The Public Realm and the Public Good

This is a pair of Supertrees.  They're in Singapore, at a place called Supertree Grove, which is part of the Gardens by the Bay; and they've made me think about one of the ways we do public space in the UK.  But I need to set things up a bit first.

I'd not expected to like Singapore; or, more strongly, I'd expected not to like it.  It's got a reputation for being a bit preppy, a bit too hyper-capitalist, a bit authoritarian, a bit... well, a bit neat.  But I went there for a conference in 2010, and I loved it.  I got a sense that the reputation was accurate to an extent, but only to an extent.  For sure, it's authoritarian, and it does a good show of being very ordered.  But it's also completely bonkers.  Not that I can put my finger on exactly why, of course.  But it is.  If you've been, you'll know what I mean.  If you don't... you should go.  (Forced to elaborate, I'd say something about the juxtaposition of the hyper-modern and sleek with the rather more ramshackle; about the way that finance capital rubs shoulders with food hawker stalls; about the way that Taoist temples in Chinatown and Hindu shrines in Little India are only a few minutes walk from gleaming skyscrapers.  Bonkers, for sure - but also beautiful.)

Anyway: I got the chance to go back there at the beginning of this month, on a work thing.  I made a show of reluctance, but I did want to go back.  And while there, I wanted to go to see Supertree Grove, which wasn't there last time.  These "trees" are a bit hard to describe.  They're big.  They're a funny shape.  They look like something from the cover of a sci-fi paperback.  Part of their function is to be a component of exhaust and aircon system for the biomes.  But they're obviously much more than that; another part of their function is aesthetic.  They're home to thousands of plants, and are artworks in their own right.  They fit perfectly into the bonkers-but-beautiful theme.

As it goes dark, they're illuminated; and twice an evening, there's a 15-minute son et lumière show.  It's cheesy as hell, but there's no shame in giving in to that every now and again.  And this is the bit that made me think about public space in the UK and in Singapore.  Though you have to pay to go into the biomes, the rest of Gardens by the Bay is free - including the son et lumière.  Not only that; there's no branding.  Were it in the UK, I'm pretty sure that there'd be signs all over the place trumpeting that the show was brought to you in conjunction with SuperBank MegaCorp, and there'd be an announcement to that effect as well (as if SuperBank MegaCorp had any relevance at all to the lives of the people watching).  And in hyper-capitalist Singapore?  Nothing like that.  It's just there.  A good thing, provided pro bono publico - which may be what makes the cheesiness of it OK.


Given how small Singapore is, there's a heck of a lot of public space; and it's all very-well maintained.  Here, for example, is the Henderson Waves, a part of a multi-kilometre walkway that weaves through and over secondary jungle without ever being more than a few blocks away from the city.  Again, free.  Again, no sponsorship or advertising.  Just a good thing that's provided for the people.

Even on the smaller scale, the public realm is more properly public than it is in the UK.  For example, there's advertising on the underground, but little to none of it elsewhere.  Even the buses and bus-stops don't carry adverts.  They could, easily.  But they don't.  And I think that that does make a difference to the feel of the place.  It's nice not always to have the low hum of people trying to sell you stuff, and of an infrastructure devoted to that.

Of course, there're all kinds of caveat here.  I've not seen all of Singapore by a long shot; maybe the government has a deliberate policy of keeping the areas that generate money - the bits that bankers and tourists want to see - like this.  Maybe there're rattier areas where the Tamil workers who repair the drains in the middle of the night live that have an entirely different feel, and billboards and adverts on every square metre of wall.  Maybe those Tamil workers resent their taxes being used to buy lovely things mainly for the benefit of much wealthier people in the much more glittery parts of town who actually get the chance to use them because they don't work nights.  When you've got a soft-authoritarian government, that kind of policy becomes much more viable.  But I've no evidence for this; the fact that it is a possible (partial) explanation for observed phenomena doesn't mean that it's the correct explanation, and doesn't entitle anyone to speculate about the unobserved phenomena.  So I shall take things as they come, and say simply that there are in Singapore well-maintained public spaces, that they're genuine public spaces (as opposed to spaces into which the public is allowed), that those public spaces contain some remarkable things, and that - and this is important - it's hard to imagine anything like them in the UK under the current political and cultural dispensation.

Of course, there are free public spaces in the UK.  But those that are genuinely public are overwhelmingly "legacy" spaces: parks that the Victorians provided on which we've not yet had the heart to build a Travelodge.  Of the rest, there's a big not-for-profit sector, but that often depends on philanthropy, and so it is slightly precarious in a way that the genuinely public isn't; and it often relies on private sponsorship anyway: many galleries, for example, rely on SuperBank MegaCorp getting a shoutout on publicity material.  The newer stuff is corporatised, which means that it's not really a public space at all.  It's an advertising hoarding to which the public is given access, because there's no point in spending money on advertising if noone can see it.  We can have good things in return for SuperBank MegaCorp getting good things, and only if SuperBank MegaCorp can have good things.  Good things are monetisable, the thinking goes, therefore monetisability is the - rather than a - badge of the good.  (I'd brace myself for a deluge of counterexamples, but, fortunately, noone reads this blog.)

I like the way Singapore does it better.

Anyway.  Here're some more supertrees, because they really are super.