STREETS FOR PEOPLE: EXPLORING SANCTIONED URBAN INTERVENTIONS AND CRITICAL UTOPIAS IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

Recently, there is a growing interest in urban interventions within and beyond academia. Particularly, unsanctioned urban interventions are celebrated for their transformative potentials as organic manifestations of utopian desires while sanctioned urban interventions are posited as necessarily perpetuating authoritarian blueprints of the future. However, an alternative view is emerging which contends that authorities could support urban interventions without subsuming their transformative intent. To what extent, then, do sanctioned urban interventions provide spaces for the critical exploration and experimentation of alternative urban possibilities? Drawing on literature on utopianisms and urban interventions, this thesis contributes to broader scholarly agenda through a more nuanced study of sanctioned urban interventions and their transformative potentials. Urban interventions and their utopian possibilities, at first glance, appear to have no place in a city like Singapore where urban life and space are extensively regulated by the state. However, as public participation emerges on the urban agenda lately, ordinary urban dwellers in Singapore are now actively engaged to co-initiate sanctioned urban interventions with the state through the Urban Redevelopment Authority’s Streets for People (S4P) programme. Through a qualitative, inductive study of S4P where participant observation and semistructured interviews were conducted, this thesis excavates and critically examines the utopian potentials immanent in sanctioned urban interventions in Singapore. I investigate how urban dwellers, both representatives from state institutions and ordinary urban dwellers, explore futures through sanctioned urban interventions. Arguing against the conception that state control wholly forecloses transformative potentials by (re)producing authoritarian prescriptions of ideal futures, I posit that sanctioned urban interventions are critical spatial practices through which both the state and ordinary urban dwellers critique present conditions and negotiate the exploration of alternative, desired futures. Overall, this thesis urges critical analysis itself to open up to the possible and raise fundamental questions about what could be.