The Emergence of the Global and Social City: Golden Mile and the Politics of Urban Renewal

Abstract

This study discusses the conflicted ideas of urban renewal under the economically progressive but inexperienced leadership of a young Singapore government. As the site of this study, the Golden Mile shares its aspirational name with the first building built on it – the Golden Mile Complex. This district was planned to carry Singapore into the era of the global city. During the period of modernization in the 1960s, influential ideas were propagated through different United Nations experts. Singapore used these recommendations to legitimize an aggressive form of urban renewal, but it also encouraged greater participation by think tanks with greater intellectual and research sophistication. This marked Singapore’s most democratic period of public debate and participation in urban policy-making. The advancements made by the Singapore Planning and Urban Research group, and Lim’s built megastructure and unbuilt linear city came about under these liberal conditions. Consumerist functions and civic-minded forms were combined to produce unprecedented but ultimately incomplete socio-urban effects. This episode revealed that Singapore’s successful legacy of modernization was always exclusively narrated by the state, but there was an under-documented tussle was between the sociopolitical capital of Singapore’s public housing programme, and the economic acceleration of private and global consumerist functions.