Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment

by Brenda S.A. Yeoh

In the British colonial city of Singapore, municipal authorities and Asian communities faced off over numerous issues. As the city expanded, disputes arose in connection with sanitation, housing, street names, control over pedestrian 'five-foot-ways', and sacred spaces such as burial grounds. Brenda Yeoh's Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore details these conflicts and how they shaped the city.

The British administration structured the private and public environments of the city with an eye toward shaping human behavior, following scientific principles and the lessons of urban planning in other parts of the world. For the Asian communities, Singapore was the place where they lived according to their own values, priorities and resources. The two perceptions of the city frequently clashed, and the author reads the cityscape of Singapore as the result of this contest between discipline and resistance.

Drawing on meticulous research and a theoretically sophisticated use of cultural and social geography, post-colonial historical discourse, and social theory, the author offers a compelling picture of a critical stage in Singapore's past. It is an important contribution to the study of colonial cities and an indispensable resource for understanding the shape of modern Singapore.

380 pages, Paperback

First published November 21, 1996

About the author

Brenda S.A. Yeoh is Professor in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore, and Research Leader of the Asian Migration Cluster at NUS’s Asia Research Institute.

Reviews

[Nils · Rating 4 out of 5]

The built environment is always the product of a particular vision of sociability, and this is true at both micro-scales (individual buildings and even rooms within buildings) and macro-scales (urban systems as a wholes). As such, given the inherent unruliness of the people who come to dwell in these spaces, more and less voluntarily, built environments are always simultaneously acts of social engineering and sites of resistance to that engineering. Nowhere is this more true than in colonial cities, in which the sites where colonial masters develop systems of control and exploitation are also places where the locals try to make their own worlds, on their own terms.

Brenda Yeoh's CONTESTING SPACE IN COLONIAL SINGAPORE is a beautifully rendered, intricately detailed analytic narrative of exactly this dance and tension in the construction of Singapore, a most unusual colonial city in that it was built as a trading entrepôt and strategic military site, rather than (like most other colonial cities) primarily as a site for the direct exploitation of an indigenous hinterland already developed by incumbent elites.

The introduction is an exceptionally clear exposition and critique of the dominant schools of thought about the nature of colonial urbanism, including the modernization hypothesis, predicated on a dualistic and teleological understanding of urban development; the cultural explanation, which sees the colonial city primarily as a site for the production of cultural and psychological domination by the colonialists; and the political economy approach, which emphasizes the city as a site for the development of a system of economic exploitation. In each case, she argues, insufficient attention is paid to what her title indicates: the contested nature of the process, that is, the way that the local indigenes resist having these spaces developed strictly on the terms of the colonial overlord, and carve out their own cultural, physical, and economic autonomous zones. Slums, for example, are thus not just places of hope or despair, per De Soto, but even more sites of independence and self-actualization.

But this begs the question: why are the spatial outcomes of colonial cities, even ones run by the same colonial power, so very different? Calcutta, Mombasa, and Singapore turn out dramatically differently, despite a shared British overlordship, and this has to be explained by BOTH the fact that the British have different projects in mind with each city, AND the independent projects of the locals themselves, who arrive in these cities on drastically different terms, with very different relationships not only to the lands that they came from, but to the hinterlands that the British are interested in controlling from each of these cities. Yeoh's singular focus on Singapore and lack of even a glance an compressive cases limits the utility of the book from a nomothetic perspective, though the ideographic qualities are exemplary.