A megastructure in Singapore Th e “Asian of tomorrow?”

Xinyu Guan

Abstract: Th e People’s Park Complex is one of two megastructures built in the early 1970s as prototypes for a new “Asian city of tomorrow” designed to humanize the urban expansion of Singapore through the creation of aff ective ensembles and con- nections, and would serve as an alternative to the state’s forcible relocation of the population to alienating, cookie-cutter high-rise new towns. While the envisioned model of an expansive, aff ective failed to materialize in these megastruc- tures, I examine how the transnational migrant and working-class communities that use the complex engage in other forms of aff ective that disrupt the narratives and temporalities in the state’s recuperation of the surrounding old city by the state as a heritage and tourist . I illuminate how aff ect can serve as an analytic to reorient a unilinear notion of architectural failure toward new temporalities, imaginations, and futurities. Keywords: aff ect, architectural failure, Asian , gentrifi cation, megastructures, migration, Singapore, urbanity

Built in the 1970s as a prototype for a new Asian PPC, as well as the contemporaneous Golden model of urbanism, the 31-story People’s Park Mile Complex, was conceived as a part of a total Complex (PPC) towers above the surrounding program to reimagine and humanize the rapid two-story shop houses of the old city center urban expansion of Singapore through sensory of Singapore. Th e building features a series of and aff ectual connections; the two megastruc- large, volumetric spaces that open up into one tures would form nodal points out of which another: four large, interlocking atria—one on urban activities and sensory connections would top of another, separated by an overhanging spread out as future buildings were constructed fl oor, and another two on the sides. Standing around these focal spaces. in any one of these atria, one can feel the sights Decades aft er the construction of the two and sounds from the other three atria sub- piloting megastructures, however, the envi- tly percolating in from a distance; indeed, the sioned sensory expansiveness and connectiv- structure was built with these sensory qualities ities failed to materialize in the surrounding in mind, as a massive sensory . Th e neighborhoods, and the two buildings have be-

Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical 86 (2020): 53–68 © Th e Author doi:10.3167/fcl.2020.860105 54 | Xinyu Guan come islands in the midst of their environs. Nev- embedded in a national historical narrative since ertheless, the two megastructures have become the late 1990s. Fieldwork and archival research spaces for migrant and diasporic communities were conducted between January and July 2017, who create sensory connections, aspirations, and over three weeks in July 2018. Th is article and commitments, not to the immediate urban draws from on-site observations and unstruc- surrounds but to other locales in Asia. Yet, these tured conversations with users of the two mega- communities are now under threat: the propri- structures and the surrounding area, as well as etors of the Golden Mile Complex have put the from archival sources available at the National building up for collective sale in 2018 (Leong Library and the National Archives of Singapore. 2018), while negotiations are underway for the PPC to be likewise put on sale (Zaccheus and Tai 2018). Aff ect in the city In this article, I extend the notion of architec- tural failure beyond the individual building— Th e aff ective qualities of urban spaces have come beyond the failure of individual structures to under greater scholarly attention in the past two produce desired eff ects or maintain their phys- decades, especially in exploring how un- ical integrity—to explore the missed potentials folds in urban spaces, not just in terms of phys- of two megastructures to eff ect changes on a ical appropriations and expropriations of urban larger urban level, through connections that space but also through the aff ective comingling may be physical, sensorial, or produced through of human and nonhuman bodies, buildings, in- human use—a failed attempt at sensory, aff ec- frastructures, atmospheres, lights, sounds, and tual placemaking on an urban scale. My argu- noises: for example, in the collective dynamics ment is that the failure of this urbanistic project at ephemeral events such as rallies and demon- cannot be comprehended without reference to strations (Th rift 2004), in atmospheres in re- other urbanistic projects and reimaginings that modeled public spaces that renarrate histories have taken place in the postcolonial city-state of and reimagine futures (Brash 2019; Wanner Singapore since independence in the 1960s, es- 2016), or in the shock and awe of large-scale in- pecially in terms of the spaces, uses, and urban frastructural projects (Johnson 2014; Schwen- aff ects that these other projects have produced. I kel 2013). Th e analytic of aff ect helps account read the aff ective qualities of the megastructures for the “emergent” political eff ects of interac- not in isolation but in counterpoint and con- tions among human and nonhuman bodies that trast with the aff ective qualities of other spaces cannot be reduced and located in any individual in the same urban and national space. Th en I at- body (Th rift 2004: 62). In particular, Christina tempt to refi gure the