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Planning as State-Effect: Calculation, Historicity and Imagination at Marina

Bay, Singapore

The urban planning of Singapore is a story overdetermined by the trope of success. This is

especially so for projects such as Marina Bay, the new urban waterfront that crystallizes the

millennial ambitions of this small city-state. Here, a unified statist narrative has been tightly

choreographed through cultural representations of national identity, architectural aesthetics and

mega-events (Goh, 2017). Recently, the city-state has also transitioned from being a receiver of

accolades to an anointer of distinction through the awarding and hosting of the prestigious “Lee

Kuan Yew World City Prize”. Mayors and experts from around the world seek to learn from

Singapore, its planning experience formalized into replicable sets of “best practices” which, when

exported overseas, have produced uneven results (Chua, 2011). This luminosity attributes a

fetishistic quality to the “state” as the principal author of urban planning and guarantor of success.

Insofar as the “state” connotes qualities of hierarchy, stability and order, this model of urban

planning also exhorts similar virtues in its ability to carry long-term visions to fruition.

Singapore’s global effect on professional planning discourse and practice is inseparable from this

figure of the “state”, such that it has become a taken-for-granted idiom to capture the city-state’s

distinction and exception in a rapidly urbanizing world. This paper critically frames the “state” as

what needs to be explained, rather than what provides the explanation. Instead of assuming state-

led planning as inherently “top-down” and “long-term”, the paper analyzes these assumptions as

effects that reify the “state” and asks how such effects are produced through mundane practices

within the planning bureaucracy. In other words, how does planning produce the effect that there
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is a “state” that oversees and guides development? Through what sets of arrangements and

practices does this “state” appear to have purpose and agency? Similar anthropological attention

on modern states has opened up avenues to interpret and theorize the political and cultural effects

of various modes of practices that constitute what appears to be a monolithic entity that is separate

from and governs society (Sharma and Gupta, 2006). Mitchell (1999) calls this phenomenon of

reification “structural effects”, whereby the “state” is not an actual structure or autonomous entity,

but “the powerful, metaphysical effect of practices that make such structures appear”. They argue

that “states” are performed, reinforced and imagined through the repetition of banal everyday

activities and cultural representation. By studying how people encounter the “state” in official

letterheads or by waiting in line, or how bureaucrats conduct themselves in meetings and carry out

their routine tasks, anthropologists displace the metaphysical concept of the state with an analysis

of the “state” as complex cultural and social phenomena.

Singapore presents itself as a top candidate for this kind of critical analysis because here, the

identity of the state is so tied to a single political party, the institutions of urban planning so

centralized and the discourse of development so wedded to economic and national progress that it

would seem impossible to imagine the “state” as anything other than a monolithic entity that hovers

above and governs society. This image of “vertical encompassment” (Ferguson and Gupta, 2002)

dominates the way urban planning in Singapore is framed in professional and academic discourse

– labels such as “state-led planning” or “developmentalism” or “long-term comprehensive

planning” are commonly used to describe the political economic foundations of Singapore’s urban

transformation (Chan, 1975; Dale, 1999; Low, 2010; Soh and Yuen, 2011; Ho, Woon and Ramdas,

2013; Shatkin, 2014). One of the consequences is that the inner workings of the planning
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bureaucracy become analytically subdued, which further contributes to the reification of the

“state”. Coupled with the reluctance of bureaucrats to speak in their own voice and the dearth of

primary records in the public realm, existing literature on planning practices in Singapore is

generally institutionalist and statist in approach.

In this paper, I analyze the heterogeneous mix of socially mediated practices that contribute to the

reification of the “state” through three analytical lenses – calculation, historicity and imagination.

They pertain to distinct modes of abstraction that enact quantifications of means and ends, concepts

of history and pictures of urban life respectively. Such abstractions are neither peculiar to planning

nor state processes, as scholars of governmentality and planning practitioners have shown (Rose

and Miller, 2008; Elden, 2007). Yet, the governmentality literature tends to overemphasize

calculative modes of rationalization which flattens much of what I discovered through my

interviews and analysis of official documents. Measuring population projections, narrating history

through the urban landscape, and imagining an exciting city are significantly different as

constellations of power and knowledge. Ghertner (2010) has shown that planners in India do not

classify and make policies about slums solely through statistical surveys, but also through aesthetic

judgement that is codified in law, while Lewis and Zapata (2007) have shown that planning

involves a spectrum of imaginative, calculative and modelling practices. The three analytical

lenses in this paper thus builds on the recognized multimodality of planning work and allows my

analysis to be attentive to the complexities of the Singaporean planning bureaucracy. As I will

show, these lenses bring to surface how planning practices produce effects that, in the context of

Singapore’s Marina Bay, efface the work of individual planners and reify the “state” as the author

of history and development.

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I focus on the work of government planners within the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA)

which is the national statutory board that carries out key functions such as master planning, urban

design, development control, land sales and, increasingly, place management and public outreach.

Since the 1970s, generations of planners have drawn up increasingly detailed plans for the

expansion of the existing Central Business District to create a new urban waterfront that is known

today as Marina Bay. About 360 H of land was reclaimed and at the turn of the millennium, the

URA began to market the Bay to potential investors and sell parcels of land for commercial

development. Though many other government agencies were involved in the process, as the

statutory board empowered by the Planning Act to implement and review the Master Plan, the

URA is the most consequential in performing the “state” in the domain of urban planning.

