitated this process of administrative decentralisation, which reflected a much wider and significant shift in governmental strategy that will be addressed in chapter seven. As Foucault (2007) clearly postulated in his lectures, and which has tended to be overlooked in governmentality studies, to act on the population is to necessarily act on the materiality in which they live. The biopolitics of collective human 145 existence is grounded in the socio-ecological fabric of the milieu and its infrastructural networks of social provision. As I have argued here, and will expand upon further in the subsequent chapters, the milieu was undergoing a coordinated process of transformation in accordance with a series of urban planning objectives. Source control techniques, an integral component of IWRM, would provide the foundation for a decentralised, relational system of stormwater management, which facilitates and calibrates human interaction with urban water (Karvonen 2011). And indeed, these were not merely aesthetic or environmental projects but strategic interventions in the urban milieu to reconfigure the administrative boundary between the population and water circulation, aligned with the shift to a service economy. With security, Foucault (2007, p.22) suggests that ‘we see the notion of milieu appear here as the target of intervention for power…in which artifice functions as a nature in relation to a population’. The closed drainage system, centrally coordinated, standardised and premised on the exclusion of citizens, was materially amenable and exemplary of the former hierarchical, disciplinary regime. However, through mechanisms of security a more subtle, affirming and networked form of government would be facilitated by removing physical barriers and encouraging people to interact with water through lifestyle and community initiatives. Under a revised techne and telos, businesses, NGOs, community groups and individual citizens were henceforth encouraged to make decisions and assume personal responsibility for water through the provision of information and benchmarking practices, where the everyday operations of the state have been technologically and materially reconfigured through a different calculation of openings. The next chapter examines another key response to the crisis of closed systems, focusing on waterfront design and property development.

146

6. Birth of the waterfront: Urban design, property and Marina Bay

If the space of flows is truly the dominant spatial form of the network society, architecture and design are likely to be redefined in their form, function, process and value…the coming of the spaces of flows is blurring the meaningful relationship between architecture and society (Castells, 2000, p.448).

6.1 Introduction

As the previous chapter revealed, a series of interconnected plans began to envisage an alternative future for Singapore which made greater utility of the waterfront. Lifestyle and culture, alongside concomitant changes in the techne and telos of government, would provide the means through which the conduct of citizens would be orchestrated. Increasingly, undesirable behaviour would not be counteracted with concrete and command-and-control regulation but modified through calculated openings and physical contact with water. This form of government, premised on neoliberal principles, mechanisms of security and the entry of nature into social and political life, was closely scrutinised in regard to drainage design and mosquito control in the preceding chapter. Whereas the immediate inclination was to more closely contain water and quarantine infected citizens in light of increasingly severe dengue outbreaks, the shift to security instigated an alternative, practically antithetical response that utilised technologies of exposure as opposed to enclosure. Evidently, there would continue to be tension between these alternative approaches to water governance. However, the strategic shift from discipline to security, which occurred in response to a general crisis of closed systems and growing disillusionment with concrete modernism, would gain momentum as waterfront development intensified. Vast and pervasive, dormant storm canals were undermining the state’s programme of upgrading to a service economy, which would to a great extent rely on property investment and speculation. As canals were beautified and waterfront projects proliferated the cultural status of water began to mutate and escalate, bringing about wider implications for the exercise of everyday government as well. The material politics of this transition will again be central to our concerns and how government is enabled and modified by the physical reconfiguration of the built environment. By focusing on concrete practices of statecraft and the material properties of water, the analytical emphasis will be advantageously recalibrated to transcend contractual questions of institutional type whilst the continued significance of political sovereignty in neoliberal modes of government is made tangible. This chapter will return to the issue of urban planning and consider how water has been comprehensively incorporated into terrestrial areas in order to increase property values and provide lifestyle destinations. The ‘Master Plan for the Urban Waterfronts’ was particularly significant in this regard, shaping the trajectory of development at Tanjong Rhu and Marina Bay. 147

Given their proximity to the CBD it was not altogether surprising that both of these projects would become prime property destinations and metaphorical magnets for foreign capital. However, before turning to these distinguished projects, the chapter will consider how a series of less conspicuous waterfront developments were planned for various locations around Singapore, in Simpang, Kampong Bugis, Changi, Jurong and Punggol. During this period of waterfront development, it will be contended that administrative decentralisation was facilitated specifically through the planned entry of water into urban life, seeing an increasing number of private stakeholders involved in the design process of housing estates. Private architects in particular became a progressively influential presence, whilst developers were granted ever greater freedom to transform the waterfront to their own ends. Furthermore, the emergence of the waterfront provided a strategic arena for the exercise of a lifestyle-oriented form of government, which will be further examined in the subsequent chapter.

6.2 Urban water assets

A year before the Waterbodies Design Panel was formed a 10-year master plan for the development of Marina Bay and Kallang Basin was released, which acknowledged that ‘the cleaning of our urban waterways has unleashed their hidden potential as recreational playgrounds in the city’ (URA, 1989b, p.1). Along with development proposals for the Singapore River, the plan envisaged that these ‘three urban water assets’ (p.3) could be transformed into recreational, commercial and high-end residential hubs. Comprising 265 hectares, situated in and around the city centre, development of the revitalised waterways would not be left to chance. Instead, the plan would carefully ‘guide the successful integration of the water element with its surroundings, thus creating a complementary relationship between the use of the water and the waterfronts’ (p.5). Indeed, anything deemed incompatible or uncomplimentary such as the remaining shipyards, gasworks and small industries at Kallang Basin would be ‘phased out in order to fully realise the area’s potential as a venue for fun and recreation’ (p.14). Optimised use of prime waterfront space, namely high-density housing and recreational development, was prioritised as a planning objective, as was their orientation towards the water’s edge (URA 1993a). As part of this vision, and drawing on examples from Baltimore, Sydney and San Francisco, extensive water frontage was to be lined and linked with continuous promenades to allow for strolling, shopping and spectating. Ill-defined or inaccessible shorelines would be redesigned and coordinated with adjacent waterfront developments. Overall, the stated objective of the plan was to yield benefits from the large amount of investment put into the clean-up programme, to create a ‘new aquatic recreational sanctuary’ (URA, 1989b, p.37). Feeding into Kallang Basin, the S$25.3 million reconstruction of Geylang River involved substantial landscaping to create an adjoining park-like walkway, whilst a S$51 million contract to improve Kallang River between Braddell Road and Pan Island Expressway included ‘special design 148 features’ to turn it into an ‘aesthetic waterbody’, as well as a 4-metre wide jogging track (ENV, 1993b, p.15). A year later, contracts worth S$53 million were awarded to reconstruct Whampoa with landscaping features (ENV 1994). During these reconstruction works on the central rivers the boundary was still something to be respected nonetheless. On Kallang River it was important for safety railings to ‘demarcate both the entire banks of the rejuvenated river, providing a sense of orderliness and security’, although residents were encouraged to run alongside or ‘even cast fishing lines over the sides of the river’ (ENV, 1996b, p.1). As it was ventured in chapter three, the URA had already begun regeneration work on the Singapore River in parallel with the clean-up programme. This entailed close supervision of waterfront development, meaningful private sector participation by architects and developers, and the creation of a new economic role for the river based on leisure and tourism (COBSEA 1986). In 1985 a plan was launched that not only guided development and urban design but usage of the River itself to ensure that activities are ‘complementary’, revolving around organised competitions, festivals, boat trips and water sports (URA 1986a). Although appealingly vernacular architectural features would be retained, particularly the traditional shophouses and some quaintly decorated warehouses, significant landscaping would commence including the creation of street furniture, new landmarks and ‘pause points’ to give the river a distinct image (URA 1986b). Guide plans would be provided by the Development and Building Control Division but the exact composition of uses would be decided by the private sector and the ‘imagination of the developers’ (URA, 1985a, p.12). Comprising 2.15 hectares along Singapore River, a S$54 million tender to develop Clarke Quay was awarded to the private group Real Estate Holdings to reinvent the area as a ‘shopping, recreational and cultural showpiece’ (URA, 1990a, p.23). This development, and the riverside al fresco dining venue Boat Quay further south, were both completed by 1993 to boost its economic potential as a ‘waterfront festival village’ (URA, 1994a, p.25). In recompense for completing within a strict timeframe, which would ensure development compatibility with the upgraded planning area, the URA offered to form a ‘partnership’ with private developers by streamlining the tenant settlement process and the phasing out of rent controls (URA 1989c). Referring to the regeneration of Clarke Quay, Mr Peter Sung, Minister State for National Development, underlined the emerging rationale within planning circles that the ‘private sector provides the enterprise and the creativity’ (URA, 1990b, p.3) required for increasing the value of land and property. The revised role of the state by comparison is to steer the overarching development trajectory and provide the necessary infrastructure for economic growth. As part of the Concept Plan, the river was to be designated a ‘key development corridor’ with 80 percent of surrounding land dedicated to commercial development and 20 percent for high-end residential blocks to foster a 24-hour lifestyle culture (URA, 1992a, p.19). To induce inward investment, the plan assured that ‘special events and displays will be introduced to draw more people to the water’s edge- and to the business activities near the River!’ (p.33). After 149 undergoing public consultation in 1993, the redrafted plan incorporated those that were considered ‘good suggestions’, which called for greater emphasis on historical heritage and cultural focus (URA, 1994a, p.13). But again, industries and buildings that were ‘incompatible’ with the new vision or blocked waterfront continuity would be phased out by allowing higher land values (p.15). The bottom of the Singapore River would be deepened by two metres and its embankments strengthened to enhance drainage capacity for 15 square kilometres of catchment whilst transforming it into an aesthetic waterway, costing S$140 million (ENV 1995). Work began towards the end of 1992 and would be completed in 1999, replacing the century-old, disintegrating river walls with 4,800 metres of new, sturdier embankments for waterfront development using modern methods of jet-grouting (ENV 1996c). A continuous 3 km promenade would eventually link all the riverside attraction together, to improve connectivity and provide more opportunities for commercial and recreational usage (URA 2000a). At S$97 million, a 2km stretch of the Alexandra Canal, which connects the Singapore River with Ulu Pandan, was widened and deepened between 1996 and 2001 to alleviate flooding in the area and as with other central waterways it was transformed into an ‘aesthetic waterbody’ that residents could walk, jog or cycle along (ENV, 1999a, p.16). From the 1990s onwards, the aesthetic revolution of the waterfront would spread further afield than the Central District and seek greater private involvement and investment. A sweeping project of state-endorsed gentrification would ensue predicated on the incorporation of water as a ‘natural asset’ into formerly industrial or vacant areas, to significantly enhance the value of waterfront land and property prices whilst opening up new market opportunities for investors. The URA began to strongly promote the construction of variable housing forms at attractive locations such as condominiums, townhouses and maisonettes, which could cater for affluent professionals whilst diversifying Singapore’s property portfolio (URA 1991c). Here, the material introduction of water served not only as a technology of government but as an instrument of financial capitalism. Unprecedented at the time, private architects were invited to submit plans for public housing projects, to encourage greater variability between estates and inject creativity into the monotonously state-led planning process. Although the HDB and URA had previously attempted to create a sense of competition between state planners to inspire innovation, design remained a largely homogenous affair therefore decentralisation of architectural duties to the ‘entrepreneur private sector’ was considered the logical next step (Hansard 1991b). In addition to setting aside more land in HDB estates for private development, increasingly, public housing prices would more accurately reflect construction and plot costs whilst taking into account consumer preferences for ‘locality, design and orientation’ (Hansard 1990b). Given the especial emphasis put on waterfront development it was hardly coincidental that this first occurred down at the water’s edge, where the boundary between public and private, terrestrial and aquatic were inventively blurred to foster an environment of innovation and enterprise. 150

Simpang, an undeveloped region formerly covered by coconut and rubber plantations on 554 hectares of state-owned northern coast, was partially cleared and levelled for development in 1987. Two major tributaries of the Sungei Simpang were also filled to make more land available, whilst its estuary was preserved to provide an attractive feature for waterfront housing (URA 1993b). A team from SIA was appointed in 1989 to prepare a rival proposal to the HDB, where the brief was to ‘create a 21st century waterfront development’ and ‘capitalise on the existing rivers, terrain and frontage to the coast’ (p.9). Besides providing 22,000 further dwelling units, it was enthusiastically envisaged that Simpang would offer novel housing forms, marinas, waterfront attractions and boating facilities, taking planning in a different, decidedly more fluid direction (URA 1990c). Both sets of proposals were displayed in a public exhibition in the form of videos and models in order to receive feedback, and the development strengths of each were subsequently incorporated into a Development Guide Plan (DGP) executed by the URA. This new planning framework afforded an element of flexibility that encouraged alternative perspectives from professional bodies, NGOs and citizens, which were collected through surveys, feedback sessions and written letters (URA 1990c). Whilst both proposals were similar in their reimagining of Simpang as a ‘sea-oriented’ town that would encourage residents to make everyday contact with water, largely through recreational and commercial activities, the intended treatment of the water’s edge diverged markedly. Whereas the private architects respected the existing undulations of the coastline and proposed to develop around them, even suggesting returning water to the filled tributaries to ‘recover the water edge’ (SIA, 1990a, p.20), state planners envisaged large-scale reclamation that would drastically redefine the coast and add 115 hectares of land (HDB 1990). An artificial waterway would also be constructed to create an island thereby facilitating better river flow of Sungei Simpang whilst making available more prime parcels of waterfront land, including new residential forms such as marina housing with accompanying boat berths. According to one member of the private architect team, the ambiguous legacy of the state’s approach to waterfront development continues to endure, where ‘there is no natural coastline left in all of Singapore. All the beaches are now fake, artificial…Singapore is the only island that doesn’t have a fractured coastline, it’s a completely straight line…it might as well be just a square diamond’ (int#22). The final master plan was clearly shaped in large part by the HDB bid, in which land reclamation and urban layout proposals were adopted almost wholesale. Nevertheless, a new precedent was established which at least advocated the meaningful participation of the private sector in waterfront development and urban planning, to collaboratively and imaginatively deliberate the design of the water’s edge and harness its entrepreneurial spirit. Contemporaneous proposals for a second major waterfront development at Kampong Bugis also involved the participation of private architects, concerning 76 hectares of valuable real estate located on the Kallang River adjacent to the CBD (see figure 6.1). Whereas Simpang 151 was envisaged as a coastal town in a rural setting, Kampong Bugis was set to become a uniquely urban waterfront residence (URA 1990d). The private team, headed by locally renowned and increasingly disillusioned architect Tay Kheng Soon, presciently advocated a utopian vision of an ultra-dense, mixed-use residential complex that utilised ‘modern tropical’ techniques of climatic sensitivity, namely vertical vegetation, shading, wind channels and ‘maximum use of the water edges’ (SIA, 1990b, p.9).

Figure 6.1 Kampong Bugis promotional material

Source: URA (1990d)

Similarly, their counterparts in the state planning team recognised the renewed potential for premier residential and recreational facilities with the clean-up of the central waterways, proposing that beaches were optimised and housing line both sides of the river to ‘frame the water’s edge’ (URA, 1990e, p.13). The rival proposals were exhibited at Marina Square to garner public and professional feedback, instigating a prolonged discussion between a crowd of approximately 150 participants on the benefits and disadvantages of high density living, urban greenery and waterfront design (URA 1991d). However, again, the resulting master plan was a lightly modified facsimile of the HDB bid, bearing little resemblance to the SIA plan. As one of those professionals involved in both schemes confirmed, decentralisation would not come naturally in a country which had for decades trusted in physical and managerial delineation:

The URA invited two architects and I worked on both projects. Nothing really happened, okay? We put up alternate plans to the URA and HDB plans, but basically the Government took their plans. The private architects were too radical for them (int#22). 152

6.3 Flagship projects and the decentralisation of design

This important decade of waterfront planning and stakeholder engagement, which was clearly shaped by the discursive shift in environmental government, saw further flagship proposals for quality, advanced types of residential development. The SIA were drafted in once again to contribute to the development of Jurong East and Changi Point, to render the ‘planning system more open and consultative and to harness good ideas from the private sector’ (SIA, 1992a, p.1). The design narrative remained much the same, where urban development was to be enhanced by ‘embracing the waterline more closely…emphasising the coastline and other waterfront areas to create high-quality waterfront communities….the intention is to establish a settlement in harmony with the water’ (p.2). For Jurong East, the site of Singapore’s first industrial estate, the formerly inaccessible and unattractive status of the waterfront surrounding the industrial reservoir would be addressed by the construction of a continuous promenade for recreational activities such as walking, jogging and cycling (SIA 1992b).

Figure 6.2 Detail from SIA’s Changi bid

Source: SIA (1992a)

In Changi, extensive land reclamation would provide the means through which artificial islets and meandering waterways could be manufactured along the coast, to be populated with premium private housing and marinas (see figure 6.2). This would overcome planning constraints and allow for public access to the foreshore, by extending the length of the coast and 153 allowing ‘Kelong housing’ to be built on raised piles on the water surface itself (SIA 1992a). Comprehensive feedback forms were available at the public exhibitions of plans, with rating boxes and space for critical elaboration. Alongside a professed willingness to take into account private sector input, this demonstrated a genuine intention to engage with members of the public on the issue of waterfront development in these selected areas, albeit within a highly regulated framework (URA 1994b, 1995a). However, in the mid-1990s, a series of waterfront developments were proposed that would develop the notion of collaborative planning even further and set a highly publicised precedent for future housing projects. The first proposal, Punggol 21, was first unveiled on 9 October, 1996. With the general election occurring early the following year, the PAP threatened to ‘review’ the scheme if voters opted for the competing Workers’ Party candidates (ST 1997). Unsurprisingly, and not for the first time, the PAP won the ward with 54.8 percent of the vote thanks in no small part to its longstanding reliance on infrastructural bargaining. Aside from party politics, Punggol 21 was also aligned with the URA’s ‘industrial phasing out’ programme, initiated in 1993, which coordinated the relocation or closure of heavier industries to release valuable land for property development (URA, 1999a, p.20). Rather presumptively perhaps, this waterfront scheme was conceived as a model for subsequent public housing that ‘embodies ideas for the kind of lifestyle that Singaporeans aspire to’ (URA, 1996a, p.2). The HDB began to import marketing strategies from the private sector in terms of branding and promotion, particularly the condominium market, which publicised Punggol 21 ‘as a lifestyle choice rather than a flat’ (ST 2002a). Slick advertisements emerged that were oriented towards waterfront living, or at least what branding teams decided this should entail, invariably accompanied by an appositely aspirational marine metaphor. Once associated with disease and neglect, water and its concomitant infrastructure of circulation were being gradually and astutely revalorised as socially desirable, luxury commodities. Located in the northeast of the island, an area made famous for its ready assimilation of displaced and upgraded piggeries, Punggol 21 was expected to accommodate a wider mix of housing, including HDBs, private residences and executive condominiums on 957 hectares of premium land (URA 1996b, 1998). With 40 percent of the housing stock set to be privately owned, the blurring of private and public would evidently continue, as indeed would the boundary between the terrestrial and aquatic (see figure 6.3). Although close proximity to an extensive waterfront was identified as a major advantage for property development, state planners considered this to be an ‘under-utilised’ natural asset (URA, 1998a, p.13 [see figure 6.4]). To supplement the existing Punggol and Serangoon rivers, an artificial waterway was therefore considered a realistic option, which could be created through land reclamation increasing water frontage by 15km (URA 1996b). The river proposal was positively received during the public exhibitions, a staple component of the planning process by now, where 1,670 participants provided feedback on this feature and suggested private condominiums give way to 154 increased public housing lots at the water’s edge (URA 1997a). In particular, President of SIA, Edward D’Silva, expressed concerns that public access to the waterfront would be restricted due to the new priority given to private development (ST 1996b).

Figure 6.3 Punggol housing mix with private condominiums on waterfront

Source: URA (1996b)

Influenced by proposals for Punggol, Pasir Ris 21 was a related plan that sought to apply similar concepts to an adjacent New Town also located on the northeast coast. Again, proximity to the waterfront was identified as offering great development potential, although again, access was a problem (URA 1995b). At a cost of S$16.4 million, a pilot project of the Waterbodies Design Panel to transform the Api Api River into an aesthetic waterway whilst increasing its conveyance capacity was completed in 1993, which further demonstrates the strategic dovetailing between catchment management and economic upgrading (ENV 1993b). However, in contrast to previous policy, this dual programme would be achieved through naturalisation as opposed to canalisation techniques, specifically mangrove installation, premised on the celebration rather than containment of water (ENV 1992b). A jarring juxtaposition with the preceding planning logic, the river was deepened by two metres to ensure the constant presence of water, which beforehand would drain completely dry during low tide periods. Running through the centre of Pasir Ris New Town, this novel form of ‘waterscaping’ was part of the state’s vision for turning Singapore into a global city of gardens and water (ST 1991a).