problematic of sensory and Schwenkel (2013), Catherine Wanner (2016), aff ectual connection beyond the urban scale to and Michał Murawski (2019), among others, a larger transnational scale of fl ows of people, have discussed the aff ective qualities of large- goods, and desires. scale, state-constructed buildings and housing While Pattana Kitiarsa (2014) has done an projects and the political eff ects of these mate- excellent ethnographic study of the Th ai migrant rial structures: they may evoke and reimagine communities in the Golden Mile Complex, lit- other places and times that transcend current tle scholarly literature explicitly examines the political regimes and borders, hence providing a other of the two megastructures, the People’s way of conceptualizing and producing political Park Complex. In this article, I focus on the futures that may not be deemed available under PPC in relation to the communities that use the current political conditions. megastructure, and in relation to the surround- Following in this vein, I examine an attempt ing neighborhood, which has been remade as in early postcolonial Singapore to re-create and a heritage and entertainment district and re- revolutionize urban space through the deliber- A megastructure in Singapore | 55 ate creation and fostering of aff ect—a project in a ring stretching across the entire island, with that has nonetheless failed and created partial, a central space reversed for greenery (Koolhaas fragmentary spaces but in its failure has allowed and Mau 1995: 1027). for other reimaginings and projects that hark to Th e state expropriated most of the nonur- spaces and times of otherwise. Instead of treat- banized areas outside the city center, which had ing architectural failure as a process of failing to up to then been mostly farmland, villages, and achieve a desired goal, as disruption in a unilin- rainforests, to develop “new towns” (Koolhaas ear trajectory aimed at success, I heed Hirokazu and Mau 1995: 1033) to rehouse the majority of Miyazaki’s call to pay attention to how failure the population in state-constructed, modernist sparks “reorientation[s]” (2017: 13) toward other high-rise housing estates. Th e apartments in goals and projects. Th inking beyond how senses these high-rises were sold to working-class fam- and aff ect could be products of top-down mod- ilies at aff ordable prices, which were made pos- ernist architectural design, I foreground the sible by the low cost at which the state acquired everyday production of sensory and aff ective the land. A compulsory savings scheme to pro- connections by transnational communities in vide for retirement had been introduced in 1955, disrupting and reimagining narratives of na- whereby workers were mandated to bank a cer- tional progress that are produced in the sur- tain proportion of their wages in a retirement rounding neighborhood. I subsequently turn to account; Singapore citizens could purchase the how the body, especially in terms of the aesthet- state-subsidized apartments with funds from ics of bodily care, function as sites for mediating their own retirement savings account, making aff ects and reimagining social connections in the apartments even more aff ordable (Chua this megastructural space. 2017: 78–79). Th e relocation of the city-state’s population of 1.8 million (Lim 1967: 39) from the crowded city center, informal settlements, Tabula rasa: High modernism and agricultural villages to high-rise modernist estates proceeded at breakneck speed: by 1987, Singapore is a city-state with 5.7 million peo- some 87 percent of the population had been ple in Southeast Asia, situated on an island of rehoused in these high-rise new towns (Kool- around seven hundred square kilometers on haas and Mau 1995: 1033). Th is relocation to the southern tip of the Malayan Peninsula (DSS the new towns was forced on residents of the 2019). A former entrepôt and military strong- old city center, rural villages, and informal set- hold of the British Empire, Singapore became tlements on the urban periphery, without their independent as a city-state in 1965, having been consent or input in the design process; many expelled from the Federation of Malaysia, which experienced a sense of disorientation and dis- it briefl y joined for two years. In a port city sud- location in their new surroundings (Lai 2010: denly without a hinterland, one of the fi rst acts 217), or had trouble living in high-rise build- of state-making was for the state to nationalize ings (Yeo 2015: 371). Nevertheless, by radically and productionize the existing territory of the transforming the built environment and the city-state: the Land Acquisition Act (1966) gave confi guration of space in Singapore, the post- the state the right to compulsorily purchase land colonial developmentalist state has solidifi ed its at low prices, and by the mid-1980s, the state had rule in the very spaces of day-to-day life in the come to own three-quarters of the city-state’s city-state; the provision of clean, relatively spa- territory (Kim and Phang 2013: 127). Th e state cious apartments in green, orderly new towns adopted a “ring city” plan, modeled aft er the has been presented by the ruling party as a ma- Randstad in the Netherlands, that United Na- terial testament to the legitimacy of its model of tions development consultants had proposed in authoritarian, technocratic governance (Chua 1963; the plan was to spread the urbanized area 2017: 95–97). 56 | Xinyu Guan

