The neon-pink lights twisted into paisley motifs that garishly adorned gateways in rhythmic intervals of the street. The crowd gazed in wonderment as the mundane transformed into the festive this October. Tamil mixed with a smattering of Malayalam was overheard in bargains made over a pile of shirts, while a Punjabi lady debated which handbag had a better if not bigger logo. Familiar aromas emanated from food stands, crowds mingled yet nobody jostled. This was Deepavali in Little India, Singapore.
Across the city, people played roulette in the casino that is only for foreign nationals. The building, tall and statuesque, surged to the sky — all 57 floors of it traversed in five seconds by a high-speed elevator. Crowned by an ungainly deck, 1,000 windows gracing its face, and a large concrete lotus poised at its base — this was the Marina Bay Sands casino.
Two extremes of the city — one a part of culture and the other seemingly cultured — cut along a transept. Though the former developed in the late 20th century and the latter in the last two years, both have emerged for the same reasons — they are creative dots united by economic design.
Singapore celebrates its economy in its own design. It boasts of the highest population density among nations in the world, with a GDP almost one third the size of India’s and a landmass half the size of Delhi NCR! Though it was erased, rebuilt and even accused of being synthetic, Singapore was not born sterile. It was born fiscal.
Not a product of creative accidents, Singapore was carefully constructed, engineered and innovated to be a city with predetermined design parameters. I use the word “innovated” and not “created” as the city never hatched out of a single egg but from experiments — some ended in exceptional models of service, thoroughfare and industry, others arrived at efficient strategies of housing and density management. Though no result was a “sure shot” and at best remained in the realm of the optimistic, yet what was constant was the will to innovate. From the 1960s, when it produced only mosquito coils and wigs, to the present production of cutting-edge technology, space gear and leads in animatronics, Singapore rose through the ranks to acquire world-class status.
Isn’t every civilisation actually a product of its prosperity? OMA studio recently demonstrated that the rise of museums in the United States had a direct relation to the growth of Wall Street! Having said that, what works isn’t Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good” idealogy but Steve Jobs’s belief in the power of ideas. Instead of taking Jobs’s famous mantra “Stay hungry stay foolish” literally, as we do in the Indian context, perhaps it’s time that Indian planners actually understood his words — to constantly innovate in order to add newer ingredients to the recipe of city design, to throw away the crutch of practicality and take risks, to be naive and believe in the extraordinary until it is proven otherwise. How else will we know whether high-rise buildings are the way to manage Delhi’s density, or whether new expressways may benefit the displaced slums in Kolkata? How long will we base hypotheses on the tried and tested, and when will we grow unafraid of making mistakes? What is that tipping point where political will can be a trajectory and not a five-year plan?
We will never know the answers until the design profession in the country decides to be the acrobat, to defy caution, and then learns to read the landscape not how it is, but how it could be.
Suparna Bhalla is a Delhi-based architect