By Joanne Leow

In Jane Jacobs' seminal work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Vintage, 1963), the urban theorist makes the unusual statement that while "old ideas can sometimes use new buildings, new ideas must use old buildings". By this, she means that new ideas, with their inherent risk and experimentation, need spaces, where high construction overheads are not a concern, to flourish. Jacobs is careful to make a distinction between the kinds of old buildings that are needed:

By old buildings I mean not museum-piece old buildings, not old buildings in an excellent and expensive state of rehabilitation – although these make fine ingredients – but also a good lot of plain, ordinary, low-value old buildings, including some rundown old buildings.

Jacobs' emphasis on "plain, ordinary, low-value old buildings, including some rundown old buildings" is particularly important here, and it recalls what contemporary scholars like Mark Crinson have noted as the futility of "posturbanism" in his introduction to Urban Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City (Routledge, 2005), precisely because it encourages:

the "villaging" of city centres to evoke lost or mythical forms of public life, [where] historic buildings that are little more than the carcasses of former functions, loft spaces with cleaned brick and stripped interiors filled with new fittings, "historic interiors" […] are preserved as if in aspic, facades saved while their inners are gutted and completely rebuilt.

Crinson notes that what Jacobs initially saw as the potential for "fine ingredients" are actually harbingers of economic inequality, "in a context where deprivation has increasingly become peripheralised in the post-industrial city" and a form of what he calls "nostalgie de la boue, or memory with the pain taken out". These so-called historic spaces, which have been preserved painstakingly, are ironically not the spaces where the greatest creation of spontaneity and preservation of a collective urban memory can occur. Instead, Jacobs notes that "the unformalised feeders of the arts" and "hundreds of ordinary enterprises, necessary to the safety and public life of streets and neighbourhoods" seek out ordinary old buildings, which allow them freedom from capital constraints. This suggests that powerful sources of community and possibility, at the level of the ordinary citizen and artist, must result from the lack of pressing official and economic concerns. After all these rundown buildings would fall outside the purview of enthusiastic city planners and property developers who would restore "museum-piece old buildings".

If we place Jacobs' ideas in conversation with the Italian architect and designer Aldo Rossi's notion that "the city is the locus of the collective memory", as he writes in Architecture (Princeton Architectural Press, 1991), it is possible to explore in greater depth how memory can be connected to these particular sites of creative possibility and collective spontaneity. Rossi, like Maurice Halbwachs before him, argues that "the collective memory participates in the actual transformation of space in the works of the collective, a transformation that is always conditioned by whatever material realities oppose it". Thus, Jacobs' rundown buildings can function as crucial interlocutors with the collective memory, since they perform an important creative resistance to the forces of urban renewal and exist as sites of spontaneity and possibility, which retain a sense of the past.

Rossi notes how the city can be seen as "a material artifact" which retains "the traces of time, even if in a discontinuous way", its urban structures here are "a synthesis of a series of values [which concern] the collective imagination". In an informal and less official way, the sustained use of these buildings represents an important continuity in the fabric of urban memory. This potential for a rich, temporally and spatially textured life and remembrance is set in contrast to "the corpse" that Jacobs refers to of "one-age construction", which demolishes wholesale and fails to consider the importance of a diversity of architecture and uses.

If we consider Jacobs' emphasis of these particular aged buildings and imbue them, as I have attempted, with the power of collective memory and agency, then it becomes important to address the question of what happens when these buildings are taken away. While city planners and governments might attempt to produce and impose historical significance and contemporary uses on specific aged buildings, structures and spaces, I would argue that it is only when the community has a role to play in transforming an aged space, in a context that is free from economic anxieties, that it can have true significance for collective memory. If the community is denied this opportunity, then it is necessary to document what kinds of amnesias and losses have been incurred.

In my exploration, I will examine poetic responses to the loss of ordinary urban buildings and spaces, and the consequent denial of collective agency and memory in the context of the city-state of Singapore. Firstly, however, it is important to read the city of Singapore itself as a text where as "one of the few nations in the world to have re-housed virtually its entire population in one sustained, if lengthy, campaign" – as Gregory Clancey writes in "Toward a Spatial History of Emergency" in Beyond Description: Singapore Historicity Space (Routledge, 2004) – it has set itself up to be what the architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas calls "the apotheosis of tabula rasa" – a blank slate where city planners and politicians have a free hand.