A group of architects in Singapore became more than the authoritarian state’s suspicion of concerned about this undemocratic rehousing independent nongovernmental associations in project and the anomie faced by residents of the Cold War era. As Kah Seng Loh notes, the these high modernist environments; they be- very act of relocating Singapore’s populace to moaned especially the lack of a sense of com- individuated high-rise housing blocks made munal “identity” among residents of almost possible the surveillance and control of the identical-looking housing estates (Lim 1967: population, especially the hitherto residents of 45). Th ese architects set up a collective called hitherto informal settlements on the urban pe- the Singapore and Urban Research riphery, where left -wing political organizing Group (SPUR) in 1965, and published various and informal mutual assistance networks in the alternative proposals for this rehousing process densely built-up environment oft en escaped the in their journal. SPUR was led by two architects, policing of the state (2013: 87–93). Th e organi- William Lim and Tay Kheng Soon, who had zation of state-constructed housing estates into trained with the Japanese Metabolist architect superblock-sized “precincts” divided from each Fumihiko Maki at Harvard. Invoking the bio- other by roads would also help the state spa- logical metaphor of “metabolism,” whereby in- tially contain any insurrection, a strategy also dividual leaves or cells could be replaced while employed in the Cold War designs of Baghdad, leaving the overall structure of an organism in- Islamabad, and Riyadh by Doxiadis Associates tact, the Metabolist movement in Japan sought (Daechsel 2013; Menoret 2014: 69–74). SPUR’s to create overarching urban frames, such as me- idea of constructing a continuous built environ- gastructures, which would remain intact and ment mediated through dense human use and legible to the denizens, while individual build- aff ect would have presented a direct challenge ings could evolve or be replaced with new ones to the state’s unsaid aim of creating containable (Lin 2010: 35). Maki, in particular, was con- urban populations. cerned with how groups of buildings may form a humanized ensemble through related uses and sensory interconnections that mediate the ex- Th e actually existing perience of passing from one space to another; Asian city of tomorrow Maki proposed a model of urbanism in which the architect creates nodal points—such as me- Th e SPUR architects nevertheless managed gastructures with large internal atria—around to test out some of their megastructural ideas which future structures, uses, and aff ects can when the state demolished selected portions of crystallize, mediating urban expansion in a the old downtown and sold the land parcels to more sensuous way (Koolhaas and Mau 1995: private developers for in 1967 1044–1049). (Koolhaas and Mau 1995: 1061). Th e People’s Th e SPUR architects were inspired by this Park Complex, opened between 1970 and 1973, idea of humanizing the rapid urban expansion is a 31-story tower, with residential units on the of Asian cities through nodal urbanism, and upper 25 fl oors, and a massive retail complex on published various visionary plans for an “Asian the bottom fl oors (see Figure 1). Th e building City of Tomorrow” in SPUR’s journal: large me- sits on the site of what used to be a large, open- gastructures with large internal atria featuring air bazaar, the People’s Park, which had burned retail outlets and communal spaces, the upper down in 1966; most of the vendors were relo- levels featuring housing units. SPUR’s propos- cated to a multistory market adjacent to the site als were roundly ignored by the authoritarian (NHB 2018b). Th e megastructure is notable for state, which moreover forced the group to shut its use of four large, interconnected, and inter- down in 1974 (Hava and Chan 2012: 90). Th e locking atria, which had been inspired by Ma- state’s suppression of SPUR perhaps refl ects ki’s idea of the “city room,” a large indoor atrium A megastructure in Singapore | 57

Figure : Th e People’s Park Complex, exterior view (© Jodie Sun). that allows for multiple activities to take place est tall building in the neighborhood, the PPC simultaneously, in a way visible and audible to formed a nucleus out of which similar buildings one another, creating a sensory ensemble and with large atria developed over the 1970s and engendering an aff ect of urbanity (Koolhaas 1980s in the vicinity, including the People’s Park and Mau 1995: 1061) (see Figures 2 and 3). Centre (1976) (PPC 2020.) and the Chinatown Today, the PPC mainly houses businesses Complex (1981) (NHB 2018a). Many of these catering to recent migrants from China, and to structures were connected to each other with working-class Singaporeans with a more Chi- overhead walkways and other linkages, forming nese linguistic orientation—as opposed to the a sensory ensemble of working-class commer- more English-oriented elite and middle-class of cial urbanity: markets and food courts to which Singapore; English profi ciency is seen as norma- former street food vendors were relocated, tive and required for most nonphysical jobs in travel agencies, and shops specializing in Chi- the postcolonial nation-state. Th ere are numer- nese products and services. ous stores selling food products from all over Nevertheless, by