Despite the fanfare surrounding this grand project, peering into the formidable black-box of

Singapore’s bureaucracy poses many methodological problems. The types of public fora,

transcripts or development application documents that planning scholars in the West analyze are

not available (for example, see Forester, 1999; Innes and Gruber, 2005; Throgmorton, 1996;

Flyvbjerg, 2006). For this paper, I focus primarily on key official documents produced to fulfill

the statutory responsibilities of the national planning authority – the quinquennial reviews of the

Master Plan as well as various plans of the Marina Bay produced since the 1980s. Unlike most

materials produced primarily for publicity or promotional purposes, these documents reveal a slice

of planning work carried out within the bureaucracy largely without public interference.

Furthermore, as their content is mediated by the legal requirements of the Planning Act, they record

the logics of planning decisions and, as a set, hint at how such logics changed over several decades.
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In addition, over the course of three years, I interviewed 11 planners who were directly involved

in the planning of Marina Bay between 1980 and 2010. They occupied positions in different

hierarchies of the administration and most had left the service at the time of the interview. Where

possible, I used the plans of Marina Bay to stage a conversation about how they were involved in

the planning of the waterfront. What often ensued was a kind of “guided tour” through these sheets

of colored patches, as planners became much more precise and enthusiastic when presented with

something they had worked on for many years. Their narratives filled the gaps in the technical

documents and restored figments of bureaucratic life often suppressed under the authoritative sign

of the “state”.

Planning and the “State”

Before entering into the case, this section draws productive linkages between current debates in

planning theory and anthropologies of the state and bureaucracy. I focus on the turn towards the

sociotechnical as a junction connecting these disparate communities of scholars as well as where

this paper is situated. This discussion foregrounds how routinized planning practices can be

conceptualized as processes in the reification of the “state” and the contributions to planning

scholarship such a conceptualization can make.

The figure of the state in planning scholarship has shifted dramatically over the last few decades.

In Anglo-American normative planning theory, it has generally rescinded into the background as

the thrust toward democratic participation, social inclusivity and communicative rationality

privileges civic activism as the principal mode of social and spatial change (Friedmann, 1987;
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Fainstein, 2000; Campbell and Marshall, 2002; Healey, 2003, to name a few). Occupying one

extreme end, Purcell (2016) would thus argue that the State is an enemy of democracy and should

be excised from the conceptualization of “publics”. Yet, planning theorists also insist on the

importance of the state since the promise of planning requires the marshalling of resources at

multiple scales and the production of space is intimately tied to the regulatory regimes of

governments (Beauregard, 2015: 187; Roy, 2011; Porter, 2006; Huxley and Yiftachel 2000).

Reviewing emerging scholarship outside of the Global North, Watson (2013: 95-6) points to new

forms of engagements between states, citizens and planners and argues that the state should be

analyzed as “multiple actors who have agency and power, who operate within different

rationalities, and take positions (individually or in coalition) even within the disciplining effects

of laws, rules and regulation”.

This conceptualization of the state as constellations of actors and rationalities draws in part from

a socio-technical turn in planning and related disciplines. Influenced by actor-network theory and

studies in governmentality, a cluster of debates has developed around the question of agency

between human actors and the things they both produce and by which they are governed. Taking

planning work to be irreducibly heterogeneous and relational, the literature veers away from

normative theory to peer into the micro-politics of mundane activities. Here, it is the “neglected

spaces” (Beauregard, 2013), the “small work of planning” (Rydin, 2014), the “black-boxing

process” (Jacobs et al, 2007) and the “aperspectival objectivity of built form” (Yaneva, 2017) that

explain how different actors intersect and shape each other’s conditions of possibilities. The

political functions of the government are disaggregated and analyzed as specific institutions and

practices spread across all domains of society. Such studies often take the materiality of planning
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seriously by ascribing agency to objects produced by planners (Beauregard, 2015; McAllister,

Street and Wyatt, 2015; Moroni and Lorini, 2016). Hommels (2005), for example, shows that a

commercial zoning designated on a piece of paper, when realized in concrete, can longer be as

easily changed.

While these scholars do not necessarily place the “state” at the center of their analysis, their

attention to socio-technical practices resonates with how anthropologists of the state and

bureaucracy frame their objects of analysis. As Painter (2006, 754) notes, “a concern with prosaic

relations and practices adds a further challenge to reified understandings of the state …

Understanding states in terms of prosaic practices reveals their heterogeneous, constructed, porous,

uneven, processual and relational character.” From this perspective, the state and its bureaucracies

are not given and monolithic. Rather they are constantly being made and unmade, very often

through prosaic practices like the proper filing of documents and their deliverance to specific

persons and locations. By examining the everyday encounters with documents, state insignias and

bureaucrats, anthropologists point to the multiple ways in which bureaucracies make the “state”

palpable at the political and affective level and the kinds of counter-tactics that emerge in the

process (Navarro-Yashin, 2007; Heyman 2004; Lipsky, 1980). They argue that the “state” does

not always appear as something stable and impersonal. Bureaucracies and state agents also

intentionally generate instabilities because control can be more effective when documents are

deliberately withheld or rendered ambiguous through the lack of official status (Mathew, 2008).

Just as citizens can master technical language and the legal apparatus to challenge bureaucrats,

bureaucrats can also appeal to emotions or deliberately create ambiguities to advance their

objectives (Hoag, 2010; Tironi, 2013; Pérez, 2016). Nevertheless, as Hull (2012) and Gupta (2012)
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have shown, modern bureaucratic practices are often arranged so as to project the “state” as the

author of a collective future while diffusing individual responsibility at the bureaucratic level.