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Figure 6.4 ‘Untapped’ waterfronts at Punggol

Source: URA (1998a)

Recommendations tabled by the Waterbodies Design Panel had been heeded, allowing developers and HDB planners to construct promenades, gardens, cafes or restaurants immediately adjacent to waterways from March 1993, whereas before a 6-metre strip had to be reserved for drainage maintenance (ST 1992b). This change had not gone unnoticed by the Institute of Surveyors and Valuers, which assured the residents of Pasir Ris that their property prices would appreciate with the naturalisation of Api Api, unless of course the river began to omit unpleasant odours (ST 1995). Whilst the official birth of the waterfront can perhaps be traced back to this specific policy change, planning activity at Pasir Ris was significant for another, not entirely unrelated reason. The SIA was again invited to submit suggestions for urban development but the ten architects involved in the study of Pasir Ris were afforded even greater creative freedom. Along with Punggol, Pasir Ris 21 was publicised as the general model for impending planning projects, which signalled ‘the beginning of a two-way working relationship between the government and private sector architects…the modus operandi for future “Singapore 21” plans’ (SIA, 2001, p.1). Marking something of a departure from previous plans, a key theme of Pasir Ris 21 was community development, ownership and architecture that could ‘foster a spirit of self-management of facilities and neighbourliness’ (p.10). This would be achieved through landscaped community malls, smaller estates marked out by hedges, gardens and ponds, and 156 swimming facilities that encourage social interaction. Where architects and planners were concerned, fluidity and freedom were not only becoming increasingly synonymous as master concepts but constituted what appeared to be a natural alliance. However, as various theorists of a broadly defined liquid modernity have postulated, instability and impermanence are its Janus face. Whilst some of the proposals for Pasir Ris would be realised, including a community hall with pedestrian and bicycle links completed in 2005, the majority of other plans would fail to fully materialise. Most symbolically, the ambitious plans for Punggol 21 were swiftly derailed by the Asian Economic Crisis in 1997, leaving this sparsely developed area as a potent reminder of the capricious and speculative nature of property markets. With preliminary phases of land reclamation having taken place throughout the 1990s, housing construction was scheduled to commence in 1997 and be almost completed by 2001 (Hansard 1993). In May 1997, a tender was closed for the final stage of land reclamation that would create the new waterway, amounting altogether to 855 hectares of gained ground. The banks of the Punggol River were also realigned and strengthened to support residential waterfront dwellings whilst improving its drainage capacity, which predictably also came in for aesthetic upgrading (ENV 1999b). On this foundation, which was available for development from 2003, were expected to be largely private residential, commercial and recreational facilities (Hansard 1997a). The first 800 HDB flats were constructed and went up for sale in 1998, followed by further rounds of release occurring at regular intervals over the subsequent years (ST 1998a). To entice potential buyers, the HDB introduced a number of purchase and design measures to cater more effectively to individual consumer preferences, reducing its monopoly on aesthetic and architectural direction. For the first time, the housing board actually reduced the sale price of new flats by 11 percent in the third quarter of 1998, whilst premium apartments were advertised at a higher rate that offered ‘luxurious’ interior fittings such as timber doors, wooden floors and vanity counters (ST 1998b, 2000b). In 2000, 36 wall-less ‘white flats’ with no internal partitions were also debuted at Punggol 21 to provide buyers with greater flexibility in designing their homes, providing a markedly mundane yet manifest example of this generalised disintegration of predetermined and predetermining boundaries (ST 2000c). All of these ‘flexible’ flats had been taken up within the year thereby validating the HDB’s decision to imitate the condominium model. Furthermore, the required down-payment for first-time buyers was reduced from 20 to 10 percent in 2001. At its official opening on 8 July 2001, then Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong asserted that Punggol 21 ‘would appeal to a new generation of better-educated, more sophisticated Singaporeans…it represents a brand new lifestyle in public housing estates, and is a prelude of things to come’ (NAS 2001). A central theme of the speech was neoliberal ideas of ‘ownership and community’ which Goh proposed could be nurtured in a waterfront environment. Housing options would also be available to those at both the lower and higher ends of the income 157 spectrum. Yet, irrespective of this optimism, an already precarious economy was further undermined by financial problems in the construction industry in 2003. The market effectively collapsed as demand for flats tumbled creating an unhealthy excess of housing stock. This left residents who had eagerly descended on Punggol to coordinate night patrols on a voluntary basis to deter thieves and vandals; the majority of whom had been attracted by the low occupancy of estates (ST 2003b). Indeed, the original forecast was for 80,000 private and HDB homes to be constructed at Punggol, but by 2007 only 16,000 flats had in fact been built (ST 2007b). This set of circumstances was repeated at numerous sites across Singapore where flagship waterfront projects were dropped one after another. Spectacular proposals for Kampong Bugis and Changi Point did not eventuate, whilst the vacant swamps of Simpang made it a useful location for military training instead. It was enthusiastically ventured at the turn of the millennium that marinas would be built at Punggol, Simpang and Marina East by 2010, which proved to be embarrassingly assumptive (URA 1999b). And certainly, concerns were already being declared during the initial stages of this shift to waterfront development regarding the direction in which urban planning was going. Criticism was directed towards short-term speculators who had benefited from the ‘feeding frenzy’ in escalating condominium properties, which even saw leading politicians Lee Kuan Yew and his son Lee Hsien Loong implicated in scandals over lucrative investments, tax evasion and profiteering (Hansard 1996). More generally, MP Lew Syn Pau warned against skewing the economy too much towards rapid asset inflation and speculative investment in the built environment:

We should also not over promote glamorous lifestyles which only the very rich can indulge in. For example, the Government has been talking a lot about waterfront housing as something we can look forward to. Yes, but in reality, however, at today's cost, only a very small minority can afford such housing. The remaining large majority who cannot afford them will be envious, or perhaps even resentful (Hansard 1997b).

These comments may have come across as unduly cautionary following as they did a period of rapid economic growth and land appreciation, which Singapore as a ‘property state’ had increasingly come to rely upon for its model of development (Haila 1999, 2000; Shatkin 2014). Nevertheless, they did prove to be rather prescient given the subsequent collapse in the property sector. Public housing was indeed significantly affected by the crisis but waterfront development planned for the CBD and surrounding areas of premium land, which were unsurprisingly earmarked for high-end private ventures rather than HDB construction, would not be undermined by the same extent (ST 1996c). Moreover, catchment management and reservoir expansion would again constitute a fundamental component of the state’s programme of urban restructuring and socio-economic modernisation.

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6.4 Towards a waterfront hub

Tanjong Rhu, a 34-hectare site identified in the Urban Waterfronts Master Plan as a flagship proposal, was the first planned waterfront development to be completed in Singapore (URA 1999b). Located in Kallang Basin, on land that formerly contained boatyards before coordinated gentrification commenced, Tanjong Rhu was intended to augment the official vision for a ‘Basin for Fun and Recreation’ within 15 years (URA, 1989d, p.7). The shoreline was initially regularised through land reclamation to overcome plot constraints and create space for waterfront outlets, restaurants and a marina, providing the necessary amenities for a high-end enclave of quality private housing (URA 1990f). This was part of a wider S$265 million project undertaken by the state to reclaim valuable land at Marina Bay and Tanjong Rhu using 5.4 million cubic metres of imported sand from Indonesia and Malaysia, a unique and subtle form of land grabbing (ST 1991b). Although the proposed marina has not yet materialised, the flurry of condominium construction that did ensue epitomised the ‘property fever’ which had begun to spread through the development sector. Tanjong Rhu was even considered to be the litmus test for the health of the property market as a whole, allowing both speculators and politicians to gauge the future trajectory of market trends. One particularly significant trend concerned the economic diversification of domestic marine companies, which sought to exploit the growing demand for waterfront properties fuelled by affluent ‘yuppies’ (ST 1991c). Indeed, the demand for medium-scale ship building and repair was clearly expected to shrink as more land was made available for property development, and conveniently, these companies had already laid claim to increasingly valuable waterfront space. A shift in sectoral focus was the logical evolution in their corporate strategy, which reflects in rather precise terms the wider programme of economic restructuring that was occurring down at the water’s edge. Recognising this opportunity, government-linked Keppel Corporation acquired a prime 47,257 square metre plot through transactions across its property arm Straits Steamship Land (SSL) and majority-owned subsidiary Singmarine Industries. Two adjoining parcels of land were also acquired for approximately S$47 million, which together were expected to make a pre-tax profit of S$229 million after development and the subsequent increase in property prices (ST 1989). Furthermore, Keppel Corporation was intending to expand into the booming leisure boat industry, which would of course be facilitated by its waterfront land holdings at Tanjong Rhu and reservoir construction by the state (ST 1990a). Garnering prestige by explicit association, ‘The Waterside’ consisting of 5 blocks of 23 storey-buildings was the first condominium announced for Tanjong Rhu, developed by OCBC Bank. The Bank’s first major condominium project was expected to cost approximately S$130 million to complete but would make S$357 million in resulting sales, based on an average price of S$850,000 for each apartment (ST 1990b). Property specialists forecast an influx of foreign capital but local demand did prove to be buoyant with the assistance of various financing options. The first phase of selling saw nearly half the units sold on the opening day, which 159 began at 6am with queues of prospective buyers vying for apartments with the most ‘spectacular views of the sea and the city’ (ST 1990c). The second phase the following year was even more successful, confirmed by the sight of buyers camping overnight in the OCBC offices. The end of the Gulf War had instilled greater confidence in investors and although the list price was 5 percent higher nearly all the available apartments had been bought in less than ten hours, amounting to S$112 million of investment (ST 1991d). Speculators were re-selling units just 24 hours later with significant mark-ups of around 29 percent, which local buyers thought would inevitably inflate prices above the affordability threshold of hardworking Singaporeans seeking to upgrade from public housing (ST 1991e). For the third phase of selling, taking place a year later, prices were 25 percent higher again (ST 1992c). The speculative interest that accompanied the opening of The Waterside encouraged rival developers to launch sales and increase prices, even before piling work had been completed or brochures were produced. City Developments along with other partner companies had bought land in Tanjong Rhu for S$35 million, on which they intended to construct an exclusive condominium with an advanced security system at a further cost of S$65 million. Within days of launching, over 50 percent of the 152 units at ‘Parkshore’ were sold despite the high average price of S$530 per square foot (ST 1992d). On a plot previously occupied by a flour-milling factory, bought from the confectioner Khong Guan, DBS Land and SSL developed the 155-unit ‘Casuarina Cove’ condominium, completed in 1996 with on-site swimming pool, spa, gymnasium, sports courts and putting green. The confectioner retained a 35 percent stake in the venture whilst converting to financially innovative scripless trading, seeing its share price soar by nearly 25 percent amidst heady projections of S$17.8 million profits (ST 1992e). As part of an ‘aggressive’ entry into the residential property market, DBS Land and its partner SSL also began work on the large 510-unit condominium ‘Pebble Bay’, which along with Casuarina Cove brought the company year on year surges in profits. In 1997, SSL reported a massive 83.6 percent increase in group turnover for the previous year, amounting to S$591.7 million (ST 1997c). This figure was predicted to have been higher but Amcol Holdings brought its condominium to market during the same period on the land initially acquired by Keppel- linked companies, mentioned above, which was bought for S$152 million (ST 1993c). This development, the ‘Costa Rhu’, also sought to exploit the swelling cachet of the coast (see figure 6.5). A premium 737-unit complex situated on the very cusp of the waterfront, it contains penthouses with unparalleled views of the Kallang Basin and rapid transport links to the CBD, suggestive of the clientele it was intending to attract, which sold for S$2.8 million at the initial launch. The original landowner, Singmarine, which had suffered financially by the decline of the marine industry, channelled its S$152 million proceeds into its core shipbuilding business overseas instead, completing a rather lucrative circle of investment via the property market (ST 1994a).

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Figure 6.5 View of the Cost Rhu condominium from WWS headquarters

Source: Author (2012)

A steady raft of similarly prestigious projects would follow these prototypal ventures as Tanjong Rhu consolidated as a waterfront destination. Flows of capital surged between corporations, subsidiaries and sectors, crossing international borders with increasing volume and speed. And again, the strategic role of the state in facilitating this centrifugal expansion and cycle of private investment and accumulation cannot be overestimated, orchestrated through the freedom, aspirations and desires of its citizenry, not their managed docility. To expedite Singapore’s transformation into a globally renowned ‘waterfront hub’ (URA 1999c), state planning was essential for opening up land to appropriate forms of development, enhancing connectivity through infrastructural installation, and most significantly here, rejuvenating waterways on the general premise of catchment management. During the development of Tanjong Rhu, the URA released plots of land at regular intervals through its sale of sites, with the first tenders for residential projects occurring at the end of 1992. Interest amongst property developers was significant given the state’s well-publicised commitment to transforming Tanjong Rhu into a prime waterfront destination, which in 1996 attracted twice as many bids than for other sites located elsewhere (ST 1996d). The dedicated infrastructure budget amounted to S$77.6 million, although it was also necessary to upgrade surrounding HDB estates in order to maintain some semblance of aesthetic equilibrium with neighbouring private condominiums (ST 1997d). This proximity would prove

161 to be prosperous as public housing prices would increase accordingly, leading local MP Eugene Yap to suggest that occupants ‘were sitting on a gold mine’ (Ibid.). Landscaped features were by now an essential component of luxury condominiums, particularly those incorporating water into communal areas, which enabled properties to command higher prices. A water fountain was the preferred design feature by the HDB for elevating the status of its estate in Tanjong Rhu, whilst landscaping at Pebble Bay cost in the region of S$4 million to attract a more discerning clientele (ST 2001). Ample integration of water into complexes and buildings was an assured way for architects to distinguish their projects from other developments, especially older condominiums or public housing, which was ‘associated with good living, a little higher class that being closed in an HDB estate’ (ST 1996e). Water, something of a floating signifier, literally, was becoming associated less with deficiency or threat and linked more directly to affections of fulfilment, pleasure, potency and prestige, envy, longing and lust; fixations of desire had come to generally displace those of disgust.

Figure 6.6 Marina Bay and the integrated resort Marina Bay Sands

Source: Author (2012)

With the meticulous planning and branding of Marina Bay, this emerging design principle would be implemented on a much grander, urban scale. The Bay, along with the Kallang Basin, is an entirely artificial product of the state’s planning board, a corporate utopia constructed between 1971 and 1985 from reclaimed land around which the CBD has expanded

162 and consolidated (see figure 6.6). Previously coastal in topography, a vast reservoir has been subsumed into Singapore’s territorial ambit and placated through dam technology. Together with the Singapore River, these three urban water assets would serve to frame and feed into the CBD, the economic heart and nerve-centre of the country and one of the world’s most prominent and recognisable financial nodes. Revised planning objectives for this strategic area were not altogether surprising, including greater supply of office space, hotel rooms, shops and entertainment venues (URA 1992b). However, subsequent to the strategic shift in environmental government, it would also be ‘surrounded by water and dotted with parks and trees…in fact, the Downtown of the future will be almost as much about water and greenery as it is about steel, glass, paving and offices’ (Ibid., p.13). Alongside key proposals for an internationally connected business centre and hub for 24-hour entertainment, the downtown core must also provide close proximity to waterbodies and ‘gracious waterside living’ (p.18). In line with earlier proposals by I.M Pei and Kenzo Tange, Marina Bay should therefore provide the spectacular visual and thematic focus around which a new city would eventually evolve (URA 1985b). Initiating proceedings in 1986, the first in-shore powerboat race in Asian waters took place in Marina Bay, organised by the tourist board in order to attract visitors and buoy up a flagging hotel industry (Hansard 1987b). Concurrently, a preliminary scoping exercise was conducted on the possibility of turning Marina Bay into a non-potable source of water supply. This had become increasingly urgent given that catchment expansion had been seemingly exhausted elsewhere on the island, whilst desalination technology was still too expensive to seriously contemplate (Hansard 1988). The extension of Marina South through reclamation commenced in 1990 in response to the growing demand for office space, incorporating another 36.2 hectares of land into the city core (Hansard 1989b). Although this newly reclaimed area would be initially reserved for future development, land immediately surrounding the bay had begun to be parcelled into valuable plots. To encourage a ‘pro-business’ evolution of Marina Bay, this zone was comprised of ‘white’ sites, encompassing approximately 50 hectares of prime waterfront land (URA 1997b). In contrast to erstwhile strictures associated with sales of sites, this afforded developers the freedom to ascertain the use and mix of their purchased plot according to market rather than state demands, which would allow maximum flexibility to respond to changing economic trends (URA 1998b). Widening the development potential of plots by permitting either commercial, residential or hotel usage, depending on the inclination of the developer, would optimise their market value and harness the entrepreneurialism of the private sector. Previously restricted and centrally controlled, the planning process was undergoing a coordinated programme of flexibilisation to give developers greater autonomy in deciding how the central waterfront should look, feel and function. This is not to suggest that state authorities had withdrawn their aspirations for aesthetic attainment. According to the planning board, 163

Marina Bay was destined to become ‘the place where beautiful people in sassy nightwear can flaunt their aerobicised bodies’ (URA, 1999b, p.96). This would be part of their new strategic focus on ‘cultural capital’, which proactively encouraged fashionable and inspiring activities that could potentially attract investors and professionals to Singapore (URA 1999a). And indeed, the waterfront offered the ideal stage for this biopolitical regime, establishing a glamorous backdrop for spectacularised flesh. The barrage that would eventually transform Marina Bay into a freshwater reservoir was also mooted at this time, and not coincidentally, which in addition to assisting flood control and augmenting water supply would form a ‘placid waterbody to complement and support our riverside development plans’ (Hansard 1997c). Then Minister for National Development, Lim Hng Kiang, would go even further regarding the efficacy of reservoir construction for enhancing the bay:

A barrage at the Marina Channel will stabilise the water level in Marina Bay, Kallang Basin and Singapore River. This will create a serene and pleasant water body for boating and water leisure activities, and enhance the value of waterside properties (Hansard 1997d).

During the intervening period, the URA intended to create a ‘cultural and activity loop’ around the waterfront of Marina Bay, consisting of ‘world-class’ landmarks and iconic buildings such as the Esplanade, an architecturally iconic arts centre, and Fullerton Hotel (Hansard 2003). In 2001, the bay had been designated as the primary pivot for establishing Singapore’s identity and brand in the ‘Landmark and Gateway Plan’, providing a global stage for signature buildings and famous views (URA 2001). Oriented towards the business traveller market, the renovated Fullerton Hotel was opened on New Year’s Eve in 2000 to critical acclaim, offering rooms with unparalleled and exclusive views of Marina Bay for between S$450 and S$3,800 (ST 2000d). A sister project, Fullerton Bay Hotel, opened a decade later with arguably more beguiling views, leading one British banker to plunge to his death from the seventh-story rooftop swimming pool in a fatal attempt at diving into the serenely swelling Marina Reservoir (ST 2011a). Rebranded as elegant and seductive, successfully so it would seem, water could evidently still suffocate and kill with chilling efficiency. The Merlion statue, a famous marketing icon and mascot of Singapore, was relocated to a new position adjacent to the Fullerton Hotel in April 2002 (see figure 6.7). This was performed to increase its visibility to passing tourists whilst more effectively linking Singapore River to the emerging Marina district, evidenced by its water jet spouting directly into the bay (URA 2003). It would also provide a focal point for Marina Bay allowing tourists to pose for photographs in front of the Merlion for the first time, with the famous Raffle’s Place skyline positioned strategically behind (URA 2000b).

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Figure 6.7 The Merlion statue located at Marina Bay

Source: Author (2012)

6.5 Boosterism and the bay

In an increasingly competitive global economy, Marina Bay would provide the necessary allure to attract business and financial institutions to Singapore- indeed this was its overarching rationale- but there was inevitable friction between domestic and international interests. The planning of the ‘Esplanade- Theatres on the Bay’, which officially opened in 2002, was coloured by dispute and ill-feeling. Although the first brief was delivered in 1987, it was not until a design team headed by British architect Michael Wilford was appointed five years later that the potential for controversy was introduced. With a budget of S$600 million and comprising 6 hectares of prime land, the Esplanade was intended to provide the showpiece icon for Marina Bay therefore its architectural design was of paramount importance to state planners (URA 2000c). Minister for Information and the Arts, George Yeo, assured that ‘it will be like opening a jewellery box. The Esplanade will be like a bracelet, sitting on the waterfront’ (ST 1994b). State officials challenged the team to produce an iconic, internationally recognisable building that would appeal to both Singaporeans and tourists alike, satisfying both Eastern and Western tastes in architectural design to avoid it becoming a ‘white elephant’ (Hansard 1995b). This would be entirely inappropriate for an aspiring world-class waterfront and prudently managed skyline, particularly as many envisaged it becoming the new symbol of Singapore, overtaking the Merlion (ST 1994c).

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The chosen design was nevertheless met with outcry and ire, vociferously vented by Singaporeans through media outlets. Although the project attracted the plaudits of the President and Prime Minister, quite predictably perhaps, local citizens, architects and critics that were less concerned with its international appeal criticised the design for lacking in cultural significance and symbolism, displaying little sensitivity to the Asian context (ST 1994d, 1994e). Playful and disparaging, the large serrated domes were referred to as concrete blobs, marshmallows, fly’s eyes and discarded pineapple peel, whilst more sympathetic observers preferred the affectionate analogy of papayas (see figure 6.8). Those involved in the project appealed to its aesthetic resemblance to Singapore’s most popular fruit, the durian, to endear the public to a contested design.