the 1990s, many of the met- China, remittance agencies for sending money abolic towers and the verticalized retail spaces to China, and travel agencies selling cheap fl ights became rather run-down or empty, losing out and package tours to China, in addition to of- to newer, more popular shopping malls popping fering visa services for Chinese citizens visiting up in the . As Beng Huat Chua (2017: nearby countries. Th ere are also various shops 107) and Gavin Shatkin note, the Singapore selling mobile phones and phone cards, Chi- state not only owns most of the city-state’s land nese-language bookstores, and various business but also earns land rent through real estate de- off ering herbal therapies and wellness services velopment companies such as Capitaland that for Chinese-oriented customers. As the earli- are (at least partially) owned by the state—a 58 | Xinyu Guan

Figure : Th e People’s Park Complex, interior view (© Jodie Sun). situation Shatkin dubs the “real estate turn” in Th e slow decline of the Metabolist spaces Asian statecraft (2017: 1). Th ere is a constant contrasts with the surrounding old city center, development of new retail spaces in Singapore, which was remade in the 2000s into a heritage and older shopping malls gradually lose out to district, Chinatown, that celebrates the early his- the competition from newer shopping malls in tory of Chinese immigrants in Singapore (whose a decade or two as they age; many of the met- descendants make up most of the city-state’s abolic retail spaces around Chinatown were population). With a drop in tourist numbers no exception and started becoming quiet and in the 1980s and anxieties about the “heritage” empty by the 2000s. Only the People’s Park and “identity” of Singapore from civil society Complex managed to retain some foot traffi c, groups, the state began to revalorize the older with travel agencies and supermarkets cater- two- to four-story prewar row houses (“shop ing to working-class migrants from China; yet, houses”) in the old city center, and started to much of the retail space in the large, volumet- earmark some streets and structures for “conser- ric atria appears quiet and barely patronized vation,” turning them into spaces for celebrat- compared to the pedestrianized old town space. ing ethnic heritages and histories (Chang 2016: Two of the city rooms are well traffi cked, one 529). Th e state’s eff orts at conservation, rather on the ground fl oor hosting various bookstores than being merely passive, soon turned into a and mole removal shops, and another hosting more active, top-down process of placemaking: a couple of large travel agencies and remittance older shop houses bought up by the state were agencies; the other two city rooms, in contrast, leased to artists and cultural organizations, or see much fewer people, giving the appearance of turned into offi ces hosting creative industries older shopping malls constructed in 1980s and in the 1990s (Chang 2016; Hutton 2012). Th is 1990s Singapore that have become less popular. process, for which T. C. Chang proposes the A megastructure in Singapore | 59

Figure : Th e People’s Park Complex, interior view (© Jodie Sun). term Singapore-style gentrifi cation (2016: 524), light but kept out the rain, or even enveloped involves the heavy initial involvement of the altogether in an air-conditioned glass structure state in transforming old neighborhoods into that spans many streets. art and aesthetic spaces as a process of By the 2000s, Temple Street—immediately curating national identities and exhibiting the across the street from the People’s Park Com- state as a patron of cultural producers. Th is fi rst plex—was transformed into a busy tourist street, wave of state-led heritage-oriented placemaking lined with refurbished two-story shop houses was soon followed by a “second wave” of artists and covered with a three-story-tall glass canopy and creative industries (536) who moved into (see Figure 4). Shop awnings and merchandize the surrounding shop houses, attracted by the spill out onto the pedestrianized area: post- antiquated buildings, the already-present arts cards, trinkets, restaurant tables and stools, and scene, and the growing fashionability of the calligraphy shops off ering to translate people’s neighborhood; instead of leasing from the state, non-Chinese names into multicolored Chinese they lease from private property owners and are characters stylized with birds and fl owers. In much more vulnerable to rising rents—which contrast to the surrounding old city, which was are no less set in motion by this second wave reinscribed into a national historical narrative itself as the neighborhood becomes more desir- of immigrant origins and generational progress, able. Bit by bit, Chinatown became transformed the verticalized, brutalist structures—modern into a space for urban spectacle and touris- in form but becoming less and less popular— tic consumption: shop houses were converted ironically became out of place and almost into restaurants, boutique hotels, and souvenir anachronistic. Th e sensory connections of the shops, while many streets were re-pedestrian- surrounding urban space skirted around these ized, covered with glass canopies that let in sun- Metabolist, volumetric spaces, instead of fl ow- 60 | Xinyu Guan ing seamlessly in and out of them, as the archi- any overt ethnic markers or architectural motifs tects had envisioned. that