As the urban design director for the Department of City Planning in New York, Alexandros Washburn knows a thing or two about what makes an urban space tick—including our Little Red Dot. We pick his brains on how a city’s past affects its present, and why Singapore can be a “creative laboratory” for the world.
You know, when you come in from the airport through the landscaping of the connector road, when you see the buildings that have a terracing of green; you start seeing this integration of nature in an otherwise technological city. I think what it says right off the bat is that there are many layers going on here.
Was there a sense that the physical landscape mirrors what many think of as Singaporean characteristics, like organisation or an adherence to rules?
I know Singapore has this reputation for rules and the like, but I don’t see that as its primary characteristic. It’s more of a layering of different objectives like the cultural, economic, social and interpersonal, which are being integrated into a very compact space.
So what’s it like to see the world through an urban designer’s eyes? Does your work change the way you look at the world?
Oh, completely! You read the city constantly. There’s so much that you can understand from the marks on the stones and streets… You know, you are always looking for clues. And I think if you’re attentive, you can see things that reveal an enormous amount about the present and the past of a city. Something that interests me particularly is how the past affects the present.
How so?
Well, you go to an ancient city like Athens, for example. It’s very instructive to take a walk in a straight line. It’s just something I love to do in different cities, where you start at one point and try to go as far as you can in a straight line. So for instance you start at the Acropolis, and you walk on Aeolus Street, through the ancient Roman forum, into the 19th century corner, into the modern corner of the city…. And you can tell things that went on during that time.
The orderliness during the Roman period is reflected in the width of the streets and paving. And then there’s a certain haphazardness that appears when there was no central government. Then, in the 19th century when the Europeans installed a monarchy, there was a new kind of block form that was put in, which was orderly and serene. And of course that was modified in the 1960s when a new way of building happened, and those ratios were distorted. That reflected a different society at that point.
So there are these macro-hints that you can see. Y’know, an empire falls and the width of a street changes. Because cities grow over such a long time, you can read so much about the city by looking at its physical traces, the way you can almost tell how old a tree is by counting the rings in its trunk. There’s a basic tenet that over time, cities don’t lie. They accurately reflect who we are as opposed to who we imagine ourselves to be.
So walking in a straight line almost becomes like a physical timeline, a walk through history, doesn’t it? Did you ‘walk that walk’ when you first visited Singapore?
Yeah. They suggested a hotel near the URA, which is close to Chinatown. So you’re walking through the storefront of a three-storey rowhouse – you call them shophouses, is that the correct term?
And then you come up through a couple of winding streets and reach the Pinnacle@Duxton (a public housing project in the heart of the city). We took an elevator hundreds of feet in the air, and there was this jogging track…! Okay, there’s your Athenian experience of change, but accelerated to a timeframe of hundreds rather than thousands of years. And given a third dimension: a vertical dimension.
So I think the Singaporean relationship of that layering is fascinating. The relationship of this jogging track in the Pinnacle to the shop fronts and winding streets of the place labeled Chinatown and the older neighbourhoods… It’s really indicative of where a city has wanted to go. And a hundred years from now, people will judge that much more clearly. It’ll show not just the aspirations, but the result.
Well, there will certainly be something next to it…but I don’t know in what way it will make it feel old. Is the future simply bigger and taller? I don’t think so. I think Singapore is actually blazing an experimental trail of integrating natural elements into the buildings, like the LUSH programme. So my hope is that Singapore is kind of a laboratory where buildings and nature intertwine more and more.
Maybe 80 years from now when the next Pinnacle is built, it won’t even look like a building. Maybe it’ll look entirely like a landform, and be as natural as a rainforest.
You mention a great ancient design rule in your book: “No street shall be narrower than the width of a laden donkey,” which conjures up some great images! Are there any similar rules that cities should be reminding themselves of?
Well, for me the one unchanging rule relates to a pedestrian, a citizen. We take “rule” to mean “law”, but it also means a measure or reference, like a measuring ruler. Man as a measuring device stays permanent, in my book. Cities lost their way, in a sense, when they gave up on a human being as the touchstone for all dimensional decisions. Just like the ancient city had the rule of the laden donkey, I think the width of the walking citizen, or when it comes to kids, the width of a double stroller, is important.
You say you view Singapore almost as a ‘lab’ for future urban design around the world. Do you think because of its small size and its need to be creative, that it can be a role model for other countries?
Yes, I think absolutely Singapore is a laboratory. It’s got a great combination of creativity, resources and unified action, which makes urban design scale experiments possible in a measurable timeframe. The corollary of this is that Singapore can’t make mistakes, right? It can experiment, but it can’t afford to make mistakes, because it has so little land. That makes the stakes very high.
It reminds me of when [famed US politician] Henry Kissinger was asked, after he had left the State Department, how he liked life as a well-paid consultant. And he said, “I hate it. The stakes are too low.” [Laughs] So really, Singapore has the need to get something right, get it done quickly, but also inspire. That’s why I like the Marina Barrage project. It does so many things right.
Yes. I think the human attitude to nature has swung substantially. Originally when we came to live in cities, we feared nature. We wanted a place that was safe from predators around us. And in the 19th century, when industrial production got so high, we realised that our byproducts threaten nature too.
We turned to the situation where we are so damaging to nature; we felt we had to protect nature from ourselves. That’s the current paradigm through which nature is being viewed. I think that paradigm is changing, and I think Singapore is at the forefront of that change.
*Article first appeared on http://www.goingplacessingapore.sg/people/2013/NYCUrbanDesignChiefAlexWa...