{I do not wish to claim that Koolhaas' dramatic interpretation of Singapore as "tabula rasa" can be taken completely without qualification. Singapore architect William S W Lim points out, for example, in his book, Architecture Art Identity in Singapore: Is there Life after Tabula Rasa? (Asian Urban Lab, 2004), that while there is a certain overdeterminedness in the country's Preservation of Monuments Board's shortlist of buildings and prewar shophouses which are under preservation, "there are still numerous locations and sites of varied sizes with indefinable, evolving complexity, hybridity and territoriality, such as Geylang and Joo Chiat". Lim sees these as crucial "spaces of indeterminancy", which have "withstood rapid usage changes, and [are] characterised by mixed usage and fragmented spatial arrangements" and have "the potential to become effective instruments of contemporary intellectual, artistic, cultural and sociological discourses". However, even Lim acknowledges that these "non-complying" sites are in a "minority"; he writes tellingly that "they stand as firm attestations of the persistence of memories of spaces, of instances of people reclaiming the space they live in and of plural alternatives to Singapore's story of nation building that have all but been eradicated by tabula rasa".}

The obvious corollary to the construction of countless blocks of Modernist multi-storey housing by the state was the wholesale clearance of old rundown buildings and slums by the very same governing body. Crucially though, a great deal of the architecture of the old British colonial centre of the city was left unscathed by this widespread demolition. In selectively choosing which aged buildings were to be preserved and which ones were to be demolished, Singapore's planners, in effect, have inscribed in the city skyline itself a history that privileges official power over that of the community. As Ryan Bishop, John Phillips and Yeo Wei Wei note in Beyond Description: Singapore Space Historicity, which they edited, these decisions have had far-reaching consequences in the contemporary time as these very same colonial buildings have been exploited by capitalist ventures for their historic function in a sophisticated yet soulless way:

Singapore flaunts its colonial past and postcolonial/global present through the historical maintenance of these buildings' facades. The act of renovation preserves the colonial shell of the building while reworking the buildings from the foundation up to better suit contemporary use, whether as luxury hotel, bank, government building, or restaurant. Readable in the buildings, then, is a continuation, perpetuation, and multiplication of colonial richness into the present global order, while also using the striking juxtaposition of colonial buildings and modernist high-rise buildings to reveal a specific continuum and continuity.

Note that the contemporary uses of these buildings are tied with capitalist or governing functions whether "luxury hotel, bank, government building, or restaurant". Even the museums that have also been housed in these former colonial buildings can be seen, albeit cynically, as a complex propagation of official versions of history and historicity. The "continuity" here can be seen as a form of neo-colonialism that is specifically geared towards being "a mode of attracting global capital to Singapore". These particular historic structures are far removed from Jacobs' ideas of the potential of aged buildings and also complicate what Rossi would have us see as the "locus" of collective memory since the average Singaporean did not have a say in the transformation of these buildings and does not have the economic means to use them.

It is not an overstatement to argue then, that a majority of Singaporeans have borne witness to the wholesale destruction of the plain, ordinary and rundown, under the aegis of modernist and authoritarian city planning, and the demands of a globalising capital-driven economy. How then can collective memory, as represented and enabled by communally available older architecture and spaces, continue to function? And as importantly, how can a culture that has been divested of its organic urban diversity create the possibilities for new ideas and art that are not deracinated and disoriented by the rapid urban renewal that has taken place in the past half a century?

Perhaps, art and literature, with their potential to enact the imaginistic recovery of memory and history can function in the literal and figurative void that has been left in the wake of aggressive urban redevelopment. These artistic and literary works might be seen as lieux de mémoire that exist because, as Pierre Nora notes in "General Introduction: Between Memory and History" from Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past (Editions Gallimard, 1992), "there are no longer any milieux de mémoire, settings in which memory is a real part of everyday experience". In the wake then of Singapore's tabula rasa, it might be possible to consider artistic and literary interventions as ways to create an "interaction between memory and history", where driven by "a will to remember", the poet or artist is able to "inhibit forgetting... immortalise death and... materialise the immaterial – all in order to capture the maximum possible meaning with the fewest possible signs". It seems particularly, that the formal distillation and crystallisation that is inherent in the poetic form might render it the ideal lieu de mémoire.

The multiple layers of meaning possible in the dense imagery and wordplay of a poem mean that it would not only succeed in brevity but also to meet Nora's condition that these lieux must have a "capacity for change... to resurrect old meanings and generate new ones along with new and unforeseeable connections (that is what makes them exciting)". In a sense, poems about lost spaces, as lieux de mémoire, have the ability to function like Jacobs' old, rundown buildings in the enabling of new ideas, possibilities and connections.

