Just came across the excellent Remembering Singapore site, whose recent post on Singaporean urban legends adds a new dimension to the mission to colonise the underground:

It is said that when Singapore was building the Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) in the mid-eighties, the then-Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew consulted the highly respectable Venerable Hong Chuan about the plan. The latter warned that the tunnelings would severely damage the excellent fengshui of the island, and the only solution was to ensure all Singaporeans carry a bagua (octagon diagram) with them.
But this was impossible among the different races and religions, so PM Lee thought of an excellent idea: to design the new $1 coin with the shape of a bagua, so that it would be carried by all Singaporeans.
This urban legend was made believable due to the coincidence of the timings: The new $1 coin was launched in September 1987, just two months before MRT began its first operation.
A further addition to the rumour was the road tax label, also in the shape of an octagon, which means every car on the roads of Singapore would be carrying a bagua too.

I’d heard that the shape of the dollar coin was intended to give everyone a bagua to carry, but it never occurred to me to wonder what sort of geomantic effect building an MRT system would have. Fascinating.

A while ago I was thinking about what looked like a change of attention amongst Singapore’s planners and developers away from the horizontal and towards the vertical:

Singapore definitely seems taller. But lots more of it seems to be underground as well. There are new connectors between Wheelock Place and Orchard MRT, a new subway between City Mall and Suntec, three new floors of shops below ground in Ion mall. Rather than reclaiming land horizontally, from the sea, and eventually from Indonesia and Malayasia, Singapore seems to be reclaiming it vertically. No new territory, as far as the map is concerned: instead, they’re using engineering to overcome the physical resistances of densely-packed earth and thin, unsupportive air to fit more people (and businesses, and advertising) in the area they already have, in the same way that engineering and ambition enabled them to reclaim vast areas of land from the sea. It must be easier than facing the political resistances that limit horizontal expansion. Or perhaps it’s a way of overcoming them: tunnels between malls in Johor Bahru and Woodlands must surely already be on a planner’s laptop somewhere.

I just came across the Economic Strategy Committee’s report, published on the 30th January 2010, a month before my speculation on the change of axis. About three-quarters of the way through, there’s this recommendation from the committee:

Adopt a long term perspective and invest ahead to create new land and space. While we can expand our land mass through reclamation as we have done for Marina Bay, there will be limits in the long-run. In the next 10 years, the government should seek to catalyse the development of underground space as a means to intensify land use. We should put in place enablers for underground development such as by developing a subterranean land rights and valuation framework, and by establishing a national geology office. We must also develop an underground masterplan to ensure that underground and aboveground spaces are synergised, and invest in the creation of basement spaces in conjunction with new underground infrastructural projects (e.g. rail), so as to add to our “land bank”.

Subterranean land rights and valuation framework, and an underground masterplan. Making sure above and below are lined up. And adding to a store by creating more empty spaces. As usual, Singapore is a few steps ahead of my imagination.

This is a first go at summarising something I’ve become a lot more interested in recently: how to talk about place in accounts of the future. It’s a draft, not polished, but it’s here because I want to talk about practical ways of exploring these located futures, and I want the rationale up somewhere first. Later this year I’ll be talking about these ideas at the World Futures Studies Conference in Penang.

Considering the future is widely reckoned to be a useful and productive undertaking, giving groups and individuals confidence in the decisions they take in the present, informing their goals and aspirations and helping them to try to anticipate and respond to change, with some authors calling for a greater recognition of the value of learners engaging with accounts of the future within current curricula (Facer & Sandford, 2010; Slaughter, 2008; Damasio, 2003; Hicks, 2002). There are a number of different approaches towards engaging with the future employed by different sectors – policymakers, corporate strategists, social science researchers, product designers – but they share a common desire to consider the future as open, a need to offer compelling stories of future events or behaviours, and, usually, an obligation to provide an appropriate level of evidence in support of these stories. In many cases, this need for robust accounts of the future capable of engendering confidence in their utility leads to the use of quasi-scientific language and methodologies, borrowing ways of describing and valuing the world from domains that are trusted to talk about future events, such as engineering or economics.