What can such a reorientation of the “state” bring to planning scholarship? The literature canvassed

so far has brought to surface a range of effects that reify the “state”, such as vertical

encompassment, authorship, objectivity and spatiality. These are immediately relevant to the

analysis of planning work. In particular, the case of Marina Bay in Singapore builds on Hull and

Gupta’s argument above by showing how the “state” comes into being as a unified and purposeful

entity that transcends both the bureaucracy and the historical moment it is located in. This

attribution of authorship is not only promulgated through discourse and symbols but also through

the technical and mundane practices of the planners in the bureaucracy. This process of reification

appears exaggerated in a thoroughly urbanized nation-state where the institutionalization of

centralized planning is inseparable from the ideologies of authoritarianism and developmentalism.

Second, many of the assumptions of centralized state-led planning can be analyzed as

consequences of its reification in planning practice and theory. The positive and negative tropes

associated with planning in authoritarian and postcolonial contexts are often extended from

metatheories about the nature of states and ignore how “states” are experienced and produced at

the prosaic level of everyday life (Abrams, 1988). Tania Murray Li’s (2005) response to James

Scott’s critique of authoritarian modernist planning, for example, argues against an “‘up there’, all

seeing state operating as a preformed repository of power” because it gives the “state” a coherence

and unity that it does not have. Rather, it is more productive to look closely at what planning

schemes and planners do, with all its messy and conjunctural effects. Given the malleability of the
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nation-state in today’s globalized context, and how governments are embedded in real estate

investment projects in and outside of their territorial boundaries, a vertical imagery of state-led

planning that contrasts “top-down” with “bottom-up” is woefully insufficient (Allen and

Cochrane, 2010; Brenner, 2004).

Finally, re-conceptualizing the relationship between planning and the state as relational networks

of practices, symbols, ideas and objects promises to expand the geographies of planning theory.

Without such a move, planning studies in the West which often feature local governments, private

consultancies and plural communities working on projects over a five or ten year timeframe would

seem incommensurable with a case like Singapore’s where government bureaucrats plan with

relatively little public interference over a twenty to fifty year timeframe. At the analytical level,

they are entanglements of agents that produce objects such as policies, plans and even the “state”.

Comparing her analysis of planning law in North America to Ghertner’s study of slum surveys in

India for example, Valverde (2011, 308) notes that “in New Delhi, city planners can easily shift

from scientific calculation to discussions about unsightly slums and offensiveness as convenient –

and the same epistemological eclecticism characterizes legal texts pertaining to the most advanced

capitalist cities”. This is not to ignore the very significant differences between planning ideologies

and institutional arrangements across the world, but that such differences should not foreclose

potentially productive dialogues that cut across existing geopolitical and ideological divides (see

also Devlin, 2017).

From such a perspective, Marina Bay in Singapore transforms from a case where the role of the

state is self-evident to one where this self-evidence becomes the object of critical analysis. I
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proceed by disaggregating the planning process of Marina Bay into three specific modes of

abstraction – calculation, historicity and imagination. Though they clearly overlap in practice, they

are effective as analytical lenses to identify the specific state-effects that emerge from the

individual and collective practices of the planners.

Calculation

The quinquennial reviews of the Master Plan from 1965 to 1985 follow a consistent structure of

quantitative analysis that is concerned ultimately with measuring and predicting the productivity

of the population and establishing the necessary socio-spatial conditions for economic growth and

social reproduction. In this structure, demographic trends, economic modelling and market

projections serve as a starting point that percolates downwards from the scale of the national

territory to individual urban precincts. Every five years, these numbers are updated to make sense

of the direction of development and the effects of past policies (Planning Department, 1965-85).

A typical flow of numbers would thus begin with fertility, death and immigration rates as a basis

for estimating the composition and size of the population, to the distribution and density of

residential, industry and commercial areas, the provision of certain types of amenities, the standard

sizes of housing units and open spaces, and the amount of new land to be created by reclamation

or other means.

What becomes apparent in this sequence of calculations is that land use planning could not proceed

without a hypothetical number established at the national level – a projected population ‘X’ by

year ‘Y’. In 1975, this hypothetical figure was 2.5 million by 1980. In the next review in 1980,

with the creation of the Ring City Concept Plan, a more ambitious and long-range hypothetical
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figure was established – a population size of 4 million by the early part of the 21st century (Chua,

1969: 65-9). Based on this hypothetical figure, planners extrapolated the required amount of land

and quantum of uses. Thus, two land use surveys conducted in 1975 and 1982 reported that while

land area had increased by an annual rate of 0.4% between 1982 and 1967, population growth grew

at a higher annual rate of 1.7% and that there were 8.8 million square meters of commercial floor

space, of which more than half was located in the downtown (Planning Department, 1982). These

numbers were subsequently used to justify a policy of decentralization to create regional

commercial centers and the expansion and concentration of the downtown at Marina Bay.

Because the hypothetical figure of “Population X by Year Y” is indispensable and marks the

beginning of the spatial planning process at the URA, it effectively links up the complex

bureaucracies of government into a vertically stratified division of labor. While this can be seen

simply as the actual administrative structure of the state, the question here becomes how these

series of calculations carried out by many different experts and departments produce the “state”

and what qualities are attributed to it. What 20 years of Master Plan reviews collectively present

is an effect of verticality where the system of numerical reasoning seems to originate from an apex.