may be associated with specifi c Asian tra- Th e remaking of the neighborhood into a ditions. Th e relocation of the population from marked Chinese space, moreover, cannot be more ethnically marked neighborhoods such as read in isolation from the rest of the Singapore Chinatown, Little India, or Kampong Glam in cityscape and offi cial narratives of national the old city center to the more mixed, less eth- progress and “racial harmony” in the city-state. nically marked housing blocks of the new towns In the state’s rhetoric, the planned, orderly sub- also inscribes a trajectory of nation-building urban new towns not only represent the state’s and ethnic integration in the historical time of provision of aff ordable housing and amenities to the nation. the citizenry, but also help integrate the diff erent It is in contrast to the new towns that neigh- ethnic groups that make up Singapore: 75 per- borhoods in the old city—Chinatown, Little In- cent Chinese, 17 percent Malays, and 7 percent dia, and Kampong Glam—become recuperated Indian when the city-state became independent as lieux de mémoire (Nora 1996) in the time of (Chua 2017: 128). Quotas regulating apartment the nation, a past that forms the backdrop to the sales ensure a proportionate representation of subsequent progress of the nation-state. With each ethnic group in each apartment block—a various plaques and signposts, the old alleyways measure that is nonetheless much more oner- and two-story shop houses of Chinatown have ous on minority groups in restricting choices on been recast as a site of origination for Singapor- where one can purchase an apartment, compared eans descended from migrants from China in with the majority Chinese-descended popula- the nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries, tion (148). Moreover, the sleek, modernist de- who make up the majority of the city-state’s signs of the housing blocks themselves avoid population. New sites commemorating the Chi-

Figure : Temple Street, across the garden bridge from the People’s Park Complex (© Jodie Sun). A megastructure in Singapore | 61 nese heritage of the neighborhood have sprung ate the transnational connections, making, un- up, including the Chinatown Heritage Center, a making, or remaking diasporic identities in the museum detailing the lives and struggles of nine- process. In this section, I counterpoise the failed teenth- and early twentieth-century Chinese project of fostering aff ective connections on an migrants to Singapore, cast as the “pioneers” of urbanistic and architectural level, on the one Singapore (CHC 2020). Th e museumifi cation hand, with the sensory and aff ective connec- and historicization of this neighborhood—pro- tions that transnational migrant communities jecting a Chinese Singaporean identity onto the forge within the megastructure, on the other past life of a nostalgic Chinatown that is now hand; in forging aff ective connections with mul- lost—contrasts with the continued inhabitation tiple transnational elsewheres, the present-day of the neighborhood by more recent (post- use of the space goes beyond the problematic of 1990s) immigrants from China to Singapore, creating a new, interconnected urban space for a who struggle with xenophobia from locally new nation-state, and disrupts the framing and born Chinese Singaporeans (Ang 2016). Mostly mobilization of the neighborhood for an exclu- making use of the less-popular interior spaces sionary historical narrative of national progress. of the PPC, rather than the more commercial- Weeks before the Lunar New Year, a yearly ized open-air spaces of the old city streets, the festival where many East and Southeast Asians immigrant communities become invisibilized visit their families and share a meal together, in a historical narrative that places the old city the walls and shop fronts of various small, one- streets of Chinatown squarely in the national room travel agencies become bedecked with past and the suburban new towns as the present colored pieces of A4 paper, each printed with and future. the name of a diff erent Chinese city and the price of a plane ticket to said destination. Th e entrance to the complex on the ground fl oor is Transnational cartographies also lined with various street food stands selling and sensory connections delicacies—snail broth noodles, steamed buns, pancakes—from parts of China from which Despite being marginalized in the surround- more recent working-class migrants to Singa- ing neighborhood and its narratives of national pore hail, as opposed to the foodways of spe- progress, the People’s Park Complex nonethe- cifi c parts of coastal Southern China to which less functions as a space for the transaction of most Chinese Singaporeans trace their descent. transnational goods and services, for acts of Beyond the promises of reaching home (or at imagination that connect to and mobilize other least getting a taste of it), other small businesses spaces beyond the immediate surroundings of propose alternative cartographies and imagin- Chinatown to which the megastructure is phys- ings of transnational space: a shoe store on an ically connected. I draw on Henri Lefebvre’s in- overhead walkway in one of the city rooms fea- sight on how space is socially “produced,” not tures a footwear shop with the sign France, but just through top-down urbanistic planning or the letter F is stylized aft er the Facebook logo, architectural design but