Adam and Groves (2007) describe the social imperatives that lead to this “scientific” approach towards producing accounts of the future, and suggests that they arise from a dominant ideological perspective that encourages us to consider the future as open, unclaimed and susceptible to colonisation: by constructing futures as immaterial and “extraterrestrial”, elites are free to operate without considering the material consequences of their actions. Introducing Bauman’s (1998) description of “the great war of independence from space”, they note that accountability and responsibility are notions that are strongly coupled to territory, and by projecting their actions into a placeless and abstract domain, these elites are able to evade their legal and moral obligations to communities experiencing the consequences of those actions. Castells (2009) describes a similar state of affairs in discussing the “mythical future time” mobilised by corporate planners, and the way in which their work projects the present-day values of the powerful into the future. In both these descriptions, what leaves the future open to colonisation is the way in which it is represented as abstract, immaterial, placeless, remote, general and unconnected to the present we experience and inhabit. This representation of the future positions it as a resource to be exploited, rather than the dwelling of real people to whom we owe the same moral obligation as those existing now (Groves, 2007).

If it is the remoteness and abstraction of futures as commonly represented that works to obstruct positive social action, then, there is a need to discover a way of constructing possible futures that allows people to connect to real, actual places and people. By accepting the immaterial and de-spatialised futures of powerful elites, we abdicate the right to act in our interests and abandon our future lives to those who have different interests to our own. We need a way of representing futures as connected, placed, real, local and enmeshed within networks of being in order to resist these forces.

Drawing on authors in the ecological tradition (e.g., Berry, 1977; Leopold, 1966), who have drawn attention to the need for societies to recognise the value of place and the ways in which elements of ecological systems – including human beings – are interconnected and interdependent, and on writers in the field of education futures (particularly Slaughter, 2004 and Hicks, 2002), this paper develops the notion of ‘located futures’ as just such a way of representing futures.

Located futures are accounts of alternative futures articulated in relation to a particular place: more broadly, they are futures that have been constructed with a sensitivity to the rootedness and located nature of lived experience. Futures are inescapably located – they happen in some place. By paying attention to what might come to pass in a particular location, it becomes possible to recognise the difference between this and the futures that happen elsewhere, offering an opportunity to counter the general and homogenous quality of the dominant futures constructed on behalf of and in the interests of corporate entities, and connecting those who currently inhabit that place with those who are yet to do so.

Subsequent work will describe the notion and derivation of ‘located futures’ in relation to the domain of education, explore the ways in which they might extend our capacity for embedding futures thinking within learning, and consider some practical applications within a learning context.

The above is a picture of a piece by Niklaus Rüegg, set in a village on the border between France and Belgium.

I want to make a game with this idea, handing out the same 16 frames to teams with cameras and imagination and seeing what they bring back. Everyone gets a “Suddenly..!”, a “POW!” explosion, a “Meanwhile, back at base..”, and a “But – “, and maybe a few dry-erase speech balloons, and an afternoon to go and use the city as their source. Maybe commuters crowding onto a train could be recast as henchmen rushing to their stations. Or a flock of pigeons could be accompanied by a single “Fly, my pretties!”. Or a frame could be strapped to a bike for authentic speed lines.

I’ve got no idea how you’d judge it. Perhaps you’d get credit for smuggling in certain locations, or for particular themes, or for managing to subvert comic convention, or just for running around town in spandex dressed as Captain Super. Perhaps the best one would be from the team of film students who make a comic out of other people making comics, though that could just as likely be the worst. Maybe the most popular one would be a collaboration between a six-year-old and their grandpa.

Anyway, I’d like to see it, and if I make it back to Bristol in time for the next Igfest I might see if I can do something about it.

Berg and Dentsu have made Suwappu, toy animals imprisoned in tiny digital pens that follow them wherever they go, tolerant and understanding of the dark inner lives each lead and the destructive impulses that follow bad dreams, dreams made of unbalanced psyches and snippets of the commercial fog surrounding them. At the mercy of promotional messages from car manufacturers and record companies, they struggle to connect their debilitated and half-formed consciousnesses, trying to assert basic values of trust and dependence as best they can with their stunted minds.

Their situation reminds me of the sort of existential struggles Russell Hoban’s toy characters live with, the drummer and the clock in the Mouse and his Child, the wind-up tin frog in love with La Gioconda, with their personalities crushed almost into nothingness by the constraints of their form and experience, tiny glimmers of self trapped in a hallucinatory interdimensional timelessness. I don’t think Badger will ever stop having bad dreams.

Update: Rodcorp adds what I want to call suwappu fanfic – love the Riddley Walker/primal tone, brilliant – very We3