With these potentialities in mind, I will now turn to examine two poems that seem to act as loci of urban and collective memory in the Singapore context. The first is by Australian-based Singapore writer Boey Kim Cheng, whose elegy 'Placenames', from After the Fire: New and Selected Poems (Firstfruits, 2006), gives us a glimpse of his father's dying days while simultaneously resurrecting the long demolished districts of pre-urban renewal Singapore. As the title suggests, Boey treats the names of these places as the central thematic of the poem. In the space of the poem, the italicised placenames of these "vanished places" take on various significations from their initial talismanic and incantatory functions to actual embodied subjects who bring the poet's father closer to death. The poem becomes both a personal elegy for the poet's deceased father, but also a lament for "the ruined city" as Boey conflates his father's body with an urban topography marked by its absences:

The night listens to the reel of names,
to the echo behind, to the blanks
in the man's geography.
I don't know if it is the dead places
calling him to come home
or my father summoning them
for a last walk. He intones
Johnson Pier, Malacca Street,
Old World, New World,
as if piecing together the alleys
, the streets and neighbourhood
of his body, reassembling
the ruined city
of his vanished self.

Boey here powerfully links his will to remember his late father with remapping memories of a lost Singapore. This poem functions as a lieu de mémoire as it focalises on the memory of a now demolished city through the intensely personal loss of a father. The collective and the individual are inextricably linked, and achieve both moving individual detail, but also a more devastating sense of loss and disorientation in "the ruined city". The poem's use of the words "I don't know" suggest the compelling ambiguity of agency in this poem. Memory is both a powerful tool to identify and situate oneself and also an involuntary process that has unpredictable influences on our lives. What is also crucial is how the past becomes spatially embodied, someplace where the poet's father can take "a last walk", and reaches further into this metaphor by becoming a metaphor of the poet's father's body. The alternating of lines in this section, "of his body, reassembling / the ruined city / of his vanished self" emphasises the intimate conflation of the body and the city, again linking the collective and the individual in ineluctable ways.

Boey goes further in this poem by taking it upon himself to continue his father's legacy, producing, thus, not just the memories of his father and his father's contemporaries in the poem, but also a memento (mori) for his current generation:

Soon his name will be erased
like the street names
and I will take over the chant:
Raffles Place, Change Alley,
calling the dead places
and my father home.

With these concluding lines, Boey attempts, in a sense, to return to Rossi's ideas that the city can be a "locus of collective memory" through a very individual and personal memorialisation of his father. Boey enlarges the scope of his own grief for his father by linking his death and the erasure of his name with the greater disappearances of the collective and ordinary urban spaces and structures of Singapore. While the modernisation of Singapore might have demolished the physical buildings, spaces and neighbourhoods that Boey's father attempts to call on, Boey immortalises them in his poem by "reassembling" their "geography", and having his written words "take over the chant". Besides the obvious references to mourning prayers done for the dead in numerous cultures, Boey also raises the presence of an oral culture, where his father's naming of the "vanished places" represents a form of legacy that he inherits and uses. Writing and orality become forms of resistance against the erasures and the "blanks" in the city where these places are "now remote as the stars / in a galaxy already extinct".

Although half a generation younger, the Singapore poet Alfian Sa'at has similar preoccupations with "the ruined city" that is modernised Singapore. Taken from A History of Amnesia (Ethos, 2001), his poem 'Portrait of a Sentenced Library' attempts, even from its title, to memorialise the ordinary brick structure of Singapore's first National Library constructed in the late 1950s. While ostensibly a public building, the library evolved over the years to be an important social and collective space for Singaporeans of all walks of life. It was demolished in 2005 to make way for a traffic tunnel since it was not judged to be of sufficient architectural and historic merit by the authorities to be saved.

However, the public outcry that arose when plans for its destruction were publicised points to its status as a focal point for collective urban memory in Singapore. One of the most striking visual markers that evoked the reasons for the building's demise was its understated and unassuming red brick facade, which made its status significantly different from the white-washed stone colonial buildings that had been preserved. Alfian makes direct reference to these bricks in his poem giving the physical remnants of the library an affecting prominence:

So these bricks will be torn down
And books will still not have learnt
To spread their feathers and fly
Like pigeons from a shaken tree.

So this balustrade will be dismantled
Perhaps reassembled somewhere else –
A conch paperweight by my bed is a beach.
Each hour from a postcard Big Ben chimes.