also through every- playful scrambling the codes that guarantee the day practices, rituals, and connections that are place-bound authenticity of transnational com- lived aff ectively through by a variety of users of modity desires. urban space: residents, business owners, pa- Th e transnational desire and its remapping trons, among others (1991: 38–39). David take place not only in the high-visibility spaces Miller (2001), Martin Malanansan (2006), Pan- of the city rooms but also in hidden nooks and ikos Panayi (2008) and Alex Rhys-Taylor (2013) crannies in the megastructure: a lone stair- emphasize the role commodities, foodways, and case hangs from the very top of one of the city other sensory or aff ective material forms medi- rooms, leading from an overhead walkway al- 62 | Xinyu Guan most suspended midair on the fourth fl oor to ever, that gave no indication of where the store a lone, nondescript door on the fi ft h fl oor. Tak- in question was actually located. ing the staircase up to the fi ft h fl oor, I saw a Despite the unassuming appearance of the sign, printed on an A4 piece of paper, with the premises, the store stocked quite a large range words “Chinese Supermarket” in Chinese and of food products and became rather busy on the an arrow pointing ahead. Following the signs, few weekends I visited (but not on weekdays I passed through a deliriously hot parking ga- when I visited). By the cashier’s was a whiteboard rage—heated up by skylights that nonetheless that read, “I would like ____ from my home- did not let any air pass through—before arriv- town” in Chinese on the top, and “We will try ing at a grocery store, with no visible name at to satisfy your demands by every means!” at the entrance. Th e store featured shelves and the bottom (see Figure 5); the board was cov- shelves of prepackaged food products from spe- ered with scribbles in marker pen of the names cifi c locales in China—instant snail broth noo- of various food products: specifi c brands or dles from Guangxi, spicy tofu from Sichuan, types of yogurt, tofu, plum pickles, or soy sauce. pickles from Shanxi—arranged in no particular Other scribbles on the whiteboard, however, order; some of the products on the shelves were pertain to social relations: “my girlfriend,” read still in the cardboard boxes that were opened one such post—although I have never ever seen on one side. Th e store, with a stripped-down, mentions of “boyfriends,” even on subsequent pop-up aesthetic, corresponded in location, as visits. Beyond the strict logics of exchange, of I later discovered, to a row of windows at the the commodifi cation of homesickness and food- top of one of the city rooms with a bright red- ways, the whiteboard absorbs the ostensibly and-yellow sign that read, “Finest goods from “free” “immaterial labor” of the migrant patrons, China; tastes from the homeland”—a sign, how- in the collective creation of aff ect that extends

Figure : Th e whiteboard in the Chinese supermarket (© Jodie Sun). A megastructure in Singapore | 63 beyond acts of exchange, a public manifestation mentioned “second wave” (Chang 2016: 536) of collective “dream[ing]” (Brash 2019: 323). Yet, of the “Singapore-style gentrifi cation” (524) of such acts of dreaming perhaps points toward Chinatown increasingly transforms the neigh- deep ambiguities behind the affi rmation of ties borhood into a desirable locale and raises rents. in transnational space: what would it mean for Lepark announced its closure in September someone to call upon this business to bring 2017, having been displaced by the sale of the their “girlfriend”—a playful challenge to the two-story parking space—which includes the store that acknowledges the impossibility for bar and rooft op space—by the building man- commodities to compensate for real persons agement for redevelopment (Toh 2017). Rather (even as commodities help affi rm ties to these than providing a nucleus out of which aff ect persons, as Miller (2001) notes)? Or, perhaps and sensory connections spread, the PPC has more troublingly, is the person who wrote that ironically come under pressure from the out- note comparing their girlfriend to a commodity side, from the gentrifi cation of Chinatown in among others—comparing her to a food prod- the surrounding neighborhood—being dictated uct, objectifying her, and disavowing her per- to rather than dictating the terms under which sonhood and agency? such connections are made. Th e collective sale One fl oor above the Chinese supermarket of the building that is now mooted by the pro- and the parking garage is the roof of the six- prietors (Zaccheus and Tai 2018) perhaps not story commercial space of the People’s Park only is the latest iteration of such a process but Complex, with the slender 25-story residential also could mark the fi nal failure of the mega- component of the megastructure towering above. structure to engender its own aff ects and imagi- An open expanse paved with tarmac, the roof nations of other spaces and times. has markings on the ground suggesting it could be used as a parking space, although on my var- ious visits, I have never seen a single car parked Bodies in time in that space; compared to the sheltered parking space on the fi ft h fl oor, the roof is too exposed to Rather than reading the People’s Park Complex the sun. Nevertheless, the open area of the roof as temporarily holding off a creeping but inevi- off ers a good panoramic