The city states of Hong Kong and Singapore have many features in common. Both have relatively large populations on small areas of land: Hong Kong with 6.5 million inhabitants on a surface area of 1070 km2 and Singapore with 3.7 million inhabitants on an area of 650 km2. By way of comparison, the most recent proposals for the city province of Rotterdam-Rijnmond cover roughly 600 km2 with a population of barely 1 million people. However, where the borders of the Dutch province are purely administrative, those of Singapore and Hong Kong are hard as rock: difficult relations between both city states with Malaysia and China respectively have long hampered the free traffic of people and goods to these hinterlands. The regulation of the relation between urban and rural regions within one’s own territory is therefore a matter of survival, even to the extent of being able to control one’s own supply of drinking water. The continuing urbanization of both cities is not exclusively manifested in increased sky-ward growth, but also in a continuing growth into the sea. As a result of its mountainous landscape, Hong Kong already has a 150 year-old history of land-reclamation practices, which have exploded over the last few decades – in the last ten years a total of 2300 hectares have been reclaimed, not including the 1200 hectares of the new airport at Chek Lap Kok. At the moment there are projects being planned and executed to expand the centre of Hong Kong by 100 ha into the sea and Kowloon by 300 ha; the last expansion will take place on either side of the runway of the Kai Tak air field which will close this summer.

The story of Singapore is of a similar order: Since 1967, the island has increased in size by 3000 ha and a further 9000 ha are planned for the coming decade. The reclamation of 250 ha of land for the expansion the centre of New Downtown is already at an advanced stage. In the long term, a 12 km-long island is planned off the south coast of the island, a Singaporian version of Miami Beach with the same aim – the development of large-scale tourist accommodation to compete with that of the surrounding countries. All together, the island will eventually have grown by 25%.
Apart from increased urbanization, land reclamation in both cities has led to a spectacular growth of the ports, to the extent that they are now two of the largest in the world. Though it is true that Rotterdam is still the largest port in terms of tonnage, Singapore has become the largest in terms of the volume of cargo that is transshipped there, while Hong Kong has long been the undisputed number one in terms of the number of containers that pass through it. Furthermore, the port is far more present in the images of these cities than the port at Rotterdam. In Hong Kong, it is impossible to cast your eye across the water without noticing the bustle of the shipping and the port activities. In Singapore, the expansion of the centre of New Downtown is right next to the first of the large container terminals.
We could go on for pages naming and comparing impressive figures to indicate the similarities between these city states, like the financially successful policies of public transport companies in both cities which, apart from controlling the metro and bus lines, also develop and exploit the real estate around the stations making them both independent of state subsidies and profit-making.
Yet even after the briefest of visits to both cities, the huge difference between them is inescapable: Singapore, where the city is the spatial reflection of the ambition to completely control and plan social processes by meticulously directing the city’s image, while Hong Kong reflects an extreme pragmatism that aims to create conditions for new growth and development and where the image of the city is primarily steered by the structure and design of large public architectural and engineering structures.