Figure 6.8 The Esplanade (centre) with Floating Platform

Source: Author (2012)

There were also accusations that internationally renowned foreign architects had been prioritised over their domestic counterparts, public exhibitions were limited to short-listed entries, whilst some believed that the architectural disagreement reflected a more fundamental concern that the indigenous art scene would be marginalised by more established European and American productions (ST 1999b; ST 2002b). Approximately S$13 million was spent on the opening ceremony, comprising 670 performances and a half-hour firework show, which again attracted criticism from taxpayers and politicians (Hansard 2002b). Lee Hsien Loong agreed

166 that he would have ‘preferred far fewer fireworks’ but confirmed that ‘the purpose is not just for Singaporeans but really to register ourselves internationally’ (Ibid.). This marketing strategy reaped rewards, however, when 100,000 visitors descended on this ‘new waterfront hangout’ during its initial open day, attracted by its ‘view of the bay’ (ST 2002c). Attracted by the flexibility that white sites afforded, One Raffles Quay was the first plot in the new Downtown area to be officially transferred to developers for a price of S$462 million in 2001, followed by another on adjacent land a year later (URA 2001, 2002a). On this second plot would be constructed Singapore’s tallest residential building, The Sail@Marina Bay, which would be completed in 2008 and marketed at international expatriates. The first condominium to appear at Marina Bay, more than half of the apartments offer wrap-around views of the sea, which sold on average for S$900 per square foot during the initial soft launch (ST 2004). Units with waterfront views commanded almost 20 percent more than apartments facing the city. One businessman bought three entire floors at a cost of S$31 million through a telephone transaction from his home in Moscow (ST 2005a). Even before apartments had been built, speculators were reselling units for triple the original price in some cases (ST 2007c). One particularly flagrant display of wealth saw an Indian billionaire businessman purchase the 63rd story penthouse for approximately S$15.5 million, netting the selling speculator a massive profit of S$6.7 million (ST 2008a). The penthouse, comparable in size to six four-bedroom HDB flats, enjoys unimpeded views of Marina Bay, which inspired the interior colour scheme of cream and blue, and boasts silk wallpaper, a mirror decorated with Swarovski crystals, two faux fireplaces, a jacuzzi and a swimming pool that can turn into a dance floor, whilst the apartment itself can be transformed into a cinema at the push of a button (ST 2009a). From this exclusive vantage point, the property tycoon could literally survey his high-risk investment options, which consisted of a floating pavilion on Marina Bay to the Indonesian islands of Bintan and Batam (ST 2009b). Gleaming architectural monuments to international banking and finance would gradually and dramatically begin to wrap around the waterfront of Marina Bay, a spectacle that would be carefully orchestrated as always through the URA’s sale of sites scheme. In 2001, the planning system was again reformed in response to the worst recession in Singapore’s history. The erstwhile ‘watchdog’ approach was replaced by a ‘tactical, enterprising and enabling mindset towards the private sector’, premised on the greater involvement of public institutions in ‘risk taking and profit sharing’ (URA, 2002b, p.11). Plans for this emerging area, rebranded as Downtown@Marina Bay, were exhibited to the public in June 2003, drawing more than 18,000 visitors (URA 2003a). One VIP visitor suggested that a ‘world-class marathon’ could be organised that would progress in a circle around the bay, attracting global media coverage and unprecedented publicity (Ibid, p.7). Having effectively coordinated the upgrading of the Singapore River and Tanjong Rhu, the URA was given an expanded mandate to catalyse investment as the ‘Development Agency’ 167 of Marina Bay, supported by an initial public funding package of S$300 million (URA 2004a). With this financial backing, announced in March 2004, the URA initiated design consultancy studies a month later to produce proposals for a 3.35km promenade around the bay and an iconic pedestrian bridge to link Marina Centre with Marina South, costing S$40 million and S$68 million respectively. These funds would also be used to provide a road and sewer system, whilst Southeast Asia’s first Common Services Tunnel (CST) would be extended underground to house communications, power, water and refuse lines. During the same month an advisory panel consisting of notable architects was formed, chaired by the URA Chief Planner, to evaluate submitted design proposals for the construction of Marina Barrage (URA 2004a). Given its prominent location on Marina Bay, which of course was necessary to eventually transform the bay into a calm and visually attractive freshwater reservoir, the design of the dam and its associated facilities had to be adequately impressive to complement the central area and even function itself as a waterfront attraction. Entrepreneurial inspiration from the private sector was now being relied upon even for the construction of basic infrastructure, where water and innovation increasingly flowed together. The third white site was released later that year for the development of the Business and Financial Centre (BFC) on 3.55 hectares of prime waterfront land, the second largest plot to be sold through the URA. As a ‘natural extension’ of the existing CBD, it could plug straight into its infrastructural and services networks, whilst linking into the loop of attractions around Marina Bay (URA 2004b). To attract inward investment, even greater freedom was afforded the developer of this site through the URA’s ‘flexible payment scheme’, allowing development to occur in stages over a period of 18 years therefore lowering the upfront costs and risks (URA 2004a). The discretion of the developer was again leaned upon by the URA, which only stipulated that 60 percent of the plot be set aside for offices; the remaining land could be developed in line with market trends (URA 2005a). In March 2005, one year after the public funding package was announced, the URA attended the Marche International des Professionals de L’Immobilier (MIPIM) real estate convention in Cannes, France, to promote the BFC site and other premium plots on Orchard Road, whilst marketing Marina Bay as an ‘investment haven’ (URA, 2005b, p.17). Since 2002, the URA had been ‘proactively wooing’ international investors to the shores of Singapore, transporting its miniature model of Marina Bay to Cannes on a yearly basis (URA, 2005c, p.17). State officials would continue to attend international property investment events in Dubai, Macau, Hong Kong and elsewhere to market Marina Bay (URA 2006a). This would prove highly successful with foreign property investment increasing sharply from S$900 million in 2004 to S$5.4 billion in 2006 (URA 2007a). A speech on the importance of public-private partnerships to the development of Marina Bay attracted a large crowd of fund managers, developers, property consultants and architects, delivered by URA’s then CEO Mrs Cheong Koon Hean. To nurture a ‘pro-business 168 environment’ within the URA, internal training programmes were also being run by entrepreneurs to ensure that staff had the ‘appropriate mindset and sensitivity to changing business needs’ (URA 2005b). Demonstrating this close relationship in Cannes, private sector representatives of Hong Kong Land and City Developments Limited, respective developers of One Raffles Quay and The Sail@Marina Bay, reiterated this symbiotic sentiment between state and business. There was certainly no strong-arming necessary; it was rather an alignment of interests, schedules and gesticulations. This investment pitch must have been convincing as Marina Bay Residences, the condominium that was eventually built on this parcel, eclipsed the erstwhile level of luxury available at the bay, offering an 11,000 square foot super penthouse that was sold for a record-breaking price of S$28.6 million (ST 2006). In this expanded role as Development Agency, and in line with the revised remit of planners more generally, the cultural composition of Marina Bay would be comparably as important to the URA as its infrastructural foundations and property portfolio. Although the everyday proclivities of the population had always been an explicit object of government, illustrated by the forthright interventions of environmental inspectors in chapter three, this shift in emphasis towards lifestyle and leisure required a decidedly more subtle, depoliticised form of orchestration. In close partnership with the private sector, the URA was charged with the ‘software’ development of Marina Bay, which constituted a fundamental component of their ‘place management’ programme (URA 2004c). Cultural events, attractions and recreational activities were to be coordinated in unison with private companies, as was the associated promotional exercises, to ensure that plans remained ‘market orientated and attractive to investors’ (Ibid.). Released in July 2002 as part of the Master Plan review, the Parks and Waterbodies Plan was an island-wide exercise in place management, intending to coordinate leisure activities on Singapore’s waterways by making them more accessible. Sections of the Kallang River, Lower Seletar, Pandan, MacRitchie and Bedok reservoirs were opened to water sports. The objective of these plans was to enhance the potential of these spaces for recreation whilst making them attractive to those already living on the island and to foreign talent and businesses overseas, maintaining Singapore’s competitive edge (URA 2002c). A Branding Advisory Panel was formed in September 2004 to provide feedback on the ‘place branding exercise of Marina Bay’ (URA, 2005b, p.17). This panel included the CEO and Chief Planner of URA, the CEO of the Esplanade Company, a PR consultant and the Vice President of Banyan Tree Holdings, a premium resort, hotel and spa company. Controversially, the URA paid the American marketing consultancy Interbrand S$400,000 to carry out a nine- month branding exercise only for them to suggest the existing designation of ‘Marina Bay’ be retained (URA 2006a). This provoked further public criticism from taxpayers who considered the branding exercise to be an excessive and wasteful use of national resources, particularly as

169 private international experts were again deciding upon the aesthetic trajectory of Singapore’s central waterfront (ST 2005b).

Figure 6.9 Corporate logo for Marina Bay

Source: URA (accessed at www.marina-bay.sg)

However, the marketing exercise was not only concerned with the name but the image and ambience of Marina Bay as a destination and comprehensive brand. Indeed, this new concept of place branding involves developing an internationally recognisable brand for a place as opposed to a product, allowing state representatives to market its potential abroad to global investors, using compatible brochures, videos and paraphernalia. On 21 July 2005, Mah Bow Tan, the Minister for National Development, introduced the new elliptical insignia for Marina Bay, consisting of three coloured segments representing the ‘explore’, ‘exchange’ and ‘entertain’ aspects of the brand (see figure 6.9). The blue circle in the centre of the logo denotes the bay of course, which functions as ‘the focal point for the area’ (URA, 2006a, p.46).

6.6 Revalorising reservoirs for a service economy

Now that Marina Bay was effectively a global brand its waters had to be adequately and appealingly mollified, although they had previously been cleansed, whilst further landmark structures would be introduced during the ensuing five years. The Minister for the Environment and Water Resources emphasised that maintaining the attractiveness of Marina Bay would require ongoing anti-pollution efforts:

While we are confident that the raw water collected can be treated to high drinking standards with advanced membrane technology, the challenge…will be to ensure that the water is good for recreational and other lifestyle activities. Once the Marina Barrage is built, the basin will be free from the influence of the ocean tides and ideal for various water activities. So we need to ensure that water flowing into the basin is not polluted (Hansard 2005d).

170

A constant water level would prove to be essential to Marina Bay’s expanding programme of events. These were selected and arranged on the basis that publicity would be significant and affirmative, contributing to the corporate reputation of its surrounding waterfront developments. Later that year Marina Bay would for the first time serve as the official setting for Singapore’s New Year’s Eve firework celebrations, upon which 2,500 illuminated white spheres baring the written wishes of the crowd were floated. The URA studied established count-down events that regularly occur elsewhere in the world, particularly in Sydney and New York, which had already gained international recognition (URA 2005d). After its successful debut on the national calendar, Mah Bow Tan enthused ‘I hope that one day, this celebration will be seen, not just by thousands of Singaporeans, but also by many millions all around the world "live" on New Year's Eve’ (Hansard 2006a). Whilst this celebration was considered to have ‘marked a new beginning at Marina Bay’ (URA, 2005d, p.2), other high-profile events such as the River Hongbao Festival, Singapore Skydive Festival, WaterFest and F1 Powerboat World Championship occurred the same year, coordinated by STB. The following year, on August 9, 2007, the National Day Parade was relocated to Marina Bay on the world’s largest floating stage measuring 120m by 83m, watched on television and by a crowd of 27,000 in the accompanying viewing gallery (URA 2008). The Navy could now demonstrate its military might as well as the Armed Forces with the assistance of Marina Bay, whilst patriotic images were projected onto water screens and fountains ‘danced’ to state-endorsed music during a ‘water ballet’ (ST 2007d). A journalist who had been invited to a preview of the celebrations excitedly revealed that ‘the liquid element has found its way into the show in a big way’ (ST 2007e). And indeed, this was an ideal platform for the state to showcase in spectacular fashion both its mastery and adulation of water, a display of ‘hydro- nationalism’ (Linton 2010) in a distinctly postmodern register. Nevertheless, there had been negative comments made by some people taking to the water regarding the choppy surface, wakeboarders at WaterFest being a prime example, therefore the planning board moved to confirm that this would be prevented by the construction of Marina Barrage (URA 2006a). A calm waterbody unaffected by sea currents was also preferable for the floating platform, which was intended to become a regular venue for theatre, music and sport. This would create the necessary ‘night-time-buzz’ which had previously been lacking in this up-and-coming area (ST 2005c, 2007f). The protection and enhancement of the brand required these types of measures be taken to optimise the general usage and ambience of the bay. The Landscape Master Plan was released in March 2006 to create a ‘multi-sensory environment’ through strategically arranged shrubs and trees, giving each district a distinct aesthetic profile, spatial orientation and even smell (URA, 2006b, p.4). Yellow raintrees and flowering plants were reserved for the financial district to signify the golden prospects of its future. Furthermore, to highlight the skyline and accentuate certain architectural features, a plan and incentive programme was announced the same month 171 which sought to encourage companies based around Marina Bay to install more lighting technology on their buildings (URA 2006a). Above all, according to the URA, ‘lighting features [are] centred on enhancing the water element, to accentuate the shimmering effects of the water surface’ (URA, 2009, p.13). Together, these plans would cultivate an alluring environment but the conduct of visitors would also need to be appropriately programmed. Announced in July 2006, the Water Activities Master Plan for Marina Bay, Kallang Basin and Singapore River sought to achieve just this by prescribing an endorsed programme of water-based hobbies that would provide an appealing attraction whilst simultaneously ‘injecting vibrancy’ into the area (URA 2007b). The phraseology of the plan is certainly telling, which proposed to create an ‘enlarged stage for water-based activities’ rather than merely providing its necessary amenities (URA, 2007a, p.39, emphasis added). The Marina Bay Urban Challenge (MBUC) was a central component of this image-oriented exercise in place management, organised alongside the sports marketing company Enterprise Sports Group, which attracted approximately 13,000 participants to the downtown area (URA 2008). Developing ideas from the Parks and Waterbodies Plan, a revised island-wide Leisure Plan was launched in 2008 that proposed to increase recreational opportunities in and around Singapore’s waterways through coastal promenades, boardwalks and programmed activities. The three quays on the Singapore River would undergo a rebranding exercise whilst Marina Bay would be transformed through active marketing of events and activities. Overall, the intention was to ‘provide stimulus to generate economic activities, improve the range and quality of evening activities in the key districts, and raise the buzz and hip quotient of our city’ (URA, 2008, p.46). Urbanity and trendiness were essential to the image of Singapore as a global city therefore the cultural predispositions of the population would not be left to chance. The construction of Marina Barrage was also completed in 2008 which in the process created Singapore’s fifteenth reservoir. An engineering study for the technical feasibility of Marina Reservoir was conducted in 2001, executed primarily in terms of flood control and potable water supply (PUB 2001). Going further back, Lee Kuan Yew had stated in a television interview shortly after the initial clean-up programme that such an undertaking could be achieved in the future:

In 20 years, it is possible that there could be breakthroughs in technology, both anti-pollution and filtration, and then we dam up or put a barrage at the mouth of the Marina, the neck that joins the sea, and we will have a huge freshwater lake…therefore, we should keep on improving the water quality (ENV, 1990a, p.104)

With impressive foresight, Lee supposed that damming up the bay would simultaneously provide flood control in low-lying areas such as Chinatown, Boat Quay and Jalan Besar, create a vital reserve of fresh water and produce a placid waterbody for recreational

172 use. The longstanding Prime Minister had once again identified a strategic dovetailing between catchment management and economic modernisation. It was therefore deemed appropriate to have Lee officiate the commencement of construction in March 2005 in the role of Minister Mentor (PUB 2005). Costing S$226 million, the catchment area would constitute 10,000 hectares, or one-sixth of the island-state, and be expected to provide 10 percent of Singapore’s current water supply. Spanning 350 metres across, the barrage consists of nine steel crest gates, which separate the sea from the connected freshwater system of rivers, canals and basins, whilst seven pumps are used to expel excess stormwater into the Singapore Strait at 280 cubic metres per second (PUB 2004, 2005). The crest gates are lowered when heavy rain coincides with a low tide to release the build-up of water. However, if a period of heavy rain occurs during a high tide the gates are raised to keep the seawater out, and the pumps will be operationalised.

Figure 6.10 World Water Day celebrations at Marina Barrage

Source: Author (2013)

With this newfound capability to modify and essentially halt the hydrological cycle, the constant presence of water could be assured and the unappealing sight of mud banks at low tide, which was damaging to the branding of Marina Bay, eliminated (PUB 2004). A higher water level may be beneficial for aesthetic reasons but can produce adverse effects for flood control, which presented another contradiction to be managed. The Marina Barrage Visitor Centre and Pump Station would also complement the consistent water level, downtown attractions and water-based activities with its attention to good design (see figure 6.10). Shaped like a shell or 173 swirling whirlpool, this ‘waterscape development’ would incorporate water features, event spaces and an ‘iconic’ rooftop garden larger than four football pitches to accommodate visitors, an entirely different venture to preceding, purely functional attempts at reservoir construction (PUB, 2008a, p.30). However, design features were not merely aesthetic and architectural in quality but educational, and indeed, governmental. Parks and fountains were integrated into the building to encourage visitors to interact with water and form an affective bond therefore dissuading them from littering waterways and catchments (Ibid.).

Figure 6.11 Barrage separating the freshwater reservoir from sea

Source: Author (2012)

Visitors could also walk across the barrage from Marina South to Marina East, and vice versa, inviting them to appreciate the striking contrast in colour and motion between the sea and reservoir, a feat of seemingly Mosaic proportions (see figure 6.11). Singaporean poet and PAP sympathiser Edwin Thumboo even referenced the Marina Barrage in his Independence poem, depicting the ‘waters on either side: One composed, one rough’ as ‘two signifiers’ for Singapore’s vulnerable geopolitical situation (Hansard 2009b). The Barrage was completed in July 2008 and officially declared open by the Minister Mentor’s son, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong on the last day of October (ST 2008b). It would take approximately two years however until Marina Reservoir was recognised as a freshwater source that could be relied upon for

174 supply, as the salt concentration was gradually decreased, commencing in April 2009, through frequent flushing of rainwater (Hansard 2011b). Lee Kuan Yew, still publically positioned at the forefront of water resources development, symbolically acknowledged this addition by turning on a fountain in Kallang Basin that spurted up twelve storeys high (ST 2010a). The fountain marked the position of an underwater pump linked to Upper Peirce Reservoir via 14km of pipes, where water could be stored and subsequently treated using reverse osmosis membrane technology. Marina Reservoir certainly has the largest catchment but its storage capacity is one of the smallest. Costing S$13 million, a scheme was initiated in November 2005 to integrate the reservoir system so that water levels could henceforth be optimised through a connected pipe network and allow transference across catchments, which was completed approximately two years later (PUB 2005).

6.7 Conclusion

We can see from the long-term development of Marina Reservoir that decidedly more has been at stake than water supply alone, although this promulgated exigency has provided a convenient rationale for successive rounds of economic restructuring. The water entering the central catchment via the various tributaries of the reservoir first had to be protected by means of a comprehensive resettlement programme, which was subsequently mollified through dam technology to provide a spectacular focal point for the development of the new business district and Marina Bay brand. The function of water has greatly expanded during this process and its value accordingly transformed as it has increasingly permeated the policy domains of property development and place management, facilitated a coordinated programme of administrative decentralisation, whilst the sphere of party politics has certainly not been spared. Previously associated with dearth, disease and backwardness, water is now a socially desirable object along with its concomitant infrastructure of circulation, percolating into waterfront space to augment the state’s programme of property development and land appreciation, facilitating a coordinated shift to a service economy. Whereas previously water had been concealed within infrastructural networks, a defining characteristic of the modern paradigm of hydraulic management, its presence was not only accepted as a statistical reality but celebrated and commodified (Kaika 2005; Karvonen 2011). The vast mono-functional spaces that had previously lain dormant and unproductive, a particularly conspicuous manifestation of the crisis of closed systems, have now been opened up to the property sector to reimagine and develop according to market trends. This reflects a broader, international trend in urban planning and design towards waterfront regeneration, which invariably entails a process of ecological gentrification through the replacement of industrial infrastructure for luxury housing, entertainment complexes and offices (Malone 1996; Desfor et al 2011). More than being an instrument of financial capitalism, however, water was also to become a mobile technology of neoliberal government exercised in accordance with the desires 175 of the population (Foucault 2008). Waterfront development has produced an aspirational milieu for the exercise of a more subtle form of power that functions through lifestyle choice and individualism, which has enabled a shift in the techne and telos of government, seeping into the everyday life of the population. Therefore, the material politics of urban economic restructuring has been analysed in respect to the physical transformation of infrastructural systems, an area of investigation which has been lacking in urban political ecology and governance studies (Monstadt 2009). The escalating cultural status of water has provided a strategic interface for the orchestration of appropriate types of human conduct and subjectivity, which takes leisure rather than labour as its domain of influence. And indeed, as Foucault (2007) intended to demonstrate, this points towards the significance of the milieu and circulation in biopolitical processes of government. The subsequent chapter will further examine the political effectivity of water as it permeated into the more marginal, suburban areas of Singapore. Government was increasingly being exercised through the presence rather than absence of water, facilitated by technologies of exposure as opposed to enclosure, security in addition to discipline. The architectural design of the Marina Barrage is materially indicative of this fundamental permutation in water management strategy, which can be traced back to the last quarter of the twentieth century. This is not only the decentralisation of design but decentralisation by design, involving a greater number of stakeholders in the planning and construction process. Whilst Marina Bay and Tanjong Rhu are spectacular examples of this flexible approach to urban planning and waterfront development, increasing levels of consumer and architectural freedom were being built into public housing estates as well as executive penthouses in the CBD. Water, aspiration and liberty were beginning to merge as master concepts, and this would have profound implications for governmental programmes and the exercise of political sovereignty.

176

7. Conduits of conduct: 3P initiatives and the ABC programme

[The] government of risk through spatial separation is increasingly coming under challenge by another, in which security is not thought of in absolute terms…there can be no inherently safe locales or activities and, in addition, there must be no 'no-go' zones where law-abiding citizens will not venture (Osborne and Rose, 1999, p.754).

