Concrete Garden City: Trans(planting) A Nation, 1950s-present

Abstract

This paper traces the entangled narratives of housing construction and tree planting in Singapore to reexamine the garden city schema of national development as a strategy for regional networking and international identification. It posits that from the late 1950s, the technology, material culture and architectural expressions of concrete was inseparable from those of greening. Public discourse on nationhood and modernity took its most explicit and visible forms in new concrete buildings and newly transplanted trees. This two-prong urban development set the republic apart from other industrializing cities in Asia and Southeast Asia. From the onset, the state dictated the harsh outlines of the brutalist forms – the dominant architectural aesthetic emphasizing structural clarity that was accepted by virtually all architects in Singapore - to be mitigated by lush foliage. Nowhere else in the world has the garden city idea been so extensively coopted by a state for citizenry stake-holding–to build “homes for the people”–where it took on the roles of developer-producer and consumer as nation building enterprise. How are the strategies of maintenance transforming into those of re-envisioning and speculation? This paper examines the development of two post-World War Two urban dwelling types–the garden suburb estate of single-family houses and the high-rise housing estate–to consider the shaping of domesticity and the entanglements with nation building built upon the continual invention and maintenance of Singapore the garden city.