The modernist Utopia realized

The history of the new Singapore – that is, since the establishment of the independent state of Singapore in 1965, with the absolute power of the PAP (People’s Action Party) – has recently been extensively described by Rem Koolhaas.1 Koolhaas describes Singapore’s metamorphosis from an island plagued with poverty, industrial riots and the Mafia to a capitalist utopia, noting the extensive involvement of the United States and the World Bank in its economic reconstruction. The Randstad Holland, a ring of cities around a central ‘green heart’ was taken as a model for Singapore’s development. The Dutchman, Albert Winsemius, who was an advisor to the Singaporian Government on behalf of the World Bank, played an important part in this. Winsemius used his own experience and contacts acquired during the postwar rebuilding of the Netherlands for the economic reconstruction of Singapore.2 Although it is impossible to say whether Winsemius or any other foreign advisor was responsible, it is striking how well the Western model for economic reconstruction and a Western planning and urban design concepts corresponded with the political and cultural aspirations of the ruling PAP. Being the national people’s party, the PAP went to – and still goes to – great lengths to transform this politically, culturally and ethnically divided land into a consensus state. Confucianism is the magic word that immediately crops up, even before the population=s apparently submissive acceptance of consensus ideology has been questioned. Singapore does not have many book shops, but the few there are have their shelves filled with books on Confucianism – analogous to the former dominance of Marxist and Leninist literature in East-European book shops.
One of the books by the party and state ideologist Beng-Huat Chua, contains the following pithy passage:
The contrasting representations of government in Western ideas and Confucianism reflect not only the PAP’s conception of itself as a political party but also of its political practice. The liberal idea of a minimal state held in check by a strong civil society which is protected by an extensive set of individual and group rights is seen as unsuitable for Singapore. Therefore, liberalism is explicitly rejected. In contrast, the government/people relation is to be defined in terms of reciprocity of duties: a leader has the duty to ensure the general welfare of the governed, who in turn have the duty to respect and trust in the leader.3
This so-called communitarianism forms the ideological basis to which modernist urban planning concepts can seamlessly be attached. The redevelopment of the inner city of Singapore is really a process of redevelopment. In the old street plan, the standard five foot-wide arcades represent an interesting transition zone between the strictly public nature of the thoroughfares and the private space of the interiors of the buildings. The arcades, which were principally intended to protect pedestrians from both the sun and tropical rainstorms, also served as extensions to living rooms, shops or businesses. It is precisely this transition zone between the public and private that has been cleaned away and replaced by a hard separation of a public outside world for traffic and a pedestrian domain that has withdrawn into buildings in which shopping malls and living complexes are combined. The separation of networks (particularly traffic and pedestrian) is coupled with an artificial complexity within the building itself, in which everything is connected to everything else – strongly reminiscent of the Team X concepts, as Koolhaas has also remarked. The complicated controlling and utilitarian constructions demand extreme collective discipline. This concept has been further extended in the design for New Downtown where the different networks (roads, pedestrian levels, travelators) of a whole urban area, rather than individual building complexes, will be unravelled to connect everything with everything else – a move that presumes maximum regulation of the building. The similarities with Bakema’s Pampus Plan involuntarily comes to mind – not only because this also involves land reclamation, but above all because of the artificially constructed complexity.
Outside the city centre, beautiful parkways – whose verges appear to be mown every week – lead to the new residential area (where more than 800,000 new homes have been built since 1965): mainly using a standard building type of long, high-rise slabs raised up on columns, the mown lawns are allowed to run freely under the buildings. Here too the collective discipline of communitarianism appears to be indispensable. The image of the unequivocal architecture of these new cities with their immaculate lawns, neat flowerbeds, intact telephone cells and chess tables beneath the buildings, starkly contrast with our experience in Western Europe of similar urban developments fashioned on the modernist last. In Singapore, the city is viewed as a single, large building project which, at a specific moment – The Year X – will actually be completed.
Koolhaas too mentions the authoritarian nature of the Singaporian regime which, according to him, has developed a perverse form of modernism, a modernism stripped of its original artistic, irrational and subversive ambitions.3 But the question now is whether this combination of a totalitarian state and modernist total concepts is not by definition the contradictory characteristic of all modernism, regardless of whether or not it involves a pure, ‘unperverted’ variant. Every modernist concept and design, however visionary, challenging and artistic it may be intended to be, presumes a large degree of control and consensus in order to really be able to carry out the project. On the scale of an individual building, it is generally accepted that the client pays and decides. On the scale of a building complex this becomes more complicated, though no longer abnormal – Public-Private Partnerships do their best. On the scale of a whole area of a city it becomes extremely difficult. Every Western country has experienced this. Singapore is the first example where an entire republic has been completely rebuilt according to a modernist concept. The price that has to be paid for this, the enforced collective consensus, is indeed high enough. But it would not have been otherwise even if more ‘artistic’ and ‘subversive’ concepts had been employed on this scale.