7.1 Introduction

As the previous chapter demonstrated, the physical and conceptual boundary that divides water from the city was becoming increasingly blurred, and consequently, so too was the art of government. For Lefebvre (2009), the state is largely concerned with quantifying, homogenising and controlling flows through ‘repressive partitioning of space’ (p.130), to realise ‘a society of pure circulation’ (p.112). Here, the state is primarily an anti-nomadic influence, violently circumscribing circulation, segregating it from society, disciplining material mobilities (Scott 1998).This negative depiction of the state’s general approach to circulatory flow evidently resounds with previous chapters that examined disciplinary techniques of government. However, as will be further substantiated, this account of statecraft fails to take into account the way in which government is also exercised through bringing subjects into contact with proximate circulation, by facilitating and orchestrating interaction between the population and its surrounding environment in subtle, creative ways. Indeed, Marina Barrage is the physical culmination of a much broader, social programme of government that has sought to decentralise responsibility and ownership over Singapore’s water resources to citizens, communities and companies through architectural and infrastructural design. This has not merely been a superficial or duplicitous exercise in exploitation and dispossession, although this critique can also be applied. Just as important to our inquiries are the genuine and quite candid attempts to govern more effectively through technologies of neoliberal decentralisation, which still nevertheless prompt critical questions pertaining to power but in an alternative analytical register. Indeed, as I will now attempt to substantiate further, power has in fact been exercised through bringing citizens into direct contact with water to establish a physical and emotional bond between the population and its environment. Disciplinary practices of division and the state’s adherence to concrete modernism had not only proven to be wasteful of valuable land but counterproductive in terms of governing citizens’ interactions with water circulation. The response has been to liberate nature from the stranglehold of the state, physically in terms of water and conceptually in regard to civil society, with both of these processes coming together in the milieu of the waterfront. This chapter will examine how government has been extended and refined as water has increasingly permeated the urban form, turning initially to policy that sought to open up reservoirs to recreational activities. It will be argued that PUB 177 underwent a series of institutional reforms to adapt to an individualised approach to government, focusing specifically on the 3P programme. Emphasising the physical characteristics of this transition, the chapter will then consider how the Active, Beautiful and Clean Waters (ABC) programme further entrenched neoliberal government in waterfront space as Singapore’s final reservoirs were completed. The associated learning trails programme will then be explored, where it will be contended that water has been progressively spectacularised as the techne and telos of government have changed under this immersive form of lifestyle-based governance.

7.2 ‘Water is personal’: Individualising responsibility and ownership

As argued in the previous chapter, the platform had been prepared for this neoliberal style of government based on lifestyle and aspiration, which would increasingly turn towards ordinary citizens located in the suburbs of Singapore. Marina Reservoir may be the flagship example of this ‘new generation of water catchment areas that are open to the public’, but this programme would be expanded on an island-wide basis (ST 2009c). On 9 October 2004, restrictions pertaining to reservoir spaces were relaxed by PUB (PUB 2004). Designated recreation had been permitted in catchment areas for some decades, which PUB sought to manage through provision of amenities and standardised guidelines. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, a jogging track and canoeing facility had been introduced at MacRitchie Reservoir, fishing jetties were provided at Kranji and Lower Seletar, whilst paddle and sailing boats had begun to course the waters of Seletar (PUB 1990). Parks had also become a staple feature of reservoir development, incorporating children’s playgrounds and exercise stations into surrounding areas (PUB 1991). In an aspiring global city and service economy however, recreation on reservoirs would be encouraged not to promote hardiness but enjoyment, thereby enhancing the liveability of Singapore. There was increasing pressure on PUB to introduce or allow more activities in order to maximise the utility of reservoirs, requiring a significant change of approach in regard to water ownership relations (Hansard 2004d). Indeed, at this juncture, water was still very much conceived as the exclusive property of the state. To protect this essential resource from contamination and exhaustion, water had been canalised, incarcerated and separated from the population over a number of decades. Besides strictly demarcated leisure zones, reservoirs had generally been heavily circumscribed and secured. As chapter three explained, patrol teams had stalked reservoir sites on speedboats and motorbikes, soberly dressed in uniforms and equipped with fine slips and retractable batons. It was also illegal for rainwater to be directly collected or taken from waterways and reservoirs because, as one politician starkly stated, ‘water belongs to PUB’ (Ibid.). However, although large-scale extraction of water was to remain illegal as it could potentially jeopardise the security of national supply, from October 2003 households and developers would be able to collect rainwater in storage tanks for non-potable uses such as toilet flushing, washing and watering plants. 178

Concurrently, water sports would be progressively introduced to selected reservoirs on the basis that official associations and organisations coordinate these activities (Hansard 2004e [see figure 7.1]). To mark this changing relationship with water, Bedok Reservoir hosted the HSBC Wakeboard World Cup in October 2004, attracting 10,000 spectators and international television coverage (MEWR 2005a). After a two-month public consultation, recreational opportunities would be significantly increased at MacRitchie and Bedok reservoirs to make them more vibrant, allowing individual citizens to hire kayaks for S$10 without the oversight of associations (MEWR 2005b). The public consultation exercise was significant here, as was the capacity for citizens to hire kayaks on an individual basis, for this management shift along with the policy change concerning rainwater collection were concerted attempts by the state to further decentralise authority and responsibility for water. According to PUB, the public were consulted as ‘the true owners of the reservoir parks’, which had previously been managed under the conspicuous aegis of the central state (MEWR 2005a). The material entry of water into everyday life, facilitated by the physical reconfiguration of the built environment, constitutes a further refinement of the techne and telos of government which were introduced in chapter five. The waterfront had by now become a strategic arena for the exercise of a decentralised and depoliticised style of government based on education, consumerism and lifestyle, individual responsibility, ownership and volunteerism. Longstanding attempts at disseminating the conservation message through didactic and intermittent campaigns would begin to appear rather rudimentary when compared with this physical, immersive approach to education. This is a form of government that relies more upon technologies of security rather than discipline, orchestrated in a neoliberal register which purposefully exalts the freedoms and aspirations of civil society. Indeed, a liquid modernity, metaphorically and literally, beckoned with the dissolution of the ultimate boundary between citizens and waterways. During this period, the PUB organisational structure was also overhauled to better reflect this shift in government. The Public Utilities Bill had been passed in 2001 which transferred responsibility for drainage and sewerage maintenance from the Environmental Ministry to PUB, integrating water resources management under one authority. With improvements in membrane technology and greater emphasis being put on recycling and self- sufficiency, drainage was increasingly coming to serve the requirements of water supply in addition to flood control (Hansard 2001b). It was therefore deemed expedient for PUB to administer the urban water cycle as a whole, taking charge of stormwater management in relation to sourcing, collection, purification, supply and recycling. According to one PUB employee, this expanded mandate brought about a significant shift in the organisation’s perception of stormwater, which saw it increasingly take on the status of precious resource rather than spasmodic annoyance (int#4). In response to this change of remit and concomitant revalorisation of waterways, in which property development had certainly played no small part, 179 the organisational structure of PUB was further reformed in October 2004. A new ‘3P Network’ department was formed specifically oriented towards stakeholder engagement (PUB 2004). The name of the department refers to the ‘people’, ‘private’ and ‘public’ sectors that PUB intended to bring into partnership, which would be coordinated through the physical integration of water into terrestrial areas and the opening of reservoirs to salubrious activities.

Figure 7.1 Water-based activities at Bedok Reservoir (t) and Kallang Basin (b)

Source: Author (2012)

Previously produced in a strictly pragmatic and understated format, the annual report would henceforth be presented in the way of a ‘lifestyle magazine’ to mark this further shift in governmental approach (PUB, 2004, p.3). Operational information would be provided to readers in an offhand, aspirational and visually slick style, with liberal deployment of eye-catching headlines and colourful imagery, although statistical data and figures would be sacrificed as a 180 result. In these restructured reports, water was no longer portrayed as an object of solemn administration necessitating reverence and restraint from the population but as a fashionable and spectacular backdrop for picnics, extreme sports and modelling shoots of young and physically appealing individuals. As one of the first revamped reports stated; ‘to glamorise water issues and make them hip, celebrities and attractive in-house talents are used to promote the water cause’ (PUB, 2008a, p.43). Engineer and strategist for PUB, William Yeo, was to become a staple feature of subsequent reports invariably engaged in exciting activities such as skydiving and kayaking. Increasingly, beautiful men and women would be positioned somewhat incongruously next to water treatment technology and encouraged to adopt seductive poses in an obvious and straightforward attempt to rebrand water as socially, and indeed, sexually desirable. Similarly, PUB has romantically rendered Singapore’s reservoirs as enchanting destinations for courting couples, which may boost a dwindling birth-rate at the same time as inculcating conservational norms (PUB 2005). Launched by PUB in 2007, PURE is a free ‘street magazine’ which is displayed in busy traffic corridors such as underground tube stations, tertiary institutions and hospitality establishments. It was envisaged that its glossy style would appeal to ordinary citizens and thereby ‘raise water consciousness in Singaporeans’ through ‘making water hip’ (PUB, 2008a, p.42). This initiative was part of a broader communications campaign that was pursued in 2005, which sought to reform its public relations programme and media affairs. Another product of this programme was a flamboyant corporate mascot called Water Wally, conceived in February 2005, which PUB intended to appeal to children whilst providing an immediately recognisable and amenable face of the water authority (PUB 2005). This vibrant blue cartoon character shaped in the style of a water droplet has been widely used to brand promotional clothing, books, toys, golf balls, upholstery, educational videos, computer games and recycled NEWater bottles inter alia (see figure 7.2). A regular attraction at schools and national events, a life-sized Water Wally costume is worn by obliging volunteers to relate to children and endear them to the integrity of water in a fun and interactive manner. For this innovative approach to water governance, which aims to align environmental conduct with individual aspirations for glamorous and fun-seeking lifestyles, PUB have received awards from Public Relations in the Service of Mankind (PRISM) and International Public Relations Association (IPRA) amongst others. This most essential of earth’s resources was no longer merely a mundanely fundamental facet of human existence but a desirable consumer preference and lifestyle choice. The updated corporate tagline for PUB, ‘Water for All: Conserve, Value, Enjoy’, quite intentionally encapsulates this new ‘people-centric’ and recreational orientation for a service economy (PUB 2005). The overarching policy objective of the 3P Department was to extend a sense of ownership over water resources to the population through stakeholder engagement processes, to promote an emergent and entrepreneurial civil society. The expectation was that citizens would 181 develop a personal relationship with water in an everyday, physical capacity, and therefore assume individual responsibility for its protection. As one volunteer at WWS affirmed, ‘it’s up to the individual whether they keep the water clear or not’ (int#10). Yaacob Ibrahim, the Minister for the Environment and Water Resources, expressed these intentions to Parliament:

We want people to feel that they have a personal stake in keeping the environment clean and beautiful. To this end, we will create more opportunities for the community to enjoy and appreciate our environment and water resources…to build a closer relationship with water and, in so doing, learn to appreciate and treasure this precious resource (Hansard 2005e).

Figure 7.2 PUB mascot Water Wally promotional paraphernalia

Source: Author (2012)

Over a twelve-month period, PUB and NEA would each provide S$1 million to initiatives that carried this programme further, to fund and activate projects that incorporated a voluntary element. In August 2005, the ‘Our Waters’ programme was initiated to encourage organisations such as schools, hospitals and businesses to ‘adopt’ waterways and reservoirs for a period of two years. This would require them to maintain the water body by performing regular clean-up exercises and casual surveillance duties whilst they would be at liberty to construct barbeque pits, playgrounds and seating areas on waterfronts, making it in their interests to protect the area. Schools in St. Andrew’s Village were some of the first organisations to apply, which conducted patrols of Kallang River and arranged carnivals and studies of their stretch of adopted waterway. The Principal affirmed that ‘we don’t want our students just to keep the Kallang River clean; we 182 would like them to “own” the river as part of our campus’ (MEWR, 2005a, p.8). By December that year, twenty organisations had adopted various stretches of Singapore’s water network (PUB 2005). The WWS predictably partook in the programme by adopting the Kallang Basin, upon which their headquarters was based. Likewise, the NSS assumed ownership of a section of Kranji Reservoir in 2008, which gave the organisation a ‘kind of stake in the area…a kind of capacity’ (int#12). Another key conduit of administrative decentralisation, the Restroom Association (RAS) would extend their ‘Happy Toilet Programme’ (HTP) through resources made available by the 3P Department (Hansard 2004d). Founded in 1998, this unorthodox organisation with four permanent staff focuses on changing the toilet habits of the population, which is emblematic of PUB’s neoliberal approach to governing water practices. Market-and voluntary-based instruments are central to its operations, specifically auditing services and certification. The HTP is a grading system for proprietors, which the Restroom Association oversees by inspecting, ranking and certifying toilet facilities according to cleanliness, convenience and water conservation. Workshops and presentations are also delivered for office staff and cleaners. In regard to the telos of government, RAS aims to reduce ‘indiscriminate toilet use’ by transferring the onus of public hygiene to both the individual user and proprietor (RAS 2008). The ‘Let’s Observe Ourselves’ (LOO) campaign, launched in 2008, explicitly individualises responsibility for toilet upkeep through information dissemination and volunteerism, thereby avoiding an overtly regulatory approach which can be left to state authorities. The underlying objective of the campaign is not to provocatively ‘blame’ toilet users for their undesirable conduct, which can refer to squatting, not washing hands and littering, but educate them through more ‘subtle’, indirect methods (int#14). Adopting an unusual and mundane category of techne, volunteers have been sent to problem areas to dispense tissue packages to users as they entered toilet premises, which contain relevant website addresses and advice pertaining to how they can appropriately reform their personal habits. Confrontation, and even awkward or didactic conversation, is accordingly circumvented, as one staff member confirmed:

When they give out the tissues to the people using the toilet, they will not say anything, just ‘this is for you’. So, we don’t open our mouths to say ‘please keep the toilet clean’, because some people may be offended…No preaching, and anyway, Singaporeans always like free stuff (int#14).

This is clearly contrary to the approach adopted by environmental inspectors that was heavily criticised for being aggressive and forthright, which inevitably led to conflict. Furthermore, the volunteers themselves begin to contemplate and evaluate their own conduct in the process of educating others, becoming a node in a circular arrangement of government.

183

Whether volunteers are handing out leaflets at events such as World Water Day or orchestrating games in schools or at community festivals, they are constantly engaging with educational material. The inspection of toilets was also a necessary task for volunteers, for which they receive training. Through active, experiential involvement in the maintenance of toilets, it is expected that volunteers internalise the prescribed norms, ‘then they realise that “oh, there are so many things to check”. So eventually, it’s also educating them, that they have to take care of the toilet with their next visit’ (Ibid.). And again, significant to our concerns here is the continued role of the state in coordinating the process of neoliberal decentralisation. In Singapore, due to the lack of a vibrant third sector, volunteering is an activity that is strongly encouraged through a range of incentives, to create a sense of ‘active citizenship’ (Hansard 1997e). Schoolchildren and university students are impelled to volunteer and complete a set amount of working hours in order to graduate, whilst expatriates seeking Permanent Residency can improve their application by engaging in third sector initiatives. Consequently, RAS and similar organisations can draw upon a ready pool of volunteers through an online portal, which provides an official and practicable platform for the controlled expansion of an active civil society. The WWS is dependent on individual recruits that have become involved through compulsory volunteering schemes. According to one volunteer, as an immigrant student holding a university placement he was expected to complete 80 hours of community service, through which he first became aware of WWS (int#28). At a community event organised for World Water Day in 2013, an expatriate volunteer confided that without the volunteering scheme many of the guests would have been ‘watching an empty stage’ (int#16). RAS itself relies on state funding for approximately 60 percent of its initiatives, namely the 3P Partnership Fund, which therefore have to gain prior approval before being implemented. Using these established links, PUB is able to disseminate its water conservation message through informal avenues which is simultaneously internalised by RAS employees and their volunteers. Specifically, PUB criteria for water efficiency was initially embedded into the HTP grading system whilst the water authority’s information slides have been integrated into school presentations carried out by RAS. Similar to the case with the WWS and SEC, this removes the regulatory element from conservation strategy which in turn gets transmitted to the population through a network of individually-engaged volunteers, eventually manifesting as reformed habits in the terminal of the washroom:

When it is community driven, people are more committed. When it is Government, they have the mind-set of “oh, it’s the Government again. Let them do it.” So, when you switch, it’s like “oh, it's our job now, it’s what we should do now”. It is empowering the public to do certain things…we need the soft and the hard approach, you know? (Ibid.).

184

Government has conventionally relied upon confessional technologies, as Foucault demonstrated with his work on sexuality, deploying the notion of taboo in order to extract truths from confiding subjects. And certainly, in addition to evading awkward conversation, the LOO Connect initiative also functions through enticing citizens to talk by providing an online discussion platform where toilet users can remain anonymous. Using Facebook and Android Apps, a more advanced and ‘sexy’ form of techne of course, citizens are encouraged to open up to each other about water practices, ‘because some people are not comfortable talking about it, but they are comfortable doing online chatting’ (Ibid.). As the RAS employee proffered; ‘instead of telling people to keep toilets clean, there are different ways of approach, of getting people to do things’. If not exactly discontinued, the command-and-control approach to behavioural change was becoming increasingly marginalised by subtle methods of government oriented towards independent learning and improvement, enacted through active participation not docile compliance.

Figure 7.3 Education through entertainment at the Waterworks play area

Source: Author (2012)

Under the 3P programme, sophisticated initiatives that encourage affective personal engagement would continue to be developed and widely publicised. The ‘Water Detectives’ programme that aimed to capture the sustained attention of students through theatrical performance and role play was toured in schools, as was Water Wally in February 2006 who visited approximately 20,000 students. A subsequent survey was conducted which found that 185 more than 90 percent of children would emulate the behaviour of Water Wally, thereby conserving water through reducing consumption and avoiding littering (PUB 2009a). Sponsored by PUB, the Waterworks play area was opened at the Singapore Science Centre which positioned information boards on the science of water conservation between fountains and games, ‘to get people to bond with water by having fun with it’ (PUB, 2005, p.14 [see figure 7.3]). The ‘Friends of the Water’ programme was also launched in March 2006 to formally acknowledge individuals or organisations that autonomously promote water conservation and assume personal ownership of water through acts such as reporting leaks, overseeing events and adopting best practices. Some of whom would be presented with a ‘Watermark Award’ at an annual ceremony inaugurated in 2007, which celebrated initiative and entrepreneurialism in the water sector (PUB 2007). The message that these assorted programmes seek to convey, in turns both subtle and candid, is that ‘water is personal’ (PUB, 2012a, p.15). Individualism and civil society are not necessarily extrinsic to state agencies but strategic correlates, and indeed, collaborative products.

7.3 Launch of the ABC programme

Using the MacRitchie and Bedok experiences as platforms, the ABC programme would be introduced in April 2006 to provide an ‘umbrella’ project for 3P initiatives and urban planning objectives, incorporating both software and hardware (Hansard 2006b [see figure 7.4]). Government would be progressively exercised through contouring as opposed to concrete, privileging mechanisms of security over discipline, and implemented in a horizontal rather than vertical register. Here, the emphasis is shifted from water to people, or perhaps more accurately, to the relation between water and people, which is governed through a techne and telos appropriate to a service economy. The Waterbodies Design Panel had been disbanded ten years after being set up in 1989 to allow the private sector to assume responsibility, but the programme would lay dormant due to the subsequent economic downturn (MEWR 2009). Six years later, the ABC programme continued to develop this planning objective, further entrenching the strategic dovetailing between economic restructuring and catchment management, property development and governmental innovation. Indeed, this programme was considered to a ‘main pillar’ for transforming Singapore into a global city, creating an ‘ultra- attractive and liveable island for its residents…an attractive haven for investors, professionals, workers and, of course, locals’ (Hansard 2007a). At the opening of the ABC Waters exhibition in February 2007, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong stated; ‘in the past, we protected our water resources by keeping people away from them; now, we will bring people closer to water so that they will enjoy and cherish it more’ (PUB, 2007, p.3). Concerned politicians accustomed to the water-tight formula provided by concrete modernism expressed reservations regarding the potential dangers of the programme and the general policy shift towards open waterways, in terms of both drowning risk and water 186 pollution (Hansard 2007c). However, Minister Yaacob Ibrahim reassured Parliament that safety would remain paramount, where metal railings and walls would be replaced by strategically arranged shrubs and earth mounds that could form a ‘natural barrier’ (Ibid.). Following an incident where four teenagers were swept away by strong currents in the Pandan Canal, leading to the death of one victim, further guarantees were issued such as flow analysis to prevent the derailing of the ABC Programme (Hansard 2007d). Reminiscent of the earlier drainage debate which carefully contemplated the complex coexistence of citizens and circulation, the Environment Minister rhetorically asked ‘to keep our waters clean, do we keep people away, or do we bring them nearer?’ (Hansard 2009a). Evidently, as with the issue of housing estate drainage, the latter option would gain increasing currency.