“Population X by Year Y” is both the baton that is passed from one stage of calculation to the next

as well as the overarching singular logic that conflates national and urban planning. The

consistency of this number and its logic over 20 years generates a structure of appearance that

situates the “state” above society and across time. This consistency in the face of Singapore’s

dramatic postcolonial urban transformation further conflates the “state” with a one-party political

leadership that appears, at its core, unchanged.

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How did the planners at the URA contribute to this effect of verticality? By the time it came to

operationalize “Population X by Year Y” for the planning of Marina Bay, a more focused series

of calculations had to be carried out. A senior planner explains how Marina Bay was transformed

from a shapeless number into plan-form for urban development (Fig. 1):

Well you start with analyzing the need. For example, when we did Marina South, we did
a lot of study on what should be the total floor area. I can’t remember the details, but what
we did was to do an analysis of the total commercial land, that means office, retail and
hotels for Singapore, and then for a population of 5.5 million. Some of this should be in
neighborhood centre, some in town centre, some in regional centre, some at MRT stations,
and some here. We spent a lot of time calculating quantity, and came to a number [for]
here … And after that, with this number, divided by the land [area], we came up with our
first plan. (Interview A, July 2010)

This set of calculations gave shapeless quantities spatial and social attributes. Numbers were

translated into the medium of a plan which served to integrate all physical planning-related

parameters. Calculative practices thus establish a dynamic co-constitutive relationship between the

formal, spatial, functional and biopolitical dimensions of urban governance. Similar to accounting

techniques, such practices “translate diverse and complex processes into a single financial figure”

(Miller, 2001: 381) and in so doing, solve the problem of commensurability. Subsequently,

planners who were assigned to different districts received the composite sets of numbers and began

to translate them into urban form and image. A junior planner who was involved in the revising

the old plans for Marina Bay describes this exercise:

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We set up an excel sheet, logging in the final number. You can play with all the variables
– the parcels, the uses. We basically created all the parcels and uses on Excel sheets. The
uses are pretty much the same. Still pretty much ‘white’ peppered with residential. So we
made sure that the residential quantum and the final total GFA (Gross Floor Area) is
unchanged. Then, we distributed them around to play up these precinct ideas. (italics mine)
Interview B, May 2010

Similar to “Population X by year Y”, “logging in the final number” constitutes a critical moment

in producing the state-effect of verticality because what was passed down from the top became

fixed at the bottom of the planner’s spreadsheet. The planner’s account also shows how this “final

number” created a bounded space for the experimentation of urban form, or as this planner said,

“play up precinct ideas.” As such, the vertical flow of numbers does not assume an absolute

rigidity. Rather, “logging in the final number” is one technique that preserves the original number

of “Population X by Year Y” while changing its forms and functions across different departments

of the bureaucracy. Solving the problem of commensurability through numbers and moving them

sequentially downwards from a single source allows the “state” to emerge as a vertically unified

entity.

Yet, planners understood that the relationship between numbers, space and form was unstable, as

each review of the Master Plan and national priorities could alter the chain of calculations. In 1980,

it was reported that “with the further success of the family planning programme … it is now

expected that zero population growth will be achieved by 2030, when the ultimate population size

will stabilize at between 3,000,000 and 3,500,000” (Planning Department, 1980: 6). This number

and the logic behind it changed dramatically in 2013 when the Population White Paper was

released which attempted to justify why a projected population of 6.9 million was necessary and
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how to achieve that through immigration policies (National Population and Talent Division, 2013).

In between, economic recession in the 80s meant that development projects around Marina Bay

were postponed and only picked up in the 90s after senior politicians managed to persuade several

Hong Kong tycoons to invest in Singapore, which eventually led to the development of Suntec

City, one of the largest commercial projects at that point in time (Pow, 2002).

Thus, the infrastructure of numbers was always prone to breakdowns which could happen at any

point in the chain. Planners learnt over time to cope with the inevitable stabilities that were beyond

their control. A senior planner I interviewed revealed that a 30% contingency was usually added

to the projected quantum of space through a process of “bulking” (Interview B, Jun 2010). In his

recollection, the practice of “bulking” was a strategy to deflect political and development pressure

because by planning for contingencies, the plan could absorb unexpected demands and still retain

its overall integrity. He gave several examples of foreign investors who had the support of

politicians to develop projects outside of the parameters of the existing plan and how they could

be accommodated because there was enough “bulking” in the calculations.

These techniques sustain the overall effect of verticality at the level of everyday administration

such that vast bureaucracies composed of different expertise, interests and functions can appear to

act as a single monocephalous entity. But systems often reveal their internal complexities and

contingencies when they break down. This happened upon the release of the Population White

Paper when a series of public protests rallied against the official projection of a population of 6.9

million. A decade of liberal immigration policies, faltering public infrastructure and rising cost of

living all contributed to this widespread unhappiness. To defuse the tension, the Minister of

National Development assured citizens that “6.9” was not a target, but a “worst case scenario”

(Chin, 2013). Yet, neither the Master Plan reviews nor the Population White Paper had ever based
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this number on the logic of a “worst case scenario”. The Minister’s claim was a political move to

save the foundational number of “Population X by Year Y”. His direct intervention reveals that

challenging it is tantamount to challenging the highest office of government because without it,

the unity that is the “state” will fall apart into disparate numbers and questionable assumptions.

