The Changi-Marina Bay Corridor: green strategies for Singapore’s soft power

Abstract

Singapore’s city-making strategies are seen by many Asia Pacific cities as a model to achieve today’s desired ‘world-class city’ status. They represent a source of innovation to design alternative configurations and rethink established norms of urban and social standards. This article looks at the urban landscape of the city of Singapore through infrastructural systems instead of individual design masterpieces, focusing on the urban corridor defined by the connection of Changi Airport, East Coast Parkway (ECP), and Marina Bay as a single urban entity, unified by a visual and experiential choreography. At a time of intense global competition in the aviation industry, Changi has deployed new strategies to sustain its reputation as an innovative transportation hub. The leg between Changi Airport and Marina Bay is an integral part of Singapore, experienced by the majority of its annual visitors arriving in the city-state. The 19-kilometre route, a major infrastructural project begun in the 1970s and still in progress, is a highly landscaped and scenic artery of the island, through which the airport has injected its hyper-urbanism into the city. While conveying the history of the developments of the Corridor, we consider the soft power strategies used by the city state to develop a form of transnational elite urbanism based on leisure and recreation, where urban planning, design, and green infrastructure play a key role. We reflect on the global and local dimension of Singapore, discussing how the ECP corridor reveals only one side of the city’s double character.

On the one hand, this article critically analyses the rhetorical use of landscaping ingrained in the Corridor to attract foreign investment and tourism, where the artificialisation of green interventions has overwritten the presence of the native vegetation and morphology. On the other hand, we reflect on the less evident but nonetheless split that the Corridor has generated between the city’s southern residential areas and foreshore. While cutting through the urban tissue of part of the island seamlessly and without interruption, the Corridor does in fact separate out substantial residential areas, turning Singapore successful green strategies into a form of urban injustice. The twofold nature of the corridor – at the same time, that of the ‘connector’ and ‘divider’ – thus reflects Singapore’s intrinsic ambiguity: its manifestation of global ambitions set against its local realities. This article unpacks the planning mechanisms used to design this development, including the land reclamation powers of the state and the government land sales programme. It also discusses the strategies and choices underpinning the urban sequence of the ECP’s infrastructural nodes, from the Jewel (2019) to the Conservatories (2012). Drawing on official documentation from Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA), field research, and using a multidisciplinary lens, this article interpolates architectural and planning studies with insights gleaned by onsite investigation.