Figure 7.4 ABC Waters projects in construction

Source: Author (2012) 187

A sum of S$200 million was set aside for the development of 28 projects, which would occur in tandem with the private sector over the ensuing five years (Hansard 2007b). A further 100 sites were also identified for future improvement in the long-term. Singapore was divided into three watersheds, designated Central, Eastern and Western, which came under the management of respective construction companies specialising in consultancy and development. Black and Veatch completed the Western Catchment plan, whilst CH2MHill/Atelier Dreiseitl and CPG Consultants executed comprehensive, historically sensitive plans for the Central and Eastern catchments respectively. In partnership with the 3P Department, PUB sought to ‘tap ideas, expertise and resources’ from the community as well as from business, imprinting in landscape this decentralised style of government (PUB, 2008b, p.3). A master plan and set of design guidelines were provided by PUB to ensure that individual ABC projects, widely spread across the island, achieved a standard level of quality and integration. Three key aspects were prioritised which PUB envisaged as interconnected and synergistic, including water quality improvement, ecological and biodiversity restoration, and social learning through recreational enhancement (PUB 2009b). Essential to all three objectives was the comprehensive deployment of source control techniques that would naturalise waterways and adjacent areas whilst slowing, retaining and treating stormwater ‘on site’ (Ibid, p.9). Previously, as revealed in preceding chapters, drainage management revolved around the concretisation of waterways, canal expansion and the immediate conveyance of stormwater to the sea and reservoirs. This approach was now officially recognised by PUB as detrimental to water quality, ecosystems, mosquito control, the aesthetic character of landscape and the affective bond between citizens and water. Property prices were also adversely affected, producing a discrepancy which of course the URA was keen to amend. Singapore had been suffering from a very modern crisis, a situation Deleuze referred to as a crisis of closed systems. And arguably, this was also a crisis of the centralised modern state, which in this respect was consolidated through canalisation, segregation and the centripetal containment and monopoly control of water resources. In response, PUB adopted design guidelines which advocate bioengineering solutions such as gabions, rocks and timber cribwalls for structural integrity, whilst constructed wetlands, biotopes, retention ponds, vegetated swales and basins, porous pavements and green roofs were promoted for holistic water management. By integrating these technologies into buildings, parks, roads, pavements and existing canals, PUB ventured that a centrifugal process of ‘stormwater decentralisation’ (p.10) could occur which effectively dispersed water circulation through terrestrial areas. And indeed, this was an infrastructural manifestation of a broader political shift to a neoliberal form of government, which can actually be traced back to the emergence of Enkadrain ST as a viable technology for drainage management. Formerly perceived to be detrimental to government, the ABC programme sought to propagate and popularise situated methods of purification and ‘localised rainwater harvesting’ (p.20). Educational centres and 188 pedagogic signage was similarly encouraged to facilitate broader public understanding of water conservation and sustainable management practices, in order to persuade the public to keep the waterways clean. Here, the regional pooling of water became indicative of decentralisation in both a political and infrastructural register. Consisting of a boardwalks, look-out decks and ‘interactive water features’, the first scheme to be completed was along a 200m section of Kallang River at Kolam Ayer (PUB 2008a). Finished in February 2008 as a demonstration project, Kolam Ayer residents were encouraged to form interest groups to collectively maintain the site, whilst students from proximate schools were asked to devise public education programmes and conduct river patrols. A one-day workshop was organised for community groups to liaise and coordinate activities, which would provide a template for subsequent ABC projects (Hansard 2008). To draw citizens closer to the water, gardening and exercise sessions were arranged to take place on the waterfront. Kayaking was also permitted during community and festive events and a ‘water wheel’ was constructed that allowed residents to draw water from the Kallang River and play with it, ‘making it a part of their everyday lives’ (PUB, 2008b, p.15).

Figure 7.5 Paddling waters and education hut at Alexandra Canal

Source: Author (2012)

To develop this further, ‘water festivals’ and ‘signature’ source control features were proposed by the watershed Manager throughout the entire catchment (CH2MHill- Atelier Dreiseitl, 2007, p.5). A ‘40-metre submerged boardwalk’ was constructed at MacRitchie Reservoir in 2011, allowing visitors to physically stroll through the water as they explored the nature reserve (PUB, 2012a, p.51). That same year at Alexandra Canal, Lee Kuan Yew 189 officially opened the ABC project which had transformed 1.2 kilometres of utilitarian concrete into softened banks, lined by a water play area, waterfall, constructed wetlands and an educational hut (PUB 2011). Urban design features were used to purposefully blur the boundary between land and the waterway, tempting those walking along the bank to paddle in the shallow waters (see figure 7.5). The economic value of the surrounding properties also increased as Alexandra Canal was converted, which of course was an overriding objective of the programme (Hansard 2011c).

Figure 7.6 Negotiating the boundary between land and water

Source: Author (2012)

Further up the Kallang River from Kolam Ayer, towards its source in the CWCA, the flagship ABC project was completed a year later using soil bioengineering techniques for the first time in Singapore (PUB 2012a). Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong headed the opening ceremony of Kallang River@Bishan- Ang Mo Kio Park on 17 March 2012, commemorating what appeared to be a complete reversal of former methods of stormwater management, a conspicuous and celebrated departure from modernism (see figure 7.6). With assistance from the National Parks Board, this project transformed a large 2.7 kilometre section of concrete trapezoidal canal into a naturalised meandering waterway, complete with overhanging shrubbery, reeds, grassy banks and randomly placed rocks. Cobble paths and stepping stones traverse the waterway at selected points to encourage visitors to negotiate the canal-cum-river, descending underwater and emerging on the other opposite bank (see figure 7.7). The adjacent park includes a water playground, lotus garden, pond and cleansing biotope amongst other

190 features, to ‘engage the public and foster a sense of communal ownership and appreciation for water resources’ (PUB, 2012a, p.47). Besides the recreational aspect and improvement of water quality, the naturalisation process was also executed to enhance flood management which could hold 40 percent more water than previously. At times of heavy rainfall the water level would rise and the naturalised banks would act as a flood plain, reducing the velocity of flow downstream. This concept was tested on 17 October 2012 when heavy rain fell on central Singapore, equal in volume to the whole of the previous month, flooding the adjacent banks (ST 2012a). A reminder of the artificial quality of the canal, this triggered the safety measures that had been installed along the bank, which included loud sirens, flashing lights and an audio announcement system. The warning system is prone to activate regularly, undermining the ‘natural’ image of the waterway. Ironically, waterway naturalisation necessitates a significant amount of human intervention as not only are environmental boundaries blurred but so are administrative divisions. Herbert Dreiseitl, the landscape architect in charge of the naturalisation project, affirmed that ‘it requires integrated thinking…you have to overlap territories, rivers, parks, responsibilities, maintenance, and service, as well as finance and budgets’ (AU, 2012, p.88). Whether exercised in a spectacular or mundane fashion, the government of nature is manifestly and inextricably interlinked with the nature of government.

Figure 7.7 Inviting interaction with a submerged walkway

Source: Author (2012)

191

7.4 Reservoirs and renaissance on the northeast coast

The ABC programme would be developed in tandem with the continued expansion of Singapore’s local catchment, which offered constant surface levels for waterway development (Hansard 2007c). Located on the northeast coast, the last two reservoirs to be constructed in Singapore were declared open on 3 July 2011, increasing local catchment area to approximately 67 percent of the island (PUB 2011). Costing S$300 million and with a combined catchment of 5,500 hectares, the Punggol and Serangoon reservoirs were created by damming the estuaries of their respective rivers, both of which are connected by a 4.2 kilometre artificial waterway. These two additional reservoirs have the capacity to supply 5 percent of Singapore’s current water demand, but equally as important, they also provide a greater quantity of valuable waterfront space for private and public housing development. Like Marina Reservoir, they would be designed for recreational use from their very conception, planned and constructed in relation to the demands of a service economy in addition to that of water supply. Scoping exercises were conducted in 2002 whilst the construction phase began four years later, but the potential of these waterways for property development and recreational functionality had been recognised ten years earlier (PUB 2002). With the passing of the economic downturn, precipitated by the financial crisis in 1997, the opportunity for transforming the northeast coast into premium waterfront housing emerged once again. Located between the Punggol and Serangoon rivers, the coastal suburb of Punggol had remained largely undeveloped, although sparsely dotted with housing estates which had been built during the previous, ultimately ill-fated stage of construction. Under the revised name of Punggol 21 Plus, Lee Hsien Loong introduced updated plans for the development of the area in August 2007, which closely resembled ‘a real estate sales pitch’ (ST 2007g). Not only had the presentational technology further advanced since the initial phase of development, which the Prime Minister used to great effect whilst showcasing the plans to a capacity audience, but the reservoir scheme and adjoining waterway had become a central component of the state’s vision for Punggol (ST 2007b). Using interactive visuals to zoom in on specific areas, Lee whetted the appetite of developers and homebuyers alike with spectacular proposals for waterfront amenities to be located around what was effectively a large freshwater lake. Indeed, desalting of Punggol Reservoir began in earnest in 2009, followed by Serangoon a year later (PUB 2010). Intending to reap rewards from the rebranding efforts directed towards water, the corporate tagline for the development was ‘Waterfront Town of the 21st Century’ (HDB, 2008, p.37). It was projected that 42,000 HDB flats would be constructed by 2015, vastly expanding on the 16,000 existing units. The HDB began development of Singapore’s first ‘eco-precinct’ in March 2007 under the build-to-order scheme (BTO), which was eventually completed in late 2010 (HDB 2011). Launched as Treelodge@Punggol, the building not only incorporates green technology to increase efficiency in energy, water and waste management, including a localised rainwater collection system, but encourages residents to adopt environmentally friendly 192 behaviour (HDB 2007). Water conservation was part of this accompanying scheme, palatably framed in regard to lifestyle choice. The ambition was to create a critical mass of public housing in Punggol, bringing relief to existing residents who had endured a decade of uncertainty and isolation. Many residents had grown increasingly disillusioned and resentful, particularly as the initial scheme had been widely publicised to attract votes for the PAP. There were legitimate concerns harboured by certain politicians that Punggol would be derailed a second time by the financial crisis of 2007, although these were convincingly allayed by the Minister for National Development. To confirm the health of the project, Mah Bow Tan declared that a contract for the construction of the waterway had been settled in early 2009, which was expected to be completed by 2010 at a cost of S$225 million. Again, as was proven with the clean-up of the central rivers in the 1970s and 1980s, the cost of creating the waterway would be easily recouped through increases in surrounding land and property values. Following on, the Minister promised ‘when the new Town Centre and the Waterway are completed, residents of Punggol 21 will enjoy a first-class waterfront environment quite unique in Singapore’ (Hansard 2009c). The winning architectural design was announced in November 2009 for the first public housing parcel located on the waterway, chosen from 108 submissions (HDB 2010). ‘Waterway Terraces I’ launched the following year, with all 1,072 units immediately taken up (HDB 2011). Over 5,000 more units would become available along the waterway in 2011, edging the project closer to its target of 21,000 (HDB 2012). The flats would be ‘resort-like’ in appearance, and linked to sky terraces and rooftop gardens with panoramic views of the waterway, prompting a 35 percent increase in HDB prices over a period of five years (ST 2009d; ST 2009e). Flats at the first Waterway Terraces complex attracted 13,688 applications, amounting to 18 prospective buyers for each individual unit (ST 2010b). Property experts attributed this rush to the allure of waterfront living. The first section of the coastal promenade was also opened to visitors in March 2011, the construction of which had been coordinated by the URA. This promenade connects the riverside paths that line the Punggol and Serangoon rivers, providing visual interest points, landscaping and lighting features (URA 2008). Together with the inland waterway, the promenade was undertaken to ‘enhance the sense of waterfront living in Punggol’ (URA, 2010, p.31). The final section of the promenade was launched in early 2012, allowing strollers to walk uninterrupted around the entire circumference of the Punggol area, Singapore’s first ‘eco-town’, connecting the coastal and reservoir waterfronts (URA 2012). Branded ‘My Waterway@Punggol’, a reoccurring and incontrovertibly postmodern leitmotif, the artificial river, which cuts across the complete length of Punggol town, was opened by the Prime Minister to great fanfare in October 2011 (HDB 2012). In kayaks and on bicycles, 10,000 residents turned up to hear Lee Hsien Loong proclaim Punggol no longer an ‘ulu’ or ‘backwater’, but an area comparable to Venice in stature (ST 2011b). 193

The waterway had originally been conceived as a simple subterranean pipe that would connect the two reservoirs as part of the wider integration scheme. Since water had been gradually revalorised as an economically and socially desirable object, however, the elevated ambition was to expose rather than enclose this connecting conduit, augmenting property prices and governmental programmes in the process. To exploit this opportunity, the HDB began to consider novel forms of housing that could ‘leverage on the town’s coastal proximity and the water opportunities offered by the Punggol Waterway’ (HDB, 2012, p.10). Most importantly, the waterway would contribute to the ‘brand recognition’ of Singapore, allowing for canoeing, jogging and al fresco dining (ST 2007g). The media ran sensational stories which forecasted a future Singapore where HDB residents could leave their flat with a canoe and paddle around the estate (ST 2007h). The waterway at Punggol appeared to offer this opportunity, flanked by premium housing and filled with water that was destined for the population’s taps. Jogging tracks, cycle paths, sculptured bridges, landscaped walkways and parks line the stretch of waterway, accompanied by sustainable drainage features and dedicated information boards. Further along, towards the Punggol River, a feature ‘Heartwave’ wall, measuring 280 metres long, recounts the history of Singapore between intermittent water fountains. Opposite, forming part of a public meeting area complete with artificial waterfall, steps temptingly descend into the waterway beckoning to the nation’s future (see figure 7.8). As a direct consequence of the waterway, Punggol was receiving a significant amount of attention from both politicians and property developers. Events that would normally occur at Marina Reservoir, such as the Singapore Canoe Marathon, were now being scheduled for the waterway instead. When Punggol is eventually completed, there will be 96,000 units making it one of the largest HDB towns (Hansard 2013). To enhance the status of the area, the next phase of development is oriented towards ‘signature waterfront housing districts’ (HDB, 2013, p.5). There was an expansion of private condominiums along the waterway from 2010 onwards, with approximately 5,000 units planned across 8 plots (ST 2011c). ‘Watertown’, an integrated residential and retail complex costing S$1.6 billion, has been envisaged as the leading development. However, comparable projects sprang up with similarly aquatic names, including ‘Waterbay’, ‘River Isles’ and ‘Riverbank’, whilst HDB estates are adopting titles such as ‘Waterway Ridges’ and ‘Waterway Woodcress’. Exploiting these thematic possibilities further, an ‘iconic’ 6-storey shopping mall called ‘Waterway Point’ is scheduled to be opened in 2015 (ST 2011d). Water is clearly wetting the wheels of the new economy in Singapore, albeit in a symbolic rather than industrial capacity. With the continued blurring between the terrestrial and aquatic, interesting and auspicious administrative overlaps were becoming more common as the nature of government was increasingly refined as a consequence. And indeed, at Punggol, the ABC programme was collaboratively planned and implemented by the HDB, URA and PUB, thereby pooling expertise and synergising objectives (PUB 2010; URA 2011; HDB 2012). Testimony to this, the 194

HDB received the inaugural ABC Waters Certification for its waterfront housing projects and neighbourhood park in Punggol (HDB 2011). According to the Watershed Manager for the Eastern catchment, canalisation and concretisation has been especially prevalent in this part of the island due to its large HDB population, therefore residents tend to perceive waterways as open drains rather than as rivers. The plan for this catchment, executed by CPG Consultants and Cardno International, intends to transform this residential area into a ‘water-orientated community, which celebrates water as an inseparable element in everyday lives’ (CPG, 2007, p.1). This can be achieved through structural and non-structural interventions, softening the water’s edge and introducing water-based sports and recreational activities. By increasing the awareness of the history and ecology of rivers within the population, the plan proposes that ‘people will gain respect for the waterways and catchments, with resultant water quality improvement’ (p.2). With the damming of the Punggol and Serangoon rivers, the total area for water activities was significantly increased by approximately 141 hectares.

Figure 7.8 Descending steps into the waterway at Punggol

Source: Author (2012)

As part of the initial round of pilot ABC projects, a floating island was introduced at Punggol Reservoir. In addition to improving water quality and providing a habitat for birds and fish, the island would also serve recreational purposes. To signify the agricultural history of Punggol, a play shelter in the shape of a large mangosteen provides the main focal point

195 accompanied by halved oranges that function as tables (see figure 7.9). Disneyfied and somewhat incongruous, these spectacles draw attention to information boards that explain the sustainable drainage technology and display comic strips of Water Wally. Wetland technology was also installed at Serangoon Reservoir to treat the leachate produced from its former role as a landfill site, which is again embedded within a wider pedagogic framework. Through these measures, alongside more general waterfront developments, the ABC programme effectively sets the stage for a neoliberal form of government. However, as a staff member from the 3P Department affirmed, this largely concerns questions of ‘physical engineering’ (int#2). This is necessary of course, but 3P initiatives are implemented in parallel with ABC projects and are indeed facilitated by them:

It's the hardware; we’re the software…it’s allowing people to get closer to water. But the glue, the thing that actually allows people to interact with the ABC sites, is what we do. We aim for your head but actually we want your soul (Ibid.).

Figure 7.9 ABC Waters project at Punggol Reservoir

Source: Author (2012)

7.5 Water as a technology of government

The 3P Department would use the growing number of ABC projects as the physical foundation for its programme of engagement initiatives. Plastic sculptures, colourful signage and

196 zigzagging boardwalks would come to serve as subtle technologies of government. The principle method of engaging visitors would be through the Learning Trail programme, established in 2011 at selected ABC sites and incorporated into the school curriculum. As part of a school fieldtrip or family visit, students are encouraged to explore reservoirs and learn about their history, biodiversity and unique characteristics, to assume joint ownership of Singapore’s waterways (PUB 2011). In March 2012, the ‘ABC Waters Learning Trail Passport’ was released to provide students with a comprehensive guide to all seven sites, which has since expanded to include a further four trails. The booklet contains information regarding the water cycle, water supply and quality, ABC concepts, heritage, biodiversity and conservation (PUB 2012b). Interactive activities are located at various stations around the reservoir or waterway. A sticker is awarded by a teacher when each trail is completed, to be fixed to the appropriate section of the booklet, and when five have been successfully acquired a prize can be collected from PUB. Through on-site ‘experiential learning’, students are expected to cultivate an appreciation of water and adopt practices of water conservation. With a large majority of the island acting as catchment, particularly since the Marina, Punggol and Serangoon reservoirs came into operation, the water authority acknowledged that the ‘concept of a protected catchment area’ was no longer appropriate (int#2). Whereas disciplinary measures had been deemed the logical solution to the first urban catchments at Seletar and Bedok, addressed in chapter three, such techniques had proven difficult to uphold, and worse, counterproductive. Rather than managing water as if it were ‘pristine’ or ‘holy’, segregating it from the population in the interests of conservation, PUB would increasingly use the material reality of water as a technology of government (Ibid.). Where students are concerned, the strategy is to draw them towards the water by aligning the process of engagement with activities that appeal to teenagers, exercising a seductive rather than coercive modality of power:

What I wanted was something which would entice you, bring you in- you know it's like the Black Widow on her web- entice you to come in, but every child is different. With the Learning Trails we aim for fourteen year olds… it's a good age to inspire them to learn new things, and they all have different interests. Some want to be a rock musician, some want to be astronauts, and nobody wants to be just a doctor or a lawyer…So if everyone else is saying 'yeah, you have to go green, you have to hug a tree today, you have to kiss a cockroach’. ‘Well look at me, I'm doing all of that. You know, I'm green, I'm so with it. I'm a 14 year-old teenager and I'm hip’ (int#2).

The ‘web’ being referred to here is not only institutional but infrastructural in character, networked together by strategically arranged material interventions into waterfront space. Comparably as important to this approach of government, which Foucault attempted to capture with his very specific choice of the word ‘conduct’, is the circular and relational organisation of 197 its application. Mentors should conduct themselves as they mean to conduct others, establishing iterative relations of tutelage and self-reflection, and the creation of new subjectivities, in the process. Hierarchy and docility are actively eschewed. The long-term objective of the learning trails is therefore to avoid overly and overtly didactic interventions from state officials. Instead, an emerging civil society has been increasingly and authentically encouraged by PUB to assume responsibility for water resources through autonomous individual initiative and enterprise. Children are now expected to conduct learning trails without the continued assistance of teachers or guides:

The approach we've taken is we get the kids to lead other children. They become the head honchos of the trail; they become the super divas of the trail. They lead other children on the trail. So we train them, we actually go through a whole process of training the kids, then kids then lead other kids. The kids not only lead their peers but they lead seniors, they lead juniors, and they can use the learning trail that we helped to create as a standard template which they can then work on and create trails for juniors or seniors…It's almost like co-creation (int#2).

Indicative of the proactive approach to decentralisation adopted by PUB, an elementary and discreet apparatus of orchestration serves to provoke and guide the children on the trails. As mentioned above, a ‘standard template’ is provided in the way of a dedicated booklet for both students and teachers, whilst children also receive ‘training’ from PUB to ensure the parameters of deviation from the official message are informally managed. A similar dynamic can be discerned in regard to PUB’s relationship with the ‘fledgling’ third sector which continues to require a significant amount of ‘hand-holding’ (Ibid.). Here, the intention is to empower private vendors to the point where PUB can merely facilitate and oversee:

They should be the ones creating, owning and running the programmes…PUB should only be the fact-checker, they should only come back to me if they feel that they want to do a certain test and they're not quite sure whether it's going to be testing for the right parameters, or whether it's going to be a test that is valid (Ibid.).

