Sitting on the Dock of the Bay: Partial Views of Change—Singapore, Tokyo and Hong Kong

Abstract

Cities embody the political projects of elites; the spaces that are made frame the lives of their inhabitants; it is within these spaces that ordinary people make their lives. Cities seem dense, resistant and hard, collections of buildings, but they are always in flux; buildings are torn down, new structures are made and the urban form changes. The transient nature of urban forms signals the response of elites to the shifting demands and opportunities of changing circumstances; new infrastructure, new building, whole areas whose function belonged to the past are liable to be torn down to make way for the new—the process is ongoing; it does not stop. Some buildings may be preserved, and perhaps they figure in collective memory—but broadly, the urban form is malleable; it is repeatedly changed. Change has its benefits and its costs, and these are not borne equally. In Singapore, Malay kampungs were swept away, so too China Town; citizens were relocated in modern blocks of apartments; urban re-development has swept through mainland Chinese towns, and some have objected publicly, hence Nail Houses; and in Hong Kong, powerful developers treat buildings as units of profit and loss—relatively new hotels are rebuilt, and empty flats demolished as the land upon which they stood increases in value. But all these themes are familiar to urban scholars, and these matters can be accessed in many ways, and here the route is through the accumulation of ethnographic detail, partial recollection, cities illuminated through the small scale; it is the way in which we all grasp the cities in which we live.

Otis Redding 1967; lyrics available at < lyricsdepot.com > accessed 22 06 2006.

This piece has already been published—Inter Asia Cultural Studies 2008 9.1; it is reprinted directly to save for the correction of a few errors of grammar.