Hong Kong – the pragmatism of permanent change

The governmental authorities of Hong Kong too allowed little room for democratic relations to follow Western norms. However, the authorities mainly limited themselves to the creation of those conditions that were important to British trade interests – the creation of sufficient space for the desired port machinery and trade offices, the necessary infrastructure and later a housing policy, the result of which is that 42% of the population now lives in the New Territories.
After the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong in the Second World War, Hong Kong declined into a deplorable state. In 1947, Sir Patrick Abercrombie, author of County of London Plan (1943) and the Greater London Plan (1944), was appointed to devise a masterplan for the rebuilding of Hong Kong and the housing of the thousands of people who had fled to China during the occupation.
One of the most important aspects of his plans for London was the introduction of a green belt. This was not merely intended as an element to be used to introduce contrasts to the urban environment, but also to act as a separation device between two sorts of areas with different development strategies. Whereas, within the green belt, the emphasis lay on the creation of conditions for new economic growth and the development of a new main infrastructure was the priority, in the area outside the green belt, the concept of New Towns was developed in which a precise control of ground use and the creation of an image was presumed. Community Development was an important aim in the New Towns concept. Essential to this was the architecture of the large public buildings, new motorways and parks, several sketched examples of which Abercrombie presented in the Greater London Plan. It was precisely these elements that were supposed to propagate the idea of the spatial unity of Greater London.
Almost exactly the same ingredients and concepts are to be found in Abercrombie’s proposals for Hong Kong: an improvement of the infrastructure within the metropolitan area of Hong Kong (Hong Kong Island and Kowloon) – the building of tunnels for motor traffic and a metro beneath Victoria Harbour being the most important elements – and the development of new settlements outside the metropolitan centre. These new settlements were still relatively modest: Abercrombie had counted on the population growth halting at around 2 million.
Despite the fact that fifty years later the growth in the population has more than trebled in Hong Kong, Abercrombie=s concepts still seem to have been more consistently applied there than in the mother city London. In postwar England, the spatial development of London was one of the main points of conflict between the Labour and Conservative Parties which resulted in the Greater London Plan never being implemented. A similar conflict of opinions simply wasn=t present in Hong Kong. The primary motivation in Hong Kong was formed by a commercial pragmatism that led the authorities to implement the new developments only when situations arose that threatened the entire city. For instance, after the influx of thousands of new immigrants after Mao assumed power in 1949, and following a fire in Shek Kip Mei in the west of Kowloon in 1953 which left 50,000 people homeless, an active housing policy became an absolute necessity.5 It was not until after 1973 that the development of the New Territories was seriously taken in hand and on a greater scale than Abercrombie had originally intended. Since 1973, 2.5 million people have been housed in the nine New Territories. These have mainly been developed using a limited number of building types, the most common of which is blocks of flats with eight apartments on each floor. Though Community Development also played a part in the urban concepts for the New Territories, more important were the Planning Department’s Urban Design Guidelines, which strove for a transparency of the city’s image so that the sky as well as the mountains would remain visible. Through the frequent use of narrow blocks of flats built closely together, an attempt was made to design spatial compositions in relation to the often impressive presence of the surrounding landscape. However, with the concentration of more than two thousand inhabitants per hectare and a space of barely ten metres between blocks of flats thirty-six storeys high, a vivid imagination is often required to uncover the slightest bit of transparency. The upshot of this is that they have managed to retain a considerable amount of open countryside on Hong Kong=s limited surface area.
In the New Territories, the significance of the architecture of an exceptional building is very strongly qualified. Production is the norm. This qualification is as relevant to the metropolitan area of Kowloon as for Hong Kong, where individual developers and enterprises do their best to attract attention through their buildings. But there is so much architecture to attract one=s attention here that the possibility of any one building standing out becomes virtually impossible. A building policy that attempts to construct guidelines for ‘architectural quality’ through such instruments as city image plans, is unthinkable in Hong Kong. The Planning Department’s Urban Design Guidelines restrict themselves to the interface between the building and the street, and to the setting of maximum volumes and heights, particularly with regard to retaining the surrounding water and mountains as part of the image of the city. These rules are especially significant in respect to the city’s image as seen from a distance. And because the city lies on both sides of Victoria Harbour, one is regularly automatically confronted with this image.
Besides these regulations, it is the designs for public buildings and engineering constructions by the Planning Department itself that mainly leave their mark on the image of the city. This is particularly true of the latest generation of structures to be built along the waterfront – expressways, bridges, railways and the new airport, as well as pedestrian routes. Abercrombie’s adage that modern urban development relates to the composition of ensembles of buildings, infrastructures and nature would seem to have been realized here. Within these urban design compositions, it is possible for individual buildings, programmes and social trends to change infinitely. Hence, it is not a modernist total concept but the creation of spatial conditions for modernity combined with the guarantee of a number of minimal qualities for the city’s image and the public domain, that forms the core of urban development in Hong Kong.
This approach is therefore more attractive – not only for Asia, but for Western Europe too – than the Singaporian model.