Again, whilst PUB will continue to ‘allow them a lot of room to manoeuvre’, the 3P staff member confirmed that as a water authority it is ‘very clear as to what it is we want to achieve’. This is very much the administrative domain of benchmarking, closely associated with neoliberal forms of government, which has been an essential component of the learning trails programme. In April 2012, SEC were appointed by PUB to publicise the learning trails programme and reach out to secondary school students after being awarded the tender (PUB 2012). This arrangement is exemplary of the revised approach to government as state officials, NGOs and members of the public are all implicated in the process of disseminating, learning and administering, where responsibility is dispersed and circular. In this case, the 3P staff 198 member stipulated what types of information were required for each reservoir or waterway, encompassing issues of history, biodiversity and ecology, and SEC conducted the necessary research and assisted in the production of the booklets. As chapter five sought to demonstrate, the flexible networks that SEC has access to would prove essential to the learning trails programme, which could now work through the lifestyle choices of the population in the everyday environment of the waterfront. This major contract with PUB has significantly increased the operational revenue of SEC, contributing to greater staff numbers, higher salaries and providing for more office-related payments (int#13). And indeed, it was the decentralised networked capacity of SEC that persuaded PUB to select them as vendor:

Essentially, in a nut shell, PUB needed to reach out to schools to get kids to visit these waterbodies and take ownership of the spaces around them…we won it mainly on one strength: our network to schools. Because our school green awards programme, which is up to almost 90 percent of all schools in Singapore. So in the last one year, our KPIs were to bring 25,000 kids to the various waterbodies…We needed to turn 80 schools into water adopters…and we needed to create more trails for kids to go to, and we created a new website for PUB and books. What we are able to give the Government is this ability to reach out (int#13).

In addition to school contacts, SEC has links with other NGOs and social enterprises which can be drawn upon to circulate the water authority’s objectives throughout civil society and coordinate the appropriate portfolio of actions. A green entrepreneur and owner of company linked with SEC became involved in learning trails as a volunteer facilitator, alongside various other PUB programmes, guiding school classes around designated waterbodies once or twice a week during school term (int#15). To encourage participation, full-time PUB staff do not contribute to learning trails, only SEC and their recruited volunteers. Similar to the student-led trails, preparation exercises and a ‘very detailed training guide’ are provided to outline ‘key deliverables’ (Ibid.). However, there is increased scope for improvisation and personalisation within this hand-holding framework. The volunteer facilitator believes this to be part of the wider shift to a model of ‘pure governance’, which functions through the interests and passions of committed individuals rather than their subordination. According to him, the ABC learning trails is a principle vehicle for this new focus on volunteerism, through which organisations are able to freely contribute:

By having free will they [PUB] just provide the guidelines. Anybody can contact ABC Trails. They just need to approach the SEC because they are managing it…it's free to any organisation but there are certain things you need to deliver to pass the water story. This is what the Government is doing, they are more like governors, they are not here to micromanage the organisation. And if you don't like the water story, you don't like the ABC thing, you don't have

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to be involved… at the end of the day, the people that finally do the trail are people who are interested in doing the trail (int#15).

In this model of government, the state has the responsibility to create and enforce ‘legislation’ and provide the infrastructural ‘hardware’. However, where the green entrepreneur is concerned, NGOs and social enterprises in Singapore are prepared to assume responsibility for the ‘heartware’ of the nation, which refers to a point ‘whereby they want to do it [conserve water] rather than they’re forced to do it’. To harness the aspirations of the population, the entrepreneur volunteered for PUB during World Water Day to assist with the awarding of the ‘technology prize’. In addition to facilitating a learning trail at Marina Barrage, his duty under this programme was to support the children as they contested the prize:

They actually compete…we were involved in training the winners, so we have pride in them that 'hey, they definitely learned something because they actually won'. So we were there to congratulate them, and find out what they have learned (Ibid.).

Another organisation that was invited by SEC to participate in the learning trails programme was WWS (int#13). In this capacity, WWS volunteers are trained by PUB and asked to lead discussions on water conservation, particularly at Marina Reservoir. The students are tasked to collect a water sample and conduct quality tests, to physically engage with water and to appreciate the process of treatment. Linking the idealised principles of volunteerism and ownership, members were also invited to give talks at schools that surrounded the ABC project at Bishan- Ang Mo Kio Park, and thereby encourage teachers and students to adopt the naturalised waterway (int#9). Most significantly in terms of responsibility, the WWS has been offered ‘real money this time’ to open their first branch office at the Punggol waterway, under the jurisdiction of the National Parks Board. Using the landscaping features introduced here to decentralise responsibility, the role of WWS is to ‘get new stakeholders, residents, to take ownership…to stir up and coordinate interest groups or residents’ (Ibid.). During an initial recruitment exercise, WWS persuaded approximately four Punggol residents to become volunteers:

They are going to be given the leadership with us supporting, and they are going to lead because it's their hometown, you see? So, that's our business template. Once we are there, slowly we have visibility, people will start asking 'what are you doing here? Why?' Then we hope to then engage, get more people involved…creating a community role for them but at the same time also working in line with our mission, keeping our waterways clean (Ibid.).

Depoliticised, individualised and networked, the WWS affords state agencies such as PUB and NEA an unrivalled opportunity to promote a neoliberal and lifestyle-oriented approach 200 to government on the waterfront. And indeed, ABC projects and their associated learning trails have provided a conducive platform for facilitating this strategic and meticulously coordinated transition. As water collection rights have been decentralised through source control measures so too has responsibility over its protection and conservation, both genuinely and effectively. This can also be seen during events for World Water Day, where PUB assumes a facilitating role and staff members emphasise community leadership instead. One PUB employee even stated that ‘we hope that this will be a community-led initiative eventually…we can be the drivers, but ultimately, you know, who’s going to continue this? It will be the community’ (int#6). The ‘Water-Venture’ programme ran by the People’s Association (PA), a state agency that coordinates local governmental activities, has undertaken the most explicit attempt to conceptually and physically link water and community through lifestyle change (see figure 7.10). This initiative aims to enhance community cohesion through the organisation of water sports on Singapore’s reservoirs and waterways, offering free training and equipment to incentivise participation in the scheme.

7.6 The spectacularisation of water

Taken together, the 3P Department, ABC programme and learning trails initiative are consequential products of the new approach to government adopted by the water authority. Reform in water ownership legislation, PUB’s institutional and communications reorganisation, and the wider shift to a service economy have proven to be decisive drivers of this shift to neoliberal government, alongside the counterproductive consequences of the previous policy that sought to segregate water from the population. It is extremely difficult, and indeed impossible, to identify a specific case of cause and effect, as all of these drivers are interrelated and mutually implicated. As Foucault consistently demonstrated with his analyses of historical transitions, which invariably revolved around the complex problematic of urban economic restructuring, the genealogical origins of social phenomena are contingent, multiple and intimately intertwined. Notwithstanding this caveat, there has been a prevalent pressure on the state to centrifugally manage its circulation of water, which has ultimately resulted in water becoming a conspicuous presence in the everyday life of the population. The general consequence of this transition for the object of water is one of spectacularisation, if not increasing privatisation and commercialisation. As water has progressively seeped into terrestrial areas and merged with everyday urban life, both physically and conceptually, it has been revalorised and invariably rebranded as a culturally and economically desirable commodity. Although the underlying intentions have generally been progressive in execution, the ABC programme has tended to create a spectacle of water in a didactic and exaggerated register. The concerns of place management and branding, oriented towards the requirements of a service economy, have often trumped those pertaining to community utility and biodiversity protection (int#9; int#12). These are undeniably outward- 201 looking developments, which are regularly and heavily publicised at international events oriented towards ‘liveability’ and water management best practices. Although 3P representatives remain adamant that commercial funding is selectively acquired for projects, given the reliance of the ABC programme on corporate sponsors these areas will unavoidably serve as backdrops for branding exercises (int#2).

Figure 7.10 Water-venture promoting community values through lifestyle choice

Source: Author (2013)

Beginning in 2011, a spate of copycat suicides at Bedok Reservoir, an ABC project site, threatened to undermine not only the reputation of its potable water quality but also its appealing image, prompting increased police patrols and installation of preventative signage, greater lighting and CCTV (Hansard 2011d). Formerly dominated by HDB estates, developers have started to construct private condominiums around the perimeter of the reservoir attracted by the promise of commanding waterfront prices (see figure 7.11). Suburban areas had previously failed to offer the necessary allure for condominium development, yet 2,300 private units had been constructed or planned by mid-2012 (ST 2012b). With names like ‘Waterfront Waves’, ‘Waterfront Gold’, ‘Waterfront Key’ and ‘Waterfront Isle’, it would appear to be more than circumstantial that suburban private development occurred at unprecedented rates at Bedok Reservoir. This linkage between water circulation and exclusive development has perhaps been most obvious at Marina Bay. In May 2006, a large 57-hectare site was awarded to the American 202 casino developer Las Vegas Sands for S$1.2 billion to construct Singapore’s first integrated resort, under the guidance of celebrity architect Moshe Safdie (URA 2006a). With rooftops shaped like waves and a 1-hectare skypark constructed on top of three 50-storey supporting hotel towers, Marina Bay Sands was destined to be defiantly ostentatious in a worsening economic climate, completed in 2010 (URA 2011). An ‘infinity pool’, located 57 storeys above ground level and measuring 150 metres in length, gives hotel guests who can afford the expense the impression of being immersed in water that flows forever. An artificial waterway complete with Venetian gondolas cuts through the deluxe shopping precinct, intersecting an iconic water fountain (see figure 7.12). Below ground level, Singapore’s first casino was built to increase tourist numbers, requiring amendments in longstanding policy that sought to dissuade gambling addiction (Hansard 2005f). A controversial policy has required local customers pay a fee of S$100 whilst tourists can enter for free, reducing the widely debated social impact of gambling whilst freeing up floor space for international spenders (ST 2010c).

Figure 7.11 Marketing waterfront lifestyles at Bedok Reservoir

Source: Author (2012)

Located on Marina Bay on a seemingly floating pavilion, accessible by means of an underwater tunnel, the American luxury nightclub brand Pangaea opened at Marina Bay Sands the following year. Offering to ‘transport the super elite into an opulent and richly adorned tribal fantasy’ (www.pangaea.sg), where Asia’s most expensive cocktail can be bought for S$32,000, Pangaea clearly brings into question the state’s efforts to brand these waters the ‘people’s bay’ (URA 2011). Similarly, Luis Vuitton, located in the second pavilion, is another

203 brand that remains unaffordable to the majority of the population whilst benefiting from stilled waters. The ArtScience Museum and Singapore Flyer have also been criticised for commanding extortionate entrance fees, both of which attain prestige from their proximity to the bay (ST 2008c; ST 2011e). When the boarding rates of the Fullerton Hotel complex are taken into consideration, in addition to the entry charges and beverage prices at surrounding viewing establishments Ku De Ta, LeVeL33 and 1-Altitude, we can infer that the spectacle of water is a keenly sought after service.

Figure 7.12 The spectacle of water at Marina Bay Sands

Source: Author (2012)

This form of lifestyle, oriented towards consumption and spectacle, has been encouraged by the state at various other waterfront sites. The URA 1993 Planning Report identified a large area on Singapore’s south coast as particularly amenable to commercial development, which prompted the construction of the HarbourFront Precinct, an integrated retail, entertainment and business resort comprising 24 hectares of prime waterfront land. At the centre is its S$140 million flagship enterprise VivoCity constructed in 2006, which would eventually become Singapore’s largest shopping complex. According to the architect Toyo Ito, a Deluezian if not by intention then by philosophical sympathies, the design of VivoCity is based on the concept of water, with the curved roof acting as a metaphor for waves, and the wading pool in the rooftop garden visualising the adjacent sea, thereby ‘bridging the chasm between man-made and natural environments’ (Mapletree, 2008, p.44). Comprising 340 stores, a cinema multiplex, gym, spa and food courts, VivoCity has even been described as an entirely ‘new city’ by its developer, where consumers are the city’s 204

‘denizens’; a claim supported by the fact that the number of visitors it received in its first month was equivalent to the whole population of Singapore. This sentiment is pragmatically shared by the URA (2007c), which declares ‘in contemporary times, private commercial spaces such as VivoCity, more so than public spaces, compete for the public attention and patronage’ (p.313). However, as this is very much private not public space, artwork is only installed if it provides photo opportunities and encourages spending, activities that are deemed unsafe or disruptive such as ballgames are prohibited, information displays are tailored towards short-stay foreign tourists and the emotional response of visitors is managed around ‘value creation’ (Mapletree 2008). This form of corporate agenda and concomitant hyperbole is not uncommon elsewhere, yet it provokes a certain sense of unease when exercised through Singaporeans’ ‘general nostalgia for nature’ (Mapletree, 2008, p.209). Here, VivoCity provides the physical arena for people to build a relationship with water, through the ‘phantasmagoria of shopping multi- experiences’ (URA, 2007c, p.314). This interaction is micromanaged by a vast troupe of consultants according to the overriding concerns of the brand. Possibly bearing witness to a distinct hydrosocial disconnect, a consultant working on water features in VivoCity was astonished at the positive response to his instalments. A more unfortunate trend concerns not only the commercialisation of waterfront space but its wholesale appropriation by private interests. After decades of disciplinary urbanisation and reclamation, waterfronts had become generally inaccessible to citizens, which initiatives such as the ABC programme and changes in reservoir management have intended to rectify. However, those with the necessary capital can gain unprecedented entry to privileged spaces of leisure, where they can set their unimpeded gaze on the spectacle of surrounding waters. Sentosa is one of Singapore’s larger offshore islands located just off the south coast, a short swim from VivoCity in fact. The small expanse of sea separating it from the mainland has not spared it from the state’s ruthless modernisation programme, undergoing a series of comprehensive rebranding initiatives aimed at increasing tourism on the island. Faced with a flagging trade of day-trippers, which would be exacerbated by the Asian financial crisis of 1997, the final branding overhaul was commenced in the late 1980s. Accordingly, the internationally- acclaimed centrepiece Sentosa Cove was finally opened in 2006 as ‘a playground for luxury waterfront housing’ (Tajudeen, 2007, p.95). The corporate tagline for Sentosa Cove is ‘the world’s most desirable address’, which is not an entirely outlandish assumption given its 117 hectares of premium real estate with personal boat berths, adjacent golf course, marina club for megayachts, spa, gymnasium, Venetian canals and advanced security system. Even visitors to Sentosa Cove have had to pay an access charge to meet with family and friends. Preserving the exclusivity of this luxurious waterfront is Sentosa Development Corporation (SDC), a statutory board set up in 1972, and the subsidiary Sentosa Cove Private Limited established in 1995. Under their coordination, various architects have been drafted in to 205 conceptualise Sentosa Cove which began to emerge from the sea through a large-scale programme of land reclamation that would increase the size of the island by 25 percent. In 2004, the state’s aspirations for Singapore to become a global city fed into the marketing strategy of Sentosa Cove, which increasingly turned to foreign buyers of high net worth, changing aspects of government policy to facilitate this programme of internationalisation. Later that year the government revised legislation to allow foreigners to buy property on Sentosa Cove, then the following year a financial investor scheme was created that granted Permanent Residency to anyone who invested at least S$5 million in financial assets, including a bungalow property (Balasingamchow 2009). Private sector strategies were adopted to stimulate demand, appreciate land prices and sell outside of the usual government tender process, allowing foreign property developers into the domestic market for the first time. As a result, land values increased from S$300 per square foot for the first land parcel to S$1820 by the time the last parcel was sold in 2008, with half of the land parcels being bought by foreigners from over twenty different countries (Ibid, p.26). Inside the official Sentosa Cove brochure it boasts that ‘for the first time, homes could be built right on the waterfront…in an exclusive cosmopolitan community’, which is a far cry from the former ‘backwater terrain…marked by nothing more remarkable than some coconut trees and coral reefs’ (p.13). Reflecting the cosmopolitan character of its guests, and in contrast with the unremarkably parochial coconut trees of before, the tended landscapes largely consist of plants and shrubs not native to Singapore, sourced from Australia, Africa, the Caribbean, America and other parts of Southeast Asia. The aspirations of a global city have seemingly manifested in horticulture. Comparably exclusive waterfront developments have been constructed by Keppel Corporation across the increasingly affluent south coast, spectacularly designed by celebrity architect Daniel Libeskind. With unparalleled access to the waterfront, architects like Libeskind can evoke ‘an affinity with the water through the inclusion of infinity pools that give the impression of a property merging seamlessly with the sea’ (Balasingamchow, 2009, p.35). An architect who designed a housing unit at Sentosa Cove was tasked to achieve exactly this effect by his wealthy client, revealing incontrovertibly the escalating cachet of the spectacle of water:

The client is spending ridiculous amounts of money on a view, which is of the water. So, the water as kind of image becomes a component of the real estate. It becomes part of the commodity that you're buying into, and well, that's the reality of the game…the house kind of frames the sea in more and more specific and explicit ways. Such that, when you get to the roof level, it is like this picture perfect postcard of what you've spent your millions of dollars’ worth. And slowly, I remove everything else. You remove all the views of the neighbours, all of the gardens, everything. And you just get, like, water and island, right? (int#20).

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7.7 Conclusion

Since the 1980s, the cultural status of water has completely transformed bringing about profound consequences for urban planning, economic development and government programmes. This has not been a passive process but an active one, necessitating strategic interventions from various state agencies into the urban milieu. Fluid and permeable, the biophysical properties of water make it a highly mobile locus of government which can penetrate and pervade the urban form and the everyday life of its inhabitants. Previously, the state had attempted to govern through the segregation of water from the population, circumscribing its circulation in concrete and containing it within secured reservoirs. Although the peculiarly modernist predilection for the functional separation of circulation has been undertaken in many instances with progressive or at least practical intentions in mind, the underlying logic that pervades the city is nevertheless one of restraint, constriction and segregation; government through absence not presence (Scott 1998). However, not only were disciplinary methods costly and difficult to implement but produced a diverse range of negative effects in Singapore. This was a crisis of closed systems, and indeed, a crisis of modernism and the centralised state, which is a local and unique expression of much broader critique (Berman 1983; Bauman 1991). With a greater uptake of mechanisms of security, government would be increasingly exercised through technologies of exposure rather than enclosure, facilitated by the calculated entry of water into urban life. The whims and wants of an emerging civil society would also be actively unbridled and worked through in the interests of water governance, entailing a shift in telos towards individual aspiration and sexual desire as opposed to collective docility and self-restraint. Remarking on the principle features of security, Foucault (2007, p.73) suggests that to govern is to stimulate and manipulate the ‘naturalness of desire’, which provides a potent and effective basis for realising national objectives and state aggrandisement through the individual urges and instincts of the population. Indeed, as Foucault surmised, human nature is also penetrable by this governmental form of sovereignty, which orchestrates, manipulates and strategically associates the population with its environmental surroundings in politically and economically expedient configurations (Foucault 2007). Watersports, shopping and al fresco dining would become strategic vehicles for a modality of power oriented towards seduction rather than subordination, lifestyle choice as opposed to industrial productivity. The ABC programme and 3P Department are decidedly contemporary approaches to this neoliberal form of government, which seek to activate, individualise and empower citizens through funding initiatives and participatory decision- making processes. Administrative decentralisation has occurred through the architectural and infrastructural reconfiguration of the built environment, where source control technologies have provided an everyday spatial signature of neoliberalism. The opening of reservoirs to

207 recreational activities is an explicit if not mundane indication of this coordinated process of deterritorialisation, centrifugally unleashing the potency of water flows and human desire. Water has consequently become a conspicuous presence in the lives of Singapore’s population. And indeed, waterfront spaces have proliferated and increasingly provide the strategic conduits for the orchestration of a spectacular form of conduct. Lifestyle and community have merged as master concepts under the expanding reputation of the coast. However, given the significant emphasis placed on waterfront lifestyles, there has been a spectacularisation of water which has not had entirely progressive outcomes. Consumption and grandstanding have tended to be privileged activities in the spectacular domain of the waterfront, which has led in some cases to the commercialisation and privatisation of space. As its cultural status has escalated, the desirable object of water has become something to crave, photograph and possess. Nevertheless, Foucault’s (2008) argument that market mechanisms and civil society are productive technologies of government, as opposed to being simply external pressures or instruments of dispossession, most certainly appears to apply in this circumstance.

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8. Politics of the Milieu

The body without organs is made to flatten, grasp, retain: but it’s impossible – everything leaks out from all sides…The collective equipment is there to hold something that, by its very nature, cannot be held (Guattari, 1989, p.110-11).

