Cut and dried: re-claiming land in Singapore

ABSTRACT

After seventy years of concerted expansion, reclaimed land now makes up a quarter of Singapore’s total landmass. Cut out of the sea, this artificial land aspires to cut to the chain of causality: to self-found and so give law to itself (auto-nomos). From what vantage point can one capture that sovereign gesture, whose structure is that of recursion? To venture an answer, I first proceed by asking: what exactly is being ‘reclaimed’ here in reclamation? Why should the creation of ‘new’ land need to be enacted in the idiom of a ‘re’? Though reclamation purports to create land ‘from sea’, key to this land-making is not saltwater but sand – a material substance which Singapore imports in such vast quantities that some have called it a ‘de facto transfer of territory’. Despite this, however, I argue that reclamation cannot simply be dismissed as a misnomer or as cynical rhetoric. Reclamation’s ‘re’ discloses rather than obscures the temporal workings of sovereign state power. Drawing on the legal history and ethnographic present of reclamation in Singapore, I explore how this implied recursiveness clues us into an essential temporal structure that animates the territorial state, with repercussions for the way we formulate our political critiques.

KEYWORDS:

• Territory
• Land reclamation
• Sovereignty
• Law
• Singapore

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Until recently, this was the guiding slogan for the Singapore government’s approach to development. It replaced the first Prime Minister’s earlier vision of Singapore as a ‘Garden City’. The slogan has since evolved. In 2007, it was briefly revised to ‘City of Gardens and Water’ (Ng 2008 and Khoo 2016). In 2021, it was revised again to ‘City in Nature’ as part of the Singapore Green Plan 2030 (see the National Parks Board website).

2 Beyond which point reclamation becomes financially – although not technologically – unviable, according to the country’s ex-Chief Defence Scientist (personal communication, August 23, 2017).

3 I thank the anonymous reviewer for proposing this particular wording of the question.

4 Copjec distinguishes this from a backwards projection, where one ‘reconstitutes what was not as what now is’ (37).

5 Copjec’s term.

6 The three bills, all eventually passed into law, were the Foreshores (Amendment) Bill, the Land Acquisition (Amendment) Bill and the Planning (Amendment) Bill.

7 The state’s own plans for this future ‘Long Island’ largely align with Lui’s proposal. According to The Straits Times, the Urban Redevelopment Authority is exploring the possibility of building land between Marina East and Changi using Dutch empoldering methods or potentially reclaiming a series of offshore islands which would offer more room for urban development plus some measure of coastal defence for the main island (Ng 2022).

8 A charge the Singaporean state has repeatedly denied (e.g., Lim 2010).

9 Warehouses, especially at dockside.

10 Village or more accurately, as Imran bin Tajudeen has forcefully argued, urban ward (2007, 7–8). Also spelled kampong or kampung. The conflation of kampong with village, he writes, is racialized, kampong houses being stereotyped as ‘rural’ and ‘Malay’ versus ‘urban’ ‘Chinese’ shophouses (2012).

11 §5(1) reads: ‘The president may, by proclamation published in the Gazette, declare any lands formed by the reclamation of any part of the foreshore of Singapore, or any areas of land reclaimed from the sea to be State land, and thereupon that land shall immediately vest in the State freed and discharged from all public and private rights which may have existed or been claimed over the foreshore or the sea-bed before the same were so reclaimed.’

12 The same logic applies to compulsory land acquisition by the state, where ‘the declaration itself [is] conclusive evidence that the land is needed for the purposes [the state has] specified’ (Centre for Liveable Cities 2014, 14, my emphasis). Whatever the reason for acquisition, it ‘can never be subject to judicial view’ (Lim 1968, 3) because ‘Parliament has … ma[de] the opinion of the Minister the operative test’ (Koh 1967: x). Legal scholars Tan, Tang, and Low note that in Singapore ‘property is what the state will recognize’ (2009, 20). Land would appear to operate by the same principle, it being simply what the state will recognise.

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Beverly Fok

Beverly Fok is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.