view of the surround- table process of gentrifi cation, as awaiting its fi - ing Chinatown and the skyline of the downtown nal failure, I now turn to how fi gures of the body area, as well as a close-up glimpse of the iconic and the aesthetics of bodily care could point to- tower of the megastructure above. In the day- ward other temporalities and rhythms. Drawing time, groups of young people frequently drop on Achille Mbembe (2004) and Elizabeth Povi- by the space to do photo shoots with the views nelli (2006), I examine the intertwining of the of the old town as the backdrop. More notable materiality of bodies, their representations, and on the roof was a bar, Lepark, a “hipster” bar their absences, and center the body as a site for known for attracting a fashionable, cosmopoli- colonial abjection, as well as for acts of care and tan, middle-class crowd, and an “edible garden” self-making, following Judith Farquhar’s (2002), occupying a small corner of the roof adjacent to David Palmer’s (2007) and Angela Zito’s (2014) the bar; the bar perhaps represents a little frag- discussions, among others, of how bodies and ment of the “second wave” of businesses remak- acts of bodily care are used to narrate histories ing of Chinatown into a hip neighborhood that and negotiate everyday temporalities in Sino- found its way up onto an unusual location: not phone contexts. a prewar shop house but the roof of a modernist In the old city streets of Chinatown, one en- building (Chang 2016: 536). counters various bodily fi gures of abject Chinese Th ese alternative spaces are nevertheless bodies from the colonial era, which anchor a his- vulnerable to the property market, as the afore- torical narrative of national progress, the fl eshy 64 | Xinyu Guan materiality of the bodily fi gures having been pet- family in Singapore at the last stage of their lives. rifi ed, or made absent (but still alluded to), as a Th ere are no more fragile, dying bodies to be performance of the overcoming of colonial-era seen on this street today, having been converted abjection in the national present. Outside the into one of the more mundane streets of China- Chinatown Heritage Center on Temple Street is town lined with businesses, and despite the gen- a prominent metal statue of a Samsui woman, eral unwillingness of Chinese Singaporeans to one of the migrant female laborers from south- be associated with signifi ers of death, the state ern China (especially the town of Samsui/San- has decided to put up this information panel— shui in the Pearl River Delta) who migrated to mobilizing the specter of abject bodies in the Singapore in the nineteenth and early twentieth past to highlight the progress that had taken century: squatting on the ground in a crouching place in the city-state. position and her nondescript face almost sub- Th is heritage district is nonetheless directly serviently lowered toward the ground, the statue connected to the PPC via a landscaped garden is painted in a monochrome dark gray, except bridge, which opens up, through a nondescript for her bright red, triangular headdress—that side entrance, to a quiet, dimly lit city room which identifi es her as a Samsui woman—which that houses businesses for the care of the body points diagonally upward toward the viewer that serve a mostly Chinese-speaking, working- standing in front of her. Th e woman appears class clientele: a couple of massage parlors clus- to have gotten in position to carry a heavy load tered around an L-shaped hallway seem to be on her back, but the load is not shown, and the the busiest, with shop attendants hanging out entire laboring body seems to have been seques- by the shop front. A panoply of advertisements tered under the bright red signifi er of the head- depicting various bodily treatments fi ll a row of dress—the worn-down, self-sacrifi cing body of back windows facing the atrium: a hair removal the past having been superseded and petrifi ed center displays a large picture of a confi dent into the signifi ers of national history. As Kevin woman, while a foot refl exology center has put Low notes, the fi gure of the Samsui woman has up a diagram of pressure points on the soles of been appropriated as paragons of industrious- one’s feet. Nearby, a clinic off ers treatment for ness and self-sacrifi ce in children’s books and piles (anal hemorrhoids), displaying graphic other narrative of the national past (2015: 86– photos of large, fl eshy hemorrhoids that have 87). Th e women are moreover oft en romanti- grown on people’s anuses on the shop window. cized today as “having taken a vow of celibacy,” In contrast to fi gures of bodily abjection across due to a confl ation of this group of women the street—fi xed in bronze in a national past, or with other groups of female workers in nine- superseded and negated in their very absence— teenth-century Southern China who did take the businesses found in the interior of the Peo- such a vow (43); such an idealization of women ple’s Park Complex exhibit the fl eshy materiality as disavowing one’s own sexually cannot be di- of the body as an ongoing site of care and pres- vorced from patriarchal anxieties over the sex- ent-day renegotiation. Indeed, other businesses uality of working and mobile women—partic- off er services of negotiating futures through ularly given the anxiety over the sexuality of bodily techniques: near the ground fl oor en- migrant women from China in Singapore today, trance of the PPC are also various mole removal cast as a threat to Singapore-born, heterosexual, shops, each prominently displaying diagrams Chinese families (Ang 2016). of diff erent positions where moles could grow Nearby, on Sago Lane, an informational on the human face (see Figure 6); each possible plaque informs the visitor that the lane used position corresponds to a positive or negative to be known as the “Street of the Dying” by the outlook in life or character trait—“honest/dis- Chinese, for the houses along the street once honest,” “will be lucky/unlucky,” “bad for one’s housed Chinese migrant coolies who had no wife/husband,” “will have a long/short life”— A megastructure in Singapore | 65