8.1 Introduction

This thesis has been concerned with the incremental and rather procedural expansion of catchment infrastructure in Singapore between its founding as an internationally recognised country in 1819 to the development of advanced water technology during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Whilst this narrow and somewhat specialised empirical account should hold immediate relevance for statesmen, citizens and scholars of Singapore, particularly those interested in the modernisation of water supply in this country, there are much broader, profounder implications for our theoretical understanding of government and the formation, consolidation and political anatomy of the modern state. I have attempted to demonstrate that infrastructural development of water in Singapore was not supplementary to the emergence of the modern state apparatus and its governmental capacities but formative and essential. Indeed, it can be realistically ventured that modern states are co-produced with material infrastructural networks through processes of government; to wit, by engineering and administering the relations between circulation, citizens and their surrounding environment. Drawing closely on Foucault’s original lectures at the Collège de France, which examined the logistical matrix of the modern state in Europe and its emerging capacity to regulate flows of people and resources, I have demonstrated that Singapore has experienced an analogous trajectory of urban development. Challenging the mainstream account of governmentality, which has invariably and narrowly focused on the biopolitics of the population, the analytical significance of the milieu and the related issue of circulation has been purposefully, and I hope provocatively, reiterated. Therefore, whilst the empirical chapters have progressed more or less chronologically tracing a general historical shift from sovereignty, discipline to security, each has drawn out a specific controversy which is pertinent to this wider theoretical undertaking. The shift from sovereignty to discipline was the focus of chapters three and four, characterised by the tumultuous departure of the colonial administration, which examined the far-reaching consequences for the population and water circulation respectively. A network of closed systems was consolidated throughout the territory during this period of industrialisation, which entailed a form of rule through restraint. However, as chapter five revealed, a series of crises resulting from closed systems began to undermine this disciplinary approach to government, which brought into question the efficacy of containment measures and centralised state control. The late twentieth century

209 transition from bureaucratic state management to decentralised, commercialised and demand- oriented programmes, which is generally framed as a fiscal or accumulation issue in urban political ecology (Gandy 2002; Bakker 2003; Kaika 2003b, 2005; Swyngedouw 2004), is interpreted differently here as a technical shift in government. Neoliberal decentralisation can consequently be understood not only as institutional or structural in character but technological and biopolitical, which raises different and important questions. Security mechanisms would therefore be gradually introduced into the infrastructural network by means of urban planning and design innovation, which as chapters six and seven confirm, facilitated a neoliberal mode of government through the physical reconfiguration of the milieu. The object status of water has escalated as a result, a beneficial development for the property market, whilst citizens have been governed as active rather than docile subjects in dispersed, depoliticised networks oriented around desire as opposed to restraint. An alternative biopolitical regime was inaugurated precisely through the intricate reconfiguration of material networks of circulation. Thus, whereas Foucault used the examples of grain, contagions and streets to elucidate the exercise of power over circulatory processes, a corresponding analysis was undertaken here but in relation to water. Indeed, not only is water exemplary of urban flow but was identified by Foucault as a critical and integral component of the urban problem. What Foucault referred to as ‘the question of water’ was merely hinted towards, albeit defined as an urgent area of investigation. Taking Foucault’s preliminary remarks on water distribution seriously, I have further developed this research agenda in the empirical context of Singapore, which given its contemporary experience of rapid urbanisation provides an appropriate case for analysis. The political relationship between population and resources was a privileged yet underplayed locus of critical inquiry for Foucault, as were the infrastructural networks that channel urban flows and shape the socio-ecological fabric of the milieu, an innovative and burgeoning area of critical geography (Graham and Marvin 2001; Graham 2000, 2002). The urban problem, through which Foucault brought these varied elements together, is deserving of much greater and sustained attention from governmentality scholars, which may also serve to reinvigorate this field of study and broaden the analytical horizon of political ecology. As Foucault (2007, p.21) made quite clear, the biopolitical regulation of the population must be orchestrated in and through their environmental surroundings, 'bound to the materiality within which they live'. Indeed, there cannot be a biopolitics of the population without a corresponding geopolitics of the milieu. As a consequence, intriguing allusions made by Foucault during collaborative projects and interviews to infrastructure, circulation and water certainly begin to acquire more resonance. In this concluding chapter, I will provide an overview of the empirical findings to facilitate a discussion of the key analytical contributions. Whereas power was formerly exercised through practices of restraint and enclosure, it will be argued that the desires of the population have been centrifugally unleashed through physical interventions into the milieu, 210 further substantiating Foucault’s arguments on government. Drawing on the work of CERFI collaborators in particular, the wider theoretical implications of the empirical findings for our understanding of the modern state will then be considered. The contention will be that technologies of exposure create an alternative state effect to that conventionally examined in respect to containment. The consequences of this analytical reformulation of the state for neoliberalism are thereupon deliberated and how this can critically inform popular articulations of IWRM. This will lead into a more general discussion of the urban problem which reasserts the centrality of circulation to Foucault’s analytics of government. The chapter will finally turn to a wider set of questions that have arisen in response to the conclusions of the study, outlining what could be a future research agenda oriented towards the notion of ‘eclectic engineering’.

8.2 Rule and restraint

In 1959, the recently self-governing state of Singapore began to assume a centralised form of administrative control over its subjects, resources and territory by means of anti-pollution legislation, canalisation and reservoir construction. As chapters three and four revealed, this supplanted the previously extractive entrepôt regime which under the former British colonial administration had been selective if not sporadic, discontinuous and parsimonious in the development of Singapore’s public infrastructure. And indeed, the internal conditions of the island were not significantly developed outside of the immediate areas occupied by the port and colonial facilities, leading to malarial infestations resulting from standing water, episodes of frequent flooding and dilapidating standpipes for potable supply (see Yeoh 2003). Water circulation was the prerogative of the colonial regime, which flowed in channels etched out in the interests of British sovereignty. Foucault (2007, p.20) was clear; ‘sovereignty capitalizes a territory, raising the major problem of the seat of government’. British trade and colonial districts took immediate precedence over native thirst and cleanliness during this earlier period. With the coordinated departure of the British administration and election of the PAP, a series of plans were implemented that sought to accelerate a process of national industrialisation through infrastructural development and inward investment. Integral to the Four Year Development Plan of 1961, introduced in chapter four, was the comprehensive roll-out of water supply and drainage across the entire territory of Singapore to provide for incoming manufacturing firms and a growing population. Whilst the introduction of water infrastructure and legislative measures certainly provided the necessary means through which potable supply and flooding control could be improved, this also served to physically assemble a modern state apparatus characterised by centralised administrative capacities of revenue collection, surveillance and social provision. Between the 1950s and 1980s, the canalisation and administrative centralisation of water would occur in tandem and be durably cast in concrete, contemporaneous with the modernist period of hydraulic engineering (Jones and Macdonald 2011; Karvonen 2011). 211

Trapezoidal canals and culverts spread through suburban settlements, capturing and incarcerating rainwater, separating it from adjacent areas in a concrete prophylactic, which would then be rapidly conveyed with machine-like efficiency to heavily secured reservoirs. As Scott (1998, p.82) confirms, ‘many state activities aim at transforming the population, space, and nature under their jurisdiction into the closed systems that offer no surprises and that can best be observed and controlled’. The Drainage Master Plan and WPCDA were introduced in 1975, which respectively streamlined construction protocols and provided strong legislative support for private land acquisition and the enhanced protection of drainage infrastructure as it penetrated and connected territorial space. A closed network of canals, drains and culverts formed a centripetal, disciplinary system of containment, which regularised the rhythm and route of water through standardised design specifications and functional separation from disparate or dangerous circulations (e.g. humans, wildlife, pollutants, organic materials). Aside from the ideological value of the canal grid, signifying governmental virtuosity, stewardship and control over nature, containing water in a closed system of predetermined conduits obdurately established by state fiat would centralise administrative capacities and consolidate a modern state apparatus in respect to surveillance, ownership and government. First, by homogenising the dimensions of waterways through geometric canalisation the flow of water could be regularised, thereby enabling efficient, calculable conveyance and hydrological measurements. As Foucault (1977) argued at length, the disciplinary, anti-nomadic techniques of containment and isolation are instrumental enablers of centralised surveillance, eliminating ‘diffuse circulation’ (p.143). Beginning in 1968, hydrometric stations, flood gauges, telemetric systems and CCTV technology would be progressively embedded within the canal system to facilitate surveillance and policing of both stormwater and proximate passers-by. To prevent contamination of limited water resources, as chapter three delineated, citizens would be assigned to compartmentalised spaces, producing a comprehensive administrative grid consisting of food courts, factories, markets, farms and public housing blocks. Water security was repeatedly and strategically alluded to by state officials during this period in order to push through what were irrefutably controversial measures (see Kaika 2003a). This afforded a generalised surveillance of individual water consumption practices and other everyday conduct (e.g. hygiene, productivity), whilst improving remote identification methods for taxation, rent, conscription and raids. Public standpipes were effectively discontinued in 1975 as water consumption rates could not be individualised and monitored, providing the infrastructural wherewithal to legislatively enact the WPCDA introduced the same year. A permanent address would henceforth be required in order to gain access to a centrally distributed metered supply, which technically linked citizens to a broader, nationalised system of provision. This technological striation of waterways also facilitated a generalised process of centralisation in respect to land and water ownership. The WPCDA was instrumental for 212 consolidating administrative control over potable supply in addition to drainage, legally designating water the exclusive property of the water authority which effectively brought the entire water cycle under the control of the state. To supply the nation’s reservoirs, rainwater would henceforth be collected by means of an extended drainage system and related programme of catchment clearance. This released prime, increasingly state-owned land for development, which had formerly suffered from regular flooding or had been settled by intractable, politically antagonistic slums and unproductive, small-scale industries. The URA could subsequently parcel this land for sale to domestic and foreign investors as part of a state-endorsed programme of industrialisation and gentrification, significantly increasing revenue at the disposal of the state and enhancing its administrative and fiscal capabilities (Haila 1999). An essential revenue stream was also established through the sale of water to domestic and non-domestic customers, which could be charged and taxed with the introduction of individualised meters and a national distribution network. Again, this would serve to facilitate the modernisation of the state and consolidate its developmental capacity. Bringing potable supply under the centralised ambit of the water authority also created a vast technological system of political and biopolitical dependency (see Gandy 2005, 2006a; Bakker 2013a), which configured, naturalised and concretised a new relationship between the population, water and the state, predicated on infrastructural enclosure. Water was to descend underground in ever greater volumes or be incarcerated in secured conduits as the canalisation programme was accelerated throughout the 1970s. Where water pooling did remain visible, environmental inspectors, reservoir patrollers and superintending officers would strictly police the boundary using the threat of fines, prison and physical restraint. In addition to enhancing surveillance and revenue collection, the governmental reach of the state was extended into the everyday lives of the population as piped water entered homes and workplaces. An essential feature of the modern state, the conduct of citizens would not only be monitored but also manipulated through the instalment of water meters, thimbles and flow regulators, enabling the subsequent introduction of pricing mechanisms, fiscal incentives and public education programmes. In line with World Bank loan stipulations, habits of financial discipline would be inculcated in the population as would general principles of water conservation, frequently couched within a punitive frame of reference, to encourage users to account and budget for water usage out of economic self-interest. The widely maligned ‘water waster’ would be gradually reformed into a personally responsible, calculating subject, one that practices restraint and respect for scarce water resources under a general sense of obligation to the nation. This was the demand side of a pact of social provision that envisaged supply being the sole responsibility of the central state, where access to water was a material marker of citizenship (see Swyngedouw 2004; Kaika 2005; Bakker 2010a). In addition to conservation practices, water infrastructure provided a strategic vehicle for government in regard to modern ideals of cleanliness and hygiene, naturalising endorsed 213 forms of human conduct by socio-spatially connecting infrastructural networks, people and protocols together in a techno-political assemblage (Gandy 2005; Collier 2011). The orchestrated adaptation of hawkers’ food preparation habits, covered in chapter three, serve to illustrate this expanded capacity to shape everyday subjectivity from a distance. The physical infrastructure associated with this period, particularly the dam, trapezoidal canal and subterranean distribution network, was oriented around negative techniques of containment and restriction. However, this emphasis on restraint was not only infrastructural but biopolitical, indeed disciplinary, orchestrated on the subjectivity of recipients of water under a retentive form of government.

8.3 Nature, desire and the limits of control

In 1976, the ineluctable shift to security, which functions through and iteratively adapts to the reality of natural processes, was hesitantly initiated with the public statement delivered by Mr Barker. As chapter four described, flooding was for the first time accepted as a statistical probability and ‘natural given’ in urban life, and the previous strategy of completely purging Singapore of untimely inundations was necessarily abandoned. Unlike that of communism, the unpredictable existence of flood events would not be ‘eradicated’ but accommodated and normalised, even during the flooding crisis of 1978. Not only was this revealing of the delusions of concrete modernism but also exposed the limits of both centralised administration and the ‘scientific control of vast natural forces’. Whereas disciplinary, modernist forms of government aim to internalise and subordinate natural processes to static and invariably closed systems of management, flooding was here afforded a veritable degree of naturalness and purposefully situated outside of the immediate jurisdiction of the state under an alternative coding of nature. As water breached the fixed concrete walls of trapezoidal canals and overflowed into proximate houses, factories and shops, a state effect which had been achieved by means of containment was similarly compromised, prefiguring a wider shift in governmental strategy that sought to govern through rather than over a nature external to political sovereignty. As it was argued in chapter five, a coordinated, physical process of decentralisation would follow as successive crises and pressures compelled the state to relinquish hierarchical control over water resources which had been consolidated through closed systems. Mosquitoes had taken refuge in the covered drainage system leading to outbreaks of dengue fever and public disapproval of governmental programmes, whilst modern conveyance techniques had proven detrimental to anti-flood initiatives and biodiversity protection. Water quality was also compromised as the social and emotional bond between citizens and water had been severed thereby undermining the state’s anti-littering agenda. Furthermore, the developing service economy required waterfront land for recreational usage and property development, beckoning metaphorically and literally towards an emerging liquid modernity. Disciplinary methods of government were therefore no longer befitting of an aspiring global city, where containment 214 measures were not only extremely difficult and costly to implement but worse, counterproductive. A neoliberal form of government oriented towards lifestyle, independence and aspiration was subsequently institutionalised in the organisational operations of the water authority, evidenced by the policy shift to magazine-style annual reports, celebrity campaigns, entertainment-based education and publicity drives orchestrated through fashion shoots and sexual desire. In comparison to the formerly didactic approach to information dissemination, which deployed intermittent conservation campaigns urging restraint and curtailment of consumption, this instead offered a significantly more discreet, flexible and affirming apparatus of intervention. As Ioris (2014) contends, this shift in environmental governance is a specific manifestation of the wider transformation from the hierarchical to neoliberal state. Desire became something to channel and exploit rather than centripetally constrain, at least if the aspirations of the population were to become productive, instrumental and ‘accessible to governmental technique’ (Foucault, 2007, p.73). Miller and Rose (2008, p.141) consider this contemporary linkage between government and desires to be characteristic of the ‘passional economy’, which strategically aligns personal lifestyles and aspirational consumer identities with broader programmes of public policy. And indeed, this can clearly be detected in the domestic and international domain of environmental policy (Hall 2013). The Dionysian, nomadic qualities of urban life are favoured over docility and constraint, normalising a generalised freedom of circulation in society, whilst the technical and ethical limits of centralised regulation are officially recognised in governmental practice. This is rule not through restraint but desire, mobility, autonomy and flow. In Singapore, currents of water, ambition and lust collided in a centrifugal eruption that was strategically channelled by the state, which across various agencies had detected greater potential in harnessing rather than suppressing the instincts and desires of the population, and the supreme potency of water. Chapter six analysed how this was aligned with the wider shift to a service economy that required waterfront space for property development and investment, and attractive destinations for a high-end professional workforce, which was a continuation and permutation of the strategic dovetailing between catchment management and economic restructuring. A nascent civil society, which Foucault (2008) identified as an essential technology of neoliberalism, would be actively encouraged to reform the conduct of themselves and others in a voluntary or commercial capacity, providing a socially-embedded web of network relations that intentionally distanced the state from governmental processes. As with flooding, endowed with an autonomous but adaptable naturalness, the population began to assume an independent extrinsic reality and emerge from the stifling shadow of the state. This vital unleashing of nature would be achieved technologically through the unbundling of material networks of circulation, which had previously served to contain, circumscribe and segregate urban flows. To use the official parlance of the Environment 215

Ministry, the ‘hardware’ of water management, comprising a static infrastructural system of enclosure and concomitant regime of centralised state control, was growing increasingly obsolete and constraining in a restructured economy. In markedly Baumanian terminology, therefore, ‘software’ would be incorporated into the system by means of urban planning and design, which formed networked connections across erstwhile boundaries to facilitate and operationalise everyday interactions between the population and water circulation, occasioning a merging of flows and forces that traversed the fixed channels of the state. During the early 1990s, as chapter five explains, a series of Government plans sought to introduce ‘the water element’ into urban areas by means of infrastructural and architectural design, rendering the administrative boundary between the aquatic and terrestrial physically and politically porous. The waterfront would eventually become a domain of meticulous calculation and what Allen (2006) terms ‘ambient power’, a poly-functional site of strategic significance, where naturalisation projects reconfigured the edge condition and conduct of the population. Naturalised canals and waterfront projects are not only indicative but constitutive of a neoliberal form of government, oriented towards public engagement and freedom of circulation. Indeed, the simple act of removing drainage covers in housing estates encouraged residents to form volunteer groups and conduct surveillance exercises. The mundane yet passionate debate over drainage was emblematic of a profounder shift in water governance away from closed systems towards networked, flexible management techniques that function through citizen participation, where community initiatives took precedence over concrete covers. Robust, pliable and relatively inexpensive, concrete had proved to be essential in terms of circumscribing the circulation of water, a political hardware that facilitates a vertical modality of power (Weizman 2007). However, mechanisms of security and neoliberal technologies, which function through practices of exposure, the entry of nature into the political field and the purposeful checking of state intervention, would be gradually introduced into water management processes. The techne and telos of government were transformed as a consequence, which henceforth encouraged direct exchange and interactive coexistence with urban circulation, producing an alternative state effect to that under discipline. The focus of chapter seven, individual responsibility over water resources was increasingly inculcated in the population through governmental initiatives such as the 3P network and the ABC programme, in line with legislative amendments in water ownership and access rights. Encouraged and facilitated by source control techniques, citizens and developers were from 2003 onwards at liberty to collect water for non-potable use, whilst the following year reservoirs were comprehensively opened-up to recreational activities, purposefully de-monopolising the state’s jurisdiction over the resource. Stones, rocks, vegetation, bioswales, submerged walkways and naturalised contouring reconfigured the ‘calculation of openings’, physically redefining the administrative boundary between the state, population and environment. 216

This unbundled geography of governmentality would increasingly reflect an energetic rather than docile population, constituting nothing less than a new biopolitical regime and telos oriented around lifestyle, voluntarism and ‘active citizenship’. The reach of government would be qualitatively extended through dispersed, mobile and depoliticised networks of civil society groups operating on the waterfront. Whilst these networks remain linked to state programmes they afford a level of strategic ambiguity and facilitate a circular arrangement of government between civil servants, volunteers and members of the public, thereby limiting domestic and geopolitical fallout (see figure 8.1). In coordination with the private sector, the methods or techne of governmental intervention have been aggressively leisurized for the service economy and a modified milieu, which attempt to orchestrate conduct through the regulation and manipulation of recreational activities occurring on the waterfront.

Figure 8.1 Circular government: Volunteer-led learning at Kallang Basin

Source: Author (2012)

In addition to enhancing property prices and the global brand of Singapore, water has functioned as a mobile and strategic medium for the exercise of a neoliberal form of governmental power, enticing ‘desirable’ forms of individualised interaction which are compatible with place management initiatives and the longer term conservation programme. The entrepreneurial spirit of the private sector has similarly been unleashed and afforded greater flexibility to develop waterfront facilities in line with market trends, resulting in the considerable expansion of luxury residential housing, integrated resorts, marinas and

217 entertainment complexes. Awash with speculative capital investment, another unbridled flow, water and its infrastructure of circulation has become associated not with backwardness but extravagance and spectacle. The ‘feeding frenzy’ and subsequent crisis in the property market, examined in chapter six, is perhaps the most unbecoming manifestation of this centrifugal unleashing of desire, water and lust. Indeed, the escalating object status of water has also produced positive effects, in the Foucauldian sense of the word, enabling a more subtle and fluid arrangement of government premised on circulatory co-existence.

8.4 Circulation, logistics and state ontology

I have corroborated through detailed empirical investigation that a modern state emerged in Singapore, alongside its territorial jurisdiction and concomitant programmes of government, through the coordinated expansion and administration of pipes, canals and reservoirs, acquiring a certain logistical capacity to regulate and facilitate flows. Politics and plumbing have become indelibly entangled in the process, forming a complex techno-political assemblage that continues to delineate territory, assert sovereign authority, accumulate revenue, supply industries and households, regulate subjectivity, placate a national population and symbolise governmental prowess. Somewhat reminiscent of the influential arguments of Karl Wittfogel (1957, p.22) regarding the ‘hydraulic state’, which inspired Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) understanding of statecraft incidentally, development of water infrastructure and expansion of state landownership provided the technological wherewithal to consolidate centralised bureaucratic control over the population and the environment in toto on the premise of water security, initially orchestrated in a disciplinary capacity. Here, we can perhaps understand why Virilio (2006, p.39) directly portrays the modern state as ‘the police, in other words highway surveillance’, presiding over a logistical matrix of roads, canals, railways, shipping routes, ports, warehouses and communications systems. This form of impersonal rule over environmental elements is referred to by Mukerji (2009) as ‘logistics’, but as government is concerned precisely with the strategic relationship between ‘men and things’ (Foucault, 2007, p.325), a point which I argue has been underplayed in governmentality studies, Mukerji insightfully identifies a related ‘strategics’ of power over human subjects. In this case, as catchment areas increasingly penetrated surrounding urban areas, a formerly dispersed and intractable population would initially be contained in closed systems as disciplinary mechanisms swarmed across the territory, whilst water circulation was enclosed in fortified canals (see figure 8.2). Lefebvre (2009) would refer to these vast channels of enclosure as ‘state space’, which are violently abstracted from the wider social context to afford centralised, logistical control of circulation: ‘Wherever the state abolishes chaos, it establishes itself within spaces made fasci- nating by their social emptiness: a highway interchange or an airport runway, for example, both of which are places of transit and only of transit’ (p.238). This closely resembles Deleuze and 218

Guattari’s (1987, p.386) theorisation of the state as ‘town surveyor’ or ‘engineer’, and the ideas of CERFI more generally. For them, statecraft is an exercise in traffic management through vertical, hierarchical organisation, territorialising nomadic flows in ‘smooth space’, channelling and sedentarising their metabolic trajectory, absorbing their vitality. And indeed, more analysis is required on the vertical and volumetric aspects of statecraft, particularly in respect to material flows, which I have attempted to undertake here (Whitehead 2009b; Elden 2013; Graham and Hewitt 2013; Depledge 2015; Grundy-Warr et al 2015). This study also answers the call for ‘wet ontologies’ that critically examine the fluid material interface between water and territory (Steinberg and Peters 2015).