Historicity, or concept of history

Plans spatialize time and are often guided by a concept of history, whether it is the sense of radical

rupture in Modernist planning or archaic pastoralism in New Urbanism. For Marina Bay, there is

also a concept of history that has been recorded and preserved in the various planning reports

produced between 1980 and 2000. In these reports, Marina Bay is often narrated as the culmination

of Singapore’s historical evolution, and this idea of progress is to be materialized in the seamless

transition from the old downtown to the urban waterfront created by land reclamation (URA, 1989,

1992, 1996, 1997). If calculations constitute one mode of abstraction that is most visible and

actively encountered in everyday administration, the conceptualization of time is relatively

unconscious and invisible. Planners I spoke with were generally oblivious to how planning visions

express certain cultural attitudes about the relationships between the past, present and future. Yet,

as planners labored to realize the plans of Marina Bay, they inadvertently tied the aesthetics of

seamless urban growth to the “state” as the historical author of uninterrupted success.

Official planning reports and personal recollections of the planning of Marina Bay anchor its

genesis to two Master Plans produced by international architects, Kenzo Tange and Ieoh Ming Pei.

They were appointed in 1986 at the time when land reclamation at the bay was already underway.

Both were already well-known in Singapore, having worked with major corporate banks and
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government officials. Each produced a schematic plan for the new downtown with modern

skylines, promenades, plazas and landmarks to frame the bay (Figs. 2 and 3).

While Pei and Tange’s schemes share many common features in the distribution of land uses and

urban landmarks, they are organized according to fundamentally different geometries, and more

importantly, different spatializations of time. In Pei’s scheme, the historic urban grid that organizes

the old downtown is extruded into the whole of the reclaimed land. The extruded grid defines the

street patterns of the new downtown and the rectilinear profile of the waterfront. As such, the

overall urban pattern denies any sharply defined boundaries of transition – the old and new

downtowns become amalgamated into one single field rather than bearing any contrasting

relationship with each other.

Though Tange also envisioned the old downtown to grow seamlessly into the new, as articulated

in his formal report, a closer analysis of his scheme reveals a much sharper sense of change. The

break is located at the mouth of the Singapore River – a historical marker from which an arc is

inscribed as the curved profile of the new waterfront. At this important fulcrum, the Central

Promontory and its formal axis marks where the gridiron of the old downtown ends and where the

radial spokes of the new downtown begins. Accentuating the geometric difference between the old

and the new, Tange’s scheme deliberately leaves a strip of water that divides the downtowns. This

highly symbolic gesture means that the formal axis framed by the twin towers at the Central

Promontory serves a dual function: in addition to being a compositional center that unites the

expanded waterfront as a whole, as Pei’s scheme does, it also reads as a gate that keeps the old and

the new separate. This symbolism is not lost on Tange, who notes that the new buildings straddling
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this strip of water needs to be carefully designed to “exploit the full advantage of the topological

features of Telok Ayer Basin” (Tange and URTEC, 1983: Plan 7).

Therefore, within a general aesthetic of seamlessness, both schemes depart quite significantly in

materializing a concept of history. In Tange’s vision, the old and new read as two distinct chapters

in a larger story, such that the sense of progress is written indelibly at the urban scale as the formal

difference between the two downtowns divided by an artificial water inlet. Pei’s vision blends the

two downtowns together such that historical time is registered solely in specific architectural

elements within a unified and static urban whole. By denying the urbanistic distinction between

Marina Bay and the existing downtown as two separate phases of modernization, Pei’s scheme

creates a temporal tabula rasa where historical narratives can be flexibly recomposed as the city

expands and changes over time.

While Tange’s scheme fades away into institutional memory, Pei’s geometry has become more

visible and concrete as Marina Bay is developed in its image. Planners echo unconsciously this

difference between the two schemes when they emphasize the importance of growing the new city

“seamlessly” from the old, and this trope has been, over a series of revisions and planning reports,

technicalized into smooth pedestrian access, continuous urban landscaping, conservation of

specific buildings and other urban design features of the city.1 When the iconic Merlion statue was

moved 120 meters so that it would “once again stand as the gatepost at the mouth of Singapore

River”, the claim was plausible only because Pei’s geometry, unlike Tange’s scheme, has no

marker of time (Khoo, 2000:6-8) (Fig. 4). The small relocation was critical in maintaining the

1
For example, the report emphasizes that “office towers of varying heights will be blended with hotels and open
spaces on the Main Boulevard that runs from the Golden Shoe to the sea frontage at Marina South, around Bayside
and, of course, in the Central Subzone” (emphasis mine). URA, 1996: 20
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visibility of the statue in the ever-expanding landscape of the Bay while anchoring this expansion

in a seemingly static historic point at the mouth of Singapore River. Tracing how land reclamation

to create Marina Bay ultimately eclipsed the adjacent colonial Padang as a space of national

spectacles, Lai (2010: 66) argues that “such views of the altered land- and waterscapes of the city

provide a tangible record of urban achievement ... But what is gazed upon is also the state’s ability

to will forms into place to serve desired defined objectives” (italics mine). Indeed, Marina Bay’s

physical evolution is a powerful manifestation of a will that seems to transcend the intention of

any single planner or bureaucracy. It appears instead to emanate from a single source, the “state”,

as a singular historical actor whose career stretches uninterrupted from the mouth of the Singapore

River to Marina Bay.