Alfian's image of the library as a tree of knowledge, whose books are like "carrier pigeon[s]" returning to roost, gives the building an organic quality that ties the written word and its repository to a sense of rootedness and a communal idea of the dissemination of literature. The reduction of this collective knowledge and shared space to mere souvenirs and postcards is shown to be futile. Even though the old library's balustrade was dismantled and its bricks sold to commemorate its history, Alfian notes this as an absurdity and affront using the surreal images of "a conch paperweight" as "a beach" and Big Ben chiming from a postcard. Instead of this official method of remembrance through the deconstruction and fetishisation of the library's material components, Alfian chooses instead to attempt the physically impossible by superimposing the ghostly image of the library and its contents on the traffic tunnel that has replaced it:

This is the logic of nostalgia –
This is what I mean when I say
That my memory is selfish.
Who can guarantee that roaming

Through a tunnel I will find again
The Children's section, where a boy walked
With 'The Little Prince' in his hands,
His smile the first line of a novel

Neither of us had read before?

In these lines, the poem achieves a spatial and temporal palimpsest that disrupts the hierarchies of a linear, progress-oriented history and state-dictated city planning. In imposing the ghostly image of the past and the soon-to-be demolished "Children's section" on the soon-to-be constructed traffic tunnel, the poem blurs the boundaries of time and space, creating in an indeterminate zone where "neither" the poet or his young self had read The Little Prince. While calling this is a "selfish" and individually oriented view, Alfian's affection for the library and his evocation of the illogical nature of nostalgia has a larger collective gesture: it is as though the disoriented urban memory has taken upon itself to "roam" in a newly ruined space to cope with its loss.

Like Boey, Alfian enlarges his sense of grief to other lost sites in Singapore like a gentrified Chinatown where "Blueprints and forums and rhetoric ensure / That a firecracker makes no sound", "the shattered glass of Van Kleef Aquarium" and "the ragged screen of Capitol Cinema". The poem allows these spaces to exist "Only in dreams. / Under separate stars" and then circles back in this dream-like state to the library where

[…] suddenly a book appeared in the sky
Like a carrier pigeon that had escaped
From the ruins of the library.
It landed, without a murmur,

On my shoulder. I opened that book,
Expecting a cry for help, a refugee's plea.
What I found instead was this poem
That did not know how to end. Only when.

Here the poem seems to suggest that there is no end to the sense of loss that pervades the Singapore landscape, and that the eventual acceptance of the library's demise creates a certain paralysis in the collective memory. There is no "cry for help" or "refugee's plea", only a poem that does not know how to conclude itself or what else to allude to. The lieu de mémoire that is created in this poem "materialises the immaterial" and goes further through the medium of poetry to superimpose this immaterial on the newly built environment, producing haunting recreations in the absences that are brought about by urban renewal.

I have examined these poems as only two brief instances of urban memory in the Singapore context and treated them as lieux de mémoire. Nora contends that these lieux are "pure signs", that "a lieu is a templum: something singled out within the continuum of the profane (whether space, time, or both), a circle within which everything counts, everything is symbolic, everything is significant". The emphasis on this aspect of the lieux though, fails to consider what would happen if they were taken collectively. Perhaps it is more critically productive to envision these loci of memory as part of a larger totality and thus engage with the work of Walter Benjamin. Crinson takes Benjamin's ideas of "traces" and fragments" and extrapolates his emphasis on such traces to:

a contemporary attitude towards building materials in which it is common to find memory located in a wall surface or chipped paintwork or some other material trace or fragment […] a presence as if an older discourse locating memory in the structures of the human form has now been transferred to the structures made by humans.

In the context of a redeveloped Singapore, with its loss of significant buildings and spaces, these poems by Boey and Alfian can then be seen as standing in for both memory in human form and the ruins and fragments of a modernised city.

Crinson notes that Benjamin sees these fragments "joining with others to suggest fleeting but critical insights", and I would add that in the Singapore context, these fragments of poetic memory serve as Benjamin's Parisian arcades might, as "the memory-space of the collective", especially if we see them as parts of a larger geography or urban topography. It becomes crucial then, to map out exactly how literary traces and fragments have come to represent Singapore's urban memory and recreate a sense of its vanished places. It remains to be seen whether the oeuvre of the country's writers, fragmentary, trace-like words and images, "creating tenuous, intangible, almost ineffable bond[s]: what remains of our inexpugnable, intimate attachment to those faded symbols of the past" (Nora) can stand in for the milieux de mémoire that no longer exist in the material world.

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