Figure 8.2 Vertical power: Closed drainage systems as ‘state space’

Source: Author (2012)

Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari and other collaborators at CERFI were centrally concerned with how logistical technologies of infrastructural connectivity, or what they referred to as ‘collective equipment’, constituted and stabilised the emerging apparatus of the modern state through conveyance practices. And indeed, the urban problem according to Foucault originally revolved around the question of circulation, and similarly, the art of government resembled an exercise in territorial logistics, orchestrated through roads, canals, bridges, pipes and other technologies of connectivity. Certainly, the influence of CERFI on Foucault’s later engagement with government requires further attention. With turns both subtle and violent, the modern infrastructural state strives to ensure ‘good circulation’ in an urban rather than anatomical register, to encourage and facilitate a logistical healthiness, productive population and

219 connection with profitable hinterlands (Graham 2010; Cowen 2014). Reports produced by CERFI during the 1970s construed the state as an apparatus of capture and ‘territorial fixation’, canalising and channelling human, environmental and libidinal flows (Dosse, 2010, p.278). Contemporary scholars have continued to examine the co-production of infrastructural networks and the modern state, answering Deleuze’s suggestion to examine how different types of collective equipment channel and regulate territorial flows. In her exposition of the ‘infrastructure state’, Guldi (2012, p.6) reveals how the expansion of the publically-funded road network in Britain proved to be ‘tools of social as well as civil engineering’. Similarly, Joyce (2013, p.10) focuses on the development of the British postal system to evidence what he calls the ‘technostate’. Mundane objects and technologies that were part of the postal network- railways, turnpike roads, mail coaches, sorting offices, post boxes, envelopes, stamps and pens- formed a seemingly autonomous, integrated and durable system that was coordinated on a territorial basis, which facilitated surveillance and actively produced a writing, liberal civil society engaged in private correspondence. In both cases, the state assumes concrete, tangible form and ontological solidity as technological networks emerge, consolidate and integrate, eventually becoming interlocked systems of naturalised practices and processes, comprised of human and non-human components (Callon and Latour 1981). Advancing arguments within a broadly defined transdisciplinary field of infrastructure studies, which critically considers ‘the ways in which infrastructures, cities and nation states are produced and transformed together’ (McFarlane and Rutherford, 2008, p.364), similar structuring effects of technological networks have been evinced in a wide range of geographical settings, where territorial jurisdictions and political collectivities have been physically engineered into existence (Barry 2001; Pritchard 2011; Camprubí 2014; Opitz and Tellman 2015). We can look once again to the arguments of Swyngedouw (2015) to appreciate the structuring effect of water infrastructure for the formation of the modern Spanish state and the country’s reinvigorated sense of national patriotic identity (see also Worster 1985; Blackbourn 2006; Mukerji 2009; Pritchard 2011). Central to much of this scholarship is the notion of the modern state as an aggregate effect of closed systems, which connect, organise and stabilise social processes by means of infrastructural and administrative enclosure (Mitchell 1991a; Scott 1998). As Guattari intimates in the opening passage, public infrastructure has conventionally intended to contain, centralise and direct the multitude of flows that constitute the urban milieu, within strategically arranged pipes, basins, tanks, culverts and canals. Mitchell (1991a, p.44) has proposed that a material state effect is achieved through processes of ‘enframing’, which refers to ‘a method of dividing up and containing’, producing structured distributions and organisational form; here, sovereignty is a correlate of containment (Giddens 1985; Taylor 1994). To use the terminology of Callon and Latour (1981), the state is incrementally assembled as ‘black boxes’ are brought into a more or less stable configuration, consisting of 220 durable objects, technological devices, standardised practices and modes of thought. Again, this constitutes an exercise in containment, ‘constantly struggling for closing leaky black boxes’ (p.285). The now familiar analogy of the ‘container’ is mobilised to illustrate the formation and consolidation of the state, orchestrated by figures resembling ‘hydraulic engineers’ that capture and channel flows in ‘canals and networks…and concrete pipes’ (p.289). This process of political consolidation though practices of containment has been demonstrated in this study of Singapore, where plumbing has proven to be not only metaphorical but fundamental to state formation. This directly speaks to ongoing debates regarding the general ontology of the state and how scholars should approach questions of political sovereignty (see Abrams 1988; Mitchell 1991b; Jessop 2007; Hay 2014). In particular, the empirical and theoretical observations made throughout this study can advance arguments that advocate a more situated, concrete analysis of sovereignty and governmental processes (Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Jones 2007; Jeffrey 2013). As we have seen, this strand of state theorisation examines how administrative and decision- making authority has been continually reconfigured and the economy restructured technologically through infrastructural interventions into the physical environment and the deployment of politically effectual materials and objects (Mukerji 2009; Carroll 2012; Meehan et al 2013). Practices of enclosure are able to create the appearance of a tangible boundary between society and the state, which is both conceptual and physical, abstract and concrete, thereby validating the existence of the latter (Mitchell 1991b; Joyce 2013). In this instance, fortified canals, metered taps and a closed drainage system produced an effect of centralised authority, a structural separation resolutely and hierarchically cast in concrete, which was entrenched and enforced by disciplinary officials thereby giving it actual form and presence. Closed systems are therefore generally presented as the dominant spatial signature of the state, clearly evidenced in the influential political theory of Scott, Giddens, Mitchell, Lefebvre, Deleuze and Guattari, stemming leaks and circumscribing circulation:

The State needs to subordinate hydraulic force to conduits, pipes, embankments, which prevent turbulence, which constrain movement to go from one point to another and space itself to be striated and measured, which makes the fluid depend on the solid and flows proceed by parallel, laminar layers (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p.363).

A corresponding and innovative line of inquiry within urban political ecology has examined the cultural, political and spatial characteristics of modern centralised systems of urban infrastructure, emphasising in particular the uncanny way that technological networks conceal and ‘silence’ water (Kaika and Swyngedouw 2000; Kaika 2004, 2005). Again, this entails infrastructural networks acting as ‘black boxes’, enveloping and veiling socio-ecological processes (Graham and Thrift 2007). However, whilst infrastructural enclosure and hierarchical

221 methods of control were indeed exemplary of the disciplinary period of water governance in Singapore, this was subsequently eclipsed although not displaced by a system of strategic openings under mechanisms of security. It is not necessarily a matter of purifying circulation in the disciplinary mode, thereby violently separating, standardising or speeding up flows. A central, somewhat unconventional hypothesis of this study posits that statecraft may instead entail the exposure rather than enclosure of circulatory spaces to multiple and meaningful social interactions, to constantly calculate and imbricate complex coexistences of reticulated circulations, to facilitate more subtle forms of government aligned with that of security. This has implications for our understanding of neoliberalism as well as state ontology.

8.5 Liquid state: IWRM as neoliberal technology

Drawing on Foucault’s analytics of government, from chapter five onwards this thesis has considered how the development of Singapore’s drainage infrastructure shifted from being oriented around processes of enclosure to technologies of exposure. Here, the material entry of water into the everyday lives of the population facilitated a neoliberal form of government based on lifestyle choice, decentralised ownership and individualised responsibility, exercised through seemingly mundane source control technologies. The design philosophy of concrete modernism that violently circumscribed the circulation of water had lost credibility as crises proliferated and intervolved, as would the associated regime of centralised state control and monopoly ownership of resources. In a liquid modernity shorn of stabilising structures, water now serves as a mobile technology of government which can penetrate and pervade the urban form and an emerging civil society, centrifugally unleashing the potency of water flows and human desire (see figure 8.3). To capture theoretically this networked, technological and fluid conceptualisation of political sovereignty, Joyce (2013, p.146) mobilises the provocative term ‘liquid’ state and thereby continues a venerable tendency within critical theory to rely on watery metaphors to illustrate matters of state. But of course, in this case, it can also refer to one of the three states of matter in the physical sciences, alongside gases and solids, which can provide a useful double meaning for our concern with the efficacy of water acting as a political interface for government. Taking this analytical connection further, the contemporary transition to IWRM appears to be occurring precisely at this point of intersection between matters of state and states of matter, which as we have considered was a substantive concern of Foucault. In addition to being a policy instrument as it is regularly conceived, this integrated approach to water governance can be considered a distinctly spatial process of technological opening and biopolitical reform. Government through stable, solid structures, infrastructural borders, containment and centripetal processes of sedentarisation is gradually being eclipsed by government through permeable boundaries, ecological linkages, turbulence, centrifugal unpredictability and networked open systems (Deleuze 1992; Hardt and Negri 2000). Although 222 this transition is invariably envisaged in grand, epochal terms, IWRM could be considered a very particular manifestation of this shift, one of the ‘actual technologies of governmentality’ (Ong, 2006, p.123).

Figure 8.3 Government through exposure and contact

Source: Author (2012)

To use the terminology of Foucault, IWRM is an archetypal apparatus of security that physically and administratively reconfigures the relationship between the population and environmental resources, giving rise to open forms of networks and a neoliberal modality of power which functions through circulatory exposure and freedom to interact and exchange. Therefore, IWRM and similarly decentralised approaches to resource governance should be analysed in accordance to broader shifts in the technological transformations of the modern state and the resulting changes in the material geographies of government. IWRM is both a policy and a practice that physically as well as politically involves human subjects in administrative processes, whilst producing an alternative state effect based on dispersed responsibility and contact. This should go some way in politicising IWRM as policy and technology of government, developing a research agenda that other scholars have insisted be undertaken and popularised (Linton 2010). In contrast to the orthodox understanding of neoliberal restructuring that emphasises its ideological and exploitative characteristics, the argument here is that decentralisation is also technological in execution and governmental in practice (Ong 2007; Collier 2011). The conceptual and material boundary between civil society and the state has been materially

223 reconfigured to facilitate an alternative form of government established through open rather than closed systems. Whereas the spatial characteristics of modernist approaches to water infrastructure have been thoroughly and effectively scrutinised (Bakker 2003; Kaika 2005), close and critical consideration of the spatial signature of neoliberalism would certainly appear to be lacking, which may approach economic restructuring and modernisation as mundanely physical processes of techno-managerial transformation (Monstadt 2009). And contrary to the conventional understanding, neoliberal government is here shown to function through practices of exposure and contact, and more precisely mechanisms of security, rather than separation and dispossession. As proposed in the introduction and exemplified throughout the empirical chapters, Foucault’s methodological focus on the capillary, mundane practices of government provides a useful framework for undertaking a topological examination of the infrastructural state, its intricate physical reconfigurations and technological metamorphoses. It may also go some way to preliminarily addressing how sovereignty is exercised and possibly undermined by the proliferation of openings in an era of ‘decontainment’ (Brown, 2010, p.66). This methodological approach can also further our understanding of environmental politics and the issue of neoliberalism within this literature. There is a distinct tendency within this field to pose questions of contractual concern based on abstract notions of legitimacy, accountability and rights, particularly in regard to participatory processes (Lemos and Agrawal 2006). Widely used in political science, another feature of this liberal model is the focus on institutional arrangements, which has relied heavily on grand typologies that distinguish between the categories of state, market and civil society (Evans 2012). When these categories are conceptualised as distinct ‘containers’ (Ibid., p.15), which as we have seen is a distinctly modernist undertaking, there is a risk of overlooking or discounting the complex topological linkages that intricately connect political sovereignty, economic processes and the broader social edifice. The intention of this study is to illustrate the analytical efficacy of a nominalist methodology for revealing the spatial and technological aspects of government, purposefully departing from institutional and contractual questions. By focusing on ‘concrete practices’, the typological boundaries that divide the state from economic processes and civil society soon narrow and blur. Similarly, the prevailing wisdom that neoliberalism requires or encourages the withdrawal of governmental programmes and political sovereignty is also brought into contention. Indeed, it was demonstrated in this study that state authorities intended to govern water more effectively through individualising responsibility and actively seeking involvement from companies and civil society, which required continued and more sophisticated levels of regulation. Neoliberal technologies have been deployed to authentically and productively reform the conduct of citizens to facilitate more effective forms of government, operating in an alternative register of power to that of exploitation. 224

Neoliberal restructuring is not always necessarily discordant, disingenuously exercised or unfettered, but can be technical, meticulously considered and broadly inclusive. Sustained and necessary attention has been directed towards the general crisis of centralised water management techniques in relation to fiscal and capital accumulation pressures (Haughton 1998; Bakker 2003; Kaika 2005; Swyngedouw 2005a; Furlong 2010a; Ioris 2012). But again, by focusing on the everyday concrete practices of water management one can detect a related crisis of closed systems of containment, and indeed modernism, which is by comparison technological, governmental and biopolitical in origin.

8.6 Reorienting governmentality

Whilst not a mainstay throughout the whole of Foucault's oeuvre, the urban milieu did at least provide an enduring, if perhaps flickering, backdrop. We have the 'constant circulation of the insane' (2006a, p.10) across the boundary of the city, the policing of the plague and banishment of lepers to the countryside, and the role of material networks in channelling urban flows. The question of circulation was therefore a lingering one for Foucault; how it is conceived, calculated and distributed within the city, territory and beyond. However, this question would become particularly pertinent during the latter half of the 1970s when Foucault began to seriously consider the art of government. Here, without neglecting his sensitivity to the microphysics of power, Foucault would scale up his analysis to the level of the population specifically through the problematic of the town, the milieu. Whereas in his archaeological period Foucault had seemingly imprisoned himself in language, his genealogical turn during the Collège de France years had instead seen him confined to the institution. After some initial experimentation, his escape route to more fertile analytical pastures would be via the bustling streets of the urban maelstrom. Given the centrality of circulation to Foucault's analytics of government, there does appear to be a shortfall of studies in the governmentality literature that directly addresses questions of urban flows and material infrastructures of circulation; indeed, a logistics in relation to strategics of power. More recently, presumably as a consequence of the material turn in the humanities and social sciences, there have been isolated attempts to re-establish the analytical linkages that Foucault identified between population, circulation and milieu (Elden 2013; O’Grady 2013; Gabrys 2014; Lemke 2014; Usher 2014). And whilst occasionally understating Foucault’s original emphasis on circulation, some critical scholars have proposed that biopolitics as a field of study should pay greater attention to urban flows in the provisioning of populations (Bridge 2013; Wakefield and Braun 2014; Collier and Lakoff 2015). The analytical significance of the 'socio-natural milieu' was not lost on Rabinow (1989, p.12) however, who in hindsight perhaps offered the most astute interpretation of Foucault's original arguments not long after the philosopher died. With Rabinow's emphasis centred on the social ecology of the city as a privileged object of analysis and intervention, government is 225 firmly rooted in urbanism, and more specifically, the construction of buildings and infrastructure to facilitate circulation and effectively interrelate 'natural and social elements' (p.62). Indeed, one can only speculate what governmentality studies might have engendered had his book French Modern taken precedence over The Foucault Effect as a foundational primer, released some three years later (Burchell et al 1991). I would argue that the analytical origins of governmentality should be continually reiterated, not least because they can provide a subtle, adaptable approach to the study of urban metabolism. The complex and changeable relationship between political sovereignty and circulation is a focus of inquiry worthy of further investigation, particularly during periods of urbanisation and economic restructuring. Far from being a theoretical exercise in political science or philosophy, changing principles underlying state intervention can tangibly be discerned in the physical urban form, where in this case the shift in governmental practice was reflected down at the water’s edge. Whilst the social experiences that Foucault analysed were revealed to be historical constructs, it can be shown that something as elemental as water can have a history too. The same can be said for circulation more generally, which is to say along with Foucault that the conceptualisation of circulation is a product of its time, place and politics. An intriguing question would therefore be how our understanding of circulation, government and nature might continue to change going into the future, and what impacts this will have on the urban form and its sustainability (Hodson and Marvin 2009; Mostafavi and Doherty 2010).

8.7 Towards habitable circulation

Deleuze (1988) identified two reciprocal dimensions of Foucault’s general philosophical project. There is the archival aspect oriented towards historical investigation and a second that is diagnostic and concerned with the contemporary application of critique in concrete political settings. This case study has primarily sought to achieve the former objective, extracting from historical resources and interview exchanges a critique that is relevant to our present situation. A future research project could be developed that directly applies this critique to current water governance processes in Singapore and potentially elsewhere. An emerging trend in urban planning and design, ‘daylighting’ or ‘deculverting’ refers to a process through which previously enclosed rivers and streams are uncovered and naturalised. Thus far, projects have been implemented in Asia, Africa, Europe, America and Australasia, with many more currently in the planning stage. The supposed benefits of these schemes are multiple and extensive, which include improvement of water quality and biodiversity, flood mitigation, reduction in the urban heat island effect, enhancement of the recreational and aesthetic value of waterways, increasing property values and post-industrial regeneration (Wild et al 2011). Daylighting projects are therefore attracting increasing levels of academic attention and funding, especially in the physical sciences, yet there has been little critical research conducted on the spatial politics of 226 these initiatives. Technocratic solutions continue to prevail where state officials, engineers and landscape architects oversee the uncovering process, although an emerging ethos of experimentation is beginning to shift the parameters of possibility in an ethical and political register (Karvonen 2011; Dicks 2014). Drawing on the specific example of Singapore, we can see that uncovering projects have occurred in line with a broader process of economic restructuring and concomitant shifts in governmental strategy. The material reconfiguration of waterways has not merely been an aesthetic or technical undertaking in urban design but a concerted attempt at exercising power in an alternative modality. Whereas concrete facilitated a disciplinary form of power in a vertical capacity, contouring has enabled a neoliberal style of government which is operational on a horizontal plane. Exposure rather than enclosure has become an essential technology of government, orchestrating the strategic relationship between the population and water in what is essentially an antithetical register. Therefore, although the urban design practice of daylighting could initially appear rather banal and generally peripheral to notions of the political, this procedure is on the contrary a fundamental aspect of what Foucault (2003, p.245) referred to as the urban problem: ‘control over relations between the human race, or human beings insofar as they are a species, insofar as they are living beings, and their environment, the milieu in which they live… the problem of the environment to the extent that it is not a natural environment, that it has been created by the population and therefore has effects on that population’. Here, deculverting and naturalisation projects more generally can be considered authentic governmental interventions into the urban environment, a form of politics proper, mediating the complex coexistence of citizens and circulation. Clearly, this critical understanding of daylighting schemes has significant implications for the study and implementation of naturalisation projects. By reconfiguring the physical fabric of urban waterways new political forms and formulations are brought into existence, offering novel modalities of relations between citizens and water. A future research project could analyse how daylighting reimagines and reconfigures the material culture that connects the city, society and nature, specifically in terms of cultivating public participation and progressive outcomes for society and the built environment. This would entail, to use the provocative terminology of Kaika (2004), acknowledging and ultimately embracing the urban ‘uncanny’ and the city’s connection to its hinterland, familiarising the subterranean ‘guts’ which has formerly been regarded as strange and unpleasant. Focusing specifically on drainage and daylighting projects, Karvonen and Yocom (2011) argue that a relational ‘civic environmentalism’, oriented towards the local and sustained engagement of citizens in the actual assembling and reassembling of material networks of circulation, has the potential to create new political subjectivities and emergent public commons. Through the collaborative process of exposing and channelling urban water flows, what could be termed eclectic engineering, citizens can deliberate, articulate and fabricate alternative relational 227 configurations, which are at once ethical, political and affective (Guattari 2000). This would offer a radical practice of socio-ecological politics that encourages citizens to problematise their own conduct and relationship to their environmental surroundings through an active process of ‘unblackboxing’ (Graham and Thrift, 2007, p.8), which has profoundly significant implications when the state is conceived as a technological system of black boxes. The sociologist Richard Sennett has for decades been contemplating what he has explicitly referred to more recently as the ‘open city’. Sennett argues that modern planning, influenced by the ideas of Haussmann and Le Corbusier, has tended to isolate, homogenise and ‘purify’ the different elements of urban life, to assuage through technological means the instinctive fear of otherness, ambiguity and disorder (Sennett 1970). Boundaries have been demarcated and constructed in cities to hierarchically manage urban flows and social exchange, precluding the need for citizens to negotiate the messiness and uncertainty of urban life on an everyday, individual basis. The general consequence has been a gradual and ruthless simplification of social life that is largely devoid of surprise and experimentation, producing a negative urbanism of ‘structured exclusion and internal sameness’ (1970, p.47). According to Sennett, the contemporary challenge is therefore to replace static closed systems with dynamic open systems through the inclusion of permeable borders that encourage and facilitate complex interaction (Sennett 2008). The objective would be to instigate, and perhaps even necessitate, continued public engagement with ‘lively’ circulatory spaces through urban design features and architectural techniques (Amin 2014). Scholars drawing on science and technology studies have argued for something similar, contending that publics can be mobilised through the situated involvement of citizens in the design and construction process of their material surroundings (Braun and Whatmore 2010; Marres and Lezaun 2011). In particular, urban infrastructural networks, which connect and associate different elements of the city, offer a multitude of possibilities for rewiring the relationship between inhabitants and their environment (Castán Broto and Bulkeley 2013). This would be both a technical and political exercise, one that prompts important questions about how citizens should interact with the city, its resources, and ultimately with each other. To illustrate the advantages of a porous, ‘active edge’, Sennett (2008, p.227) alludes to the ‘shoreline of a lake’ where both terrestrial and aquatic organisms can associate and thrive. Taking this analogy further, and into a literal register, daylighting schemes can purposefully introduce an element of turbulence and unpredictability to urban life, thereby revealing the messy material flows that sustain and constitute the city which have for decades been hidden under concrete (Cresswell and Martin 2012). As Virilio (2006) has argued at length, the city increasingly resembles a nodal assemblage that is penetrated and violently marked by logistical interchange and processes of permanent metabolism. In an environment of constant exchange ‘there is only habitable circulation’ (p.31), where research oriented towards cultivating and even civilising logistical space becomes more urgent and necessary. 228

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