The geometry and aesthetics of Marina Bay thus conflates urban transformation with historical

agency. This imaginary connection becomes reinforced through other cultural media produced by

the URA. On the official website of Marina Bay, for example, a historical narrative is woven that

begins in 1910, despite the fact that the bay was created ex nihilo out of reclaimed land in the 80s.2

Framing Marina Bay as “Singapore’s historic waterfront”, the narrative accelerates as historical

markers become denser and the present draws closer.3 The total effect of this accelerating

chronology attributes a singular cause and momentum to history, captured pithily in the website’s

headline: “21st century Singapore is a story of long-term thinking, far-sighted planning and

meticulous implementation.”4 Another space in which the “state” appears as a historical agent is

2
https://www.marina-bay.sg/about-marina-bay/marina-bay-story/1910-1996/singapore-historic-waterfront#1910
(accessed 25 Oct 2017)
3
The chronology leaps from 1910 to 1971, 1976, 1985, 1986 and 1996. Thereafter, there is an account every year
between 2001 and the present.
4
https://www.marina-bay.sg/about-marina-bay/marina-bay-story (accessed 25 Oct 2017)
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in the lobby of the URA. Glass (2018) has provided a detailed analysis of this gallery as a

performative space that asserts the sovereignty of the state and invites visitors and citizens to

participate in this visioning process. Here, a scaled model shows what Marina Bay will look like

when the plan is fully realized. It is constantly updated to reflect new developments, as if the

present is slowly but surely approaching the future. What is performed through this model,

therefore, a future of Marina Bay that is held constant and its completeness always apparent. The

importance of fixing the future is echoed by an ex-URA planner who explained that for investors

to choose Singapore over other neighboring countries where land price is much lower, “you must

believe that there is a Singapore story, that 20 years from now, 30 years from now, Singapore is

still around” (interview H, 2010). In his account, what gives this guarantee is the longevity of the

“state”.

By historicizing in terms of 20, 30 and even 100 years, this set of performances imbues Marina

Bay with historical coherence and predictability. These tropes are rehearsed in important

government sites, both physical and digital, and manifested in the urban landscape as Marina Bay

unfolds. Through such planning work, the state becomes reified as the author of the “Singapore

story” and the guarantor of uninterrupted success.

Imagination

As Hoag (2011: 81) notes, “bureaucracies generate collective agency, but it is achieved

paradoxically through the elaborately detailed individuation of action, and bureaucrat’s

professional survival relies on their careful and continual eschewal of authorship”. This paradox

reifies the “state” as a monolithic and univocal entity even though it is composed of many different
PENULTIMATE DRAFT

offices and individuals spread across the public and private sectors. The previous sections have

shown how, through specific modes of abstraction, the internal heterogeneity of the state was given

the appearance of verticality and historical agency. In this section, I ask how planning practices

produce the effect of separation between the collective (bureaucracy) and the individual (planner)

by attending to the planners’ imagination of Marina Bay. When planners described what they

envisaged, subjective meanings and associations peculiar to specific groups of planners that were

submerged in the plans and reports of Marina Bay came to the fore. As I will show, the “careful

and continual eschewal of authorship” was not absolute because planners did claim or recognize

individual authorship but this was sequestered in the private realm of their imagination.

As described earlier, the plans have undergone several iterations, beginning in the 1980s with two

proposals from Pei and Tange. Official reports published by the URA generally do not identify or

explain why various changes were made, focusing instead on the merits and logics of the new plan

that replaced its predecessor. These silences were filled in during the interviews as planners often

had to give justifications for major revisions and thus were very sensitive to them. One obvious

and significant change was the depressing of building heights fronting the bay so as to create a

more layered formal effect. As a result, the twin office towers at the central promontory were

replaced with a low-rise but equally iconic cultural center. The other major change was in the

programme of development – instead of focusing on two major axes of growth that extended from

the existing CBD, the new plans focused instead of ringing the waterbody as the initial stage of

development.
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In justifying this change, planners often referred to another place that served as a source of

aspiration. For the earlier generation of planners, it was the formal aesthetic of high modernism

that occupied their vision. Although Marina Bay was reportedly benchmarked against Baltimore

and Sydney’s Darling Harbor in the 1980s to define the size and shape of the land mass, the places

that the senior planners referenced to during the interviews were the Tiananmen Square of Beijing

and Central Park of New York. For the younger generation, it was the revitalized cultural

waterfronts of London (Canary Wharf), Shanghai (Pudong) and Rotterdam (also noted in Haila

2015: 161). The formality of high modernism had been replaced by a more exuberant version of

postindustrial urbanism. Their references echoed the choice of words used in reports published

between 1990 and 2010. In the earlier versions, “gracious”, “dignity” and “grandeur” were key

descriptors that justified a perimeter of high rise towers framing the waterfront. In the later reports,

to “humanize” meant that all buildings along the perimeter had to step down to create a more

human-scaled promenade. The descriptors changed to “exciting” and “vibrant”. Through the

planner’s narratives, many of the uncaptioned photographs used as fillers in the reports also

became identifiable as locations in these different cities.