Figure : A mole position chart (© Xinyu Guan). and the removal of moles would help one re- mole positions that say “good/bad for one’s chart one’s future. Yet, it is important not to wife,” while the woman’s face would have those romanticize the futures that such bodily prac- that say “good/bad for one’s husband.” tices present as radical futures that break from On the one hand, the interior spaces of the the power dynamics of the present: there are PPC form an enveloping atmosphere and aes- separate mole position charts for men and for thetic of bodily care and bodily rechartings of women, with diff erent positions for the moles— the future that contrast with the mobilizations reinforcing a gender binary on the level of the of abject or spectral bodies in the fi xing of a na- body—and with heteronormative assumptions tional history of progress in the remade lieux de about life courses; the man’s face would have mémoire on the adjacent old city streets; these 66 | Xinyu Guan practices and aesthetics of the body, like the closed volumes that various migrant and work- transnational fl ows of foodways and aspirations, ing-class communities, through their sensory point to ways of reimagining time, space, and and aff ective appropriations and productions of the body that disrupt the narrations of history, space, reimagined and actualized transnational progress, and nostalgia in the remade China- connectivities, other temporality and futures, town that surrounds the megastructure. On the away from the nostalgic and touristic recuper- other hand, nevertheless, the gendered terms ation of the old city streets of Chinatown as the under which futurities are negotiated (in the zero point of national progress. case of the mole removal businesses), and the gendered fi gures that seem to blur into trans- national food commodities (the “girlfriend” al- Acknowledgments luded to on the whiteboard) perhaps echo the gendered terms under which the body of the I would like to thank Elisa Tamburo for her Samsui woman is abjected and petrifi ed into feedback on the fi rst draft of this article, as well a monument to a patriarchal national history as the anonymous reviewers for their subse- across the road. Th e everyday productions of quent comments. space in the PPC may invoke other times and futurities beyond the nation-state and its nar- rations of time, but such times and futurities Xinyu Guan is a third-year PhD Student in An- nonetheless do not represent a break from gen- thropology at Cornell University. His research der binaries, heteronormativity, or gendered focuses on race, sexuality, and queerness in anxieties about women. Singapore, especially how mobilizations along these axes play out in the built environment in Singapore and displace the terms under which Conclusion democratic politics are imagined in contem- porary Singapore. He has a BA in Comparative In this article, I have used aff ect as an analytic Literature from Columbia University and an to interrogate the concept of architectural fail- MSc in Urban Studies from University College ure, specifi cally by looking at a project that at- London. tempted to create a new urbanistic space for a Email: [email protected] burgeoning postcolonial city through aff ect— an attempt that has nonetheless failed because of (1) the mismatch between such a project and References the state’s unstated Cold War–era imperative of creating containable, policeable, urban spaces; Ang, Sylvia. 2016. “Chinese migrant women as (2) the obsolescence of built forms in a city boundary markers in Singapore: Unrespectable, that is constantly revamping and reimagining un-middle-class and un-Chinese.” Gender, Place its retail spaces; and more recently, (3) the re- & Culture 23 (12): 1774–1787. making of Chinatown as a desirable, aesthetic Brash, Julian. 2019. “Beyond neoliberalism: Th e neighborhood by both the state and the artists High Line and urban governance.” In Th e Rout- ledge handbook of anthropology and the city, ed. and creative industries that followed. Contrary Setha Low, 313–325. New York: Routledge. to visions for an overfl owing, expansive urban- Chang, T. C. 2016. “‘New uses need old buildings’: ism, the People’s Park Complex has materialized Gentrifi cation aesthetics and the arts in Singa- instead in a series of enclosed, fugitive spaces, pore.” Urban Studies 53 (3): 524–539. little communities contained in their concrete CHC (Chinatown Heritage Centre). 2020. “Welcome shells and not having much to do with each to our shophouse museum.” Accessed 4 January. other. Nevertheless, it is in these partitioned, en- http://www.chinatownheritagecentre.com.sg. A megastructure in Singapore | 67

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