Gesturing to other places as models of emulation is not uncommon in urban planning. The change

in references can be attributed to global shifts in the political-economic functions of urban

waterfronts over the last few decades (Bunnell, 2013; Roy and Ong, 2011). But this does not

account for the depth of aesthetic and experiential details that lay submerged in the planners’

imagination – from the kind of activities on the streets, the personal encounters they had while on

site visits, to hidden associations to places like the Tiananmen Square. These details are not visible

in the public documents, or merely hinted at with vague words and pictorial associations, due to
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the nature of these documents – the plans only record what are consequential to the statutory duties

of the URA, such as land use, infrastructure and development density, while the reports are

generally brief and do not explain every planning decision that was made. Their absence indicates

the limited capacity of these technocratic media to communicate subjective assessments of place

in a way that has practical implications for planning policies.

The separation evidenced in the planners’ imagination and the official documents is an effect of

planning work that requires planners to move between two realms – one which conforms to the

public regulatory duties of the authority and the other which resides in the private imagination

where the technocratic parameters of regulation are fully rendered with the vitality of urban life.

This separation allows the objective and subjective dimensions of planning to co-exist in the state

bureaucracy, albeit in different degrees of formal visibility. This is not to say that subjective

assessments of place undermine the “proper” procedures of planning or are impossible to regulate.

Rather, in the 1980s and 90s, the URA had not established the necessary apparatus to translate

rhetoric into action. Finally, around 2004, as large developments were launched at Marina Bay,

the Marina Bay Development Agency was set up within the URA to handle the “software” of the

bay. Its key roles included creating a consistent brand platform and a calendar of events in

collaboration with private stakeholders (Ching and Ng, 2007: 18-21). With the scope of its powers

enlarged and the necessary administrative mechanisms set up, aspects of these private pictures

began to be translated into concrete programmes, such as the annual Marina Bay Countdown party

and Formula One racing.

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The vivid details of the imagined Marina Bay also staged the arena where individual authorship

was recognized or claimed. During the interviews, planners were not focused merely on the major

changes in the plans. Rather, they often picked out details which to the casual observer would

appear insignificant – a ‘high point’ in the urban form, a ‘curve’ in the road, a ‘landmark’, a ‘view

corridor’. It became clear that what was at stake was not these specific elements per se, but a larger

vision in which these specific elements were symbolically potent. A senior planner, for example,

pointed me to the slight curvature of the roads in the otherwise gridiron layout – a small deviation

that was to him a crucial marker of distinction from other standard gridiron plans. This curvature

had been “regularized” after a subsequent review of the plan under the guidance of international

consultants, which he thought was a mistake.

The symbolic potency of these elements became especially obvious when two senior planners

excoriated the newer plans for capitulating to market volatility and aesthetic fashion, which they

contrasted with “sustainable” long-term planning and the “timeless” aesthetic of architectural

modernism. In defense of the older plans, they argued that the responsibility of the planner was to

look at a time horizon that far exceeded that of developers, architects or laypeople. For the new

generation of planners, they did not see the change in plans as short-termism or lacking in

discipline. Rather, they talked about pressures from competing cities such as Dubai and new

market demands. The change in the plans for Marina Bay between 1990 and 2000 was, for them,

not a failure to follow the vision, but an adaption to new opportunities and circumstances.

Like the subjective details of urban experience that are largely invisible in the planning documents,

such disagreements signal at an affective dimension of planning work that suffuses the
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bureaucracy. They coalesced around perceived differences in the normative principles of planning

as well as the responsibilities of public servants. In these disagreements, the symbolically potent

elements revealed themselves as authorial signs that gathered the vision, effort and identities of

those who produced that specific plan. To the outsider and casual observer, such signatures were

invisible, but to the government planner, they were potent affective triggers. Their erasure thus

elicited impassioned reactions from those who had invested much time and effort on them. Indeed,

though the plans of Marina Bay had undergone several revisions which often combined and

discarded elements from multiple sources (Yap, 2013), they never lost the aura of exception and

ownership.

The visibility and invisibility of authorial marks in bureaucratic documents produces political

effects, as Hull (2003) argues in his ethnography of files in Pakistan. In this case, the hidden

signature of the plan attracts a community of supporters who sees the same picture and are bound

by a sense of duty to protect and carry it into fruition. Some of planners’ reflections might over-

simplify the divide between the senior and junior planners but they clearly demarcate a boundary

of shared ownership amongst those who worked on the same plan. One senior planner who led the

team in the 80s said:

When I left, I tell you, all of us who worked there put our life and soul and set the structure very

well … They can spin it off for the next twenty years, and they still cannot go wrong … We draw

this [Plan] – it has to be real before you can draw it! Because this is what we expect to see! There

is a row of trees here. There will be buildings here, you imagine. (emphasis added)

Interview B, Jun 2010

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In his impassioned account, the plan has become more than a technical document. It has the weight

of a promissory utterance imbued with affect and moral obligation (Abram and Weszkalnys, 2011).

Other planners’ accounts might not put it as forcefully as him, but they nevertheless reveal an

awareness that in order for the imagined to become real, the plans need to stabilize and transmit

these visions compellingly to the next generation of planners. This is especially so when one is

planning over 20 to 50 year horizons which exceed one’s own career. As this senior planner insists,

the objective of the plan is to set a stable structure that will guide the development of Marina Bay

long after he leaves the bureaucracy. From his perspective, what is “real” and compelling is not

entirely visible on these plans – like the “trees” and “buildings” he points to, they reside in the

shared imagination of those who collaborated together under his leadership.

Imagination in planning work produces a separation between the collective and the individual in

the bureaucracy that allows subjective and emotive aspects of labor to exist alongside the

technocratic and legalistic procedures of public administration. This separation often maps onto

the private and public spheres of planning, as official and publicly visible documents cannot

adequately record the experiential richness of the imagined future and such culturally embedded

practices. Nevertheless, imagination in planning work is significant as it is what gives planners a

sense of ownership in their own products and makes the vision compelling enough for generations

of planners to follow. As such, grasping the effect of separation has implications for how one can

think about Singapore’s model of “long term planning” without attributing it to some inherent

capacity of centralized planning bureaucracies to project far ahead of electoral and market cycles.

In addition to understanding how institutionalized structures of planning administration change

over time, one should also take into account the transmission of cultural values within the
PENULTIMATE DRAFT

bureaucracy and their embeddedness in the plans as private vehicles of imagination. These two

spheres might not change at the same rate, and as this case shows, it is often in their separation

that plans appear to project from the “state” into reality.

Conclusion

Rather than characterizing planning in Singapore as a project led by the state, I argue in this paper

that planning and bureaucratic practices reify the “state” and attribute to it certain qualities and

statuses that appear to stand apart from the work of planning itself. Anthropologizing the state

means that Singapore’s model of “top-down” and “long-term” planning is not taken as a given.

Rather, it is the very appearance of “top-down” and “long-term” and its naturalness that should be

critically examined as a common process of abstraction. Planners within the bureaucracy orient

their activities and behaviors towards the “state” as if it is real, attributing to it powerful causal

influence and authority even though it is through their collective effort that the “state” is produced.

In an early call to critically re-examine the concept of the state, Abrams (1988:82) argues that “the

state is not the reality which stands behind the mask of political practice. It is itself the mask which

prevents us from seeing political practice as it is.” The distortionary effect of the concept of the

state in Singapore as a unified, benevolent and dominant entity has served as a convenient way to

explain Singapore’s economic success. This mask has similarly powerful effects in the domain of

urban planning, which this paper has deconstructed into verticality, historical agency and

separation. First, in their everyday work, planners contribute and are subjected to a vertical traffic

of numbers which conflates the work of many expertise and departments into a singular logic that

emanates from the apex of the system. Second, the plans of Marina Bay contain a concept of
PENULTIMATE DRAFT

history which transcends the work of individual planners. Planners may plan, but it is the “state”

that appears to be the visionary of Singapore’s artificially protracted century-long urban

transformation. And finally, by producing a separation between the private pictures of the

imagination and the public medium of the plan, planners personalize their products with a sense

of ownership while conferring a primary and objective status to the collective intent and object of

planning. These techniques collectively transfer authorship and agency to the “state”, and gives it

an overwhelming explanatory power in nationalist, professional and academic discourses.

Singapore presents a signature case where the “state” should be confronted as a black-box in the

Latourian sense (1999) - its success, particularly in the area of urban planning, has made politics

invisible to all but its insiders. There are however limits to the generalizability of the case. The

centralization and monopolization of planning by the government, the consolidation of land under

state ownership, and the longevity of the single ruling party after independence are the

preconditions of Singapore’s model of urban planning, a combination rarely found in other

advanced capitalist cities. Thus, the practices that constitute state-effects in the context of

Singapore may not produce similar effects in other cities. For example, many planning

bureaucracies around the world appear as vertical structures without necessarily transferring these

qualities to the “state”. And in the planning of sub-national or supra-national communities,

historical agency might reify specific persons or ideals instead. Singapore being a city-state, there

is also no distinction between the urban and the national imagination. In other cities and countries,

the intensity and nature of state presence might be differentiated across urban and rural

jurisdictions – something anthropologists have shown in detail through their studies of poor

communities living in and outside of cities.

PENULTIMATE DRAFT

Yet, it is precisely in working with these specificities that an analytic of the “state” as effects can

be most useful. Around the world, planners produce and are subjected to bureaucracies and their

politics are not constrained by the labels used to distinguish one type of polity from another.

Modern bureaucracies share many important similarities regardless of the functions they serve.

Anthropological studies are thus replete with examples of how bureaucrats navigate between

personal ethics and organizational loyalties or how arbitrariness is produced because, rather than

despite, of the rule-bound nature of bureaucratic work. The three overlapping modes of abstraction

analyzed therefore do not exhaust the range of state-effects that can be produced through planning

practices. Rather, they are indicative of the multiple modalities through which the “state” is reified

and point towards the need to bring practices, imageries and discourses into the field of analysis.

This in turn necessitates embedding planning work in bureaucratic structures of different scales so

that to understand the conditions that allow practices at the level of everyday work to concatenate

and conjure up the fictive reality of the “state”. Through such analysis, one can begin to ask

comparatively how “states” appear to have different forms, spatialities, agencies and ultimately

consequences, without compartmentalizing planning models based primarily on ideological or

geopolitical divisions.
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Fig. 1. The 1992 report shows how planners quantified the future and distributed specific quanta of space in
different precincts. This graph shows both the existing downtown and Marina Bay (labelled “Central” and
“Bayside”). Source: URA 1992: 10. © Urban Redevelopment Authority. All rights reserved.
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Figs. 2 and 3: Master Plans produced by Kenzo Tange (top) and I M Pei (bottom). Annotations added by author. ©

Urban Redevelopment Authority. All rights reserved.

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Fig. 4. The Merlion was moved from Site 1 to Site 2. Other marked sites show the alternative locations considered
by the URA. Source: Skyline, Jul/Aug 2000: 8. © Urban Redevelopment Authority. All rights reserved.

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