Co-creation is the MND way.

Singapore’s development should not and need not come at the expense of our heritage, identity and sense of belonging. MND recognises this and we have, through other means, tried to preserve our memories.

Physical markers are important but they are only part of a larger tapestry forming our national identity. As Singapore develops, trade-offs are inevitable. As it is, more than 7000 buildings are already being conserved.

MICA’s Singapore Memories Project is one of the many ways to document our past. Where possible, MND will consult and co-create together, eg. Rail Corridor, Documentation of Bukit Brown Cemetery graves and promoting responsible pet ownership.

MND pioneer Mr Lim Kim San once said, “Do you want me to look after our dead grandparents or do you want to look after your grandchildren?” From time to time, we do need to make difficult and unpopular decisions over land use

1. I think as all of us sit here today, I wonder, as we talk about our heritage and history, what are our memories of our past, of our growing up days, when we went to school. Stories our parents and grandparents told us. Ms Janice Koh shared about her growing up, her memory of going to Bukit Brown. I remember my parents – I have been taking pictures of Queenstown as there have been a lot of developments there, I remember my parents brought me to Queenstown when I was young. I remember the along the streets, I remember the cinemas, which are now churches, I remember when we went to cinemas in the old days we bought kacang putih in newspaper cones. I do not know whether they are still around, or at the hawker centre there that has recently been torn down. I will always remember the yew char kway stall. I always marvelled at the way he kneaded the dough, the way he made the yew char kway. I would go home and practice it with plasticine and things like that. We remember many things from our younger days and they are all precious. Many of these places that we reminisce about and talked about as well have made way for housing and other developments.
2. All of us have our memories and these memories are precious and unique. But our children will also create their own stories and create their own memories. We can bring our children to some of these places that mean a lot to us, and they will take on board our perspectives, our stories. But they will create their own, and the cycle continues. In many ways, today’s moments becomes past memories for our children when they look back in the future. I understand where Mr Charles Chong, Ms Janice Koh and many of you are coming from. As I do the many passionate Singaporeans who champion the Bukit Brown cause or that of their alma mater, or of the various locations around Singapore that holds meaning to them. I do also understand that many of us sometimes wonder if we are changing too fast. What price, development?
3. We must not forget our past. The issue at hand, as many of you have shared, really is about our identity and our sense of what it means to be Singaporean, our sense of what it means to be Singapore. It is about our spirit, it is about our soul. I think, often, we do not talk about these things enough.
4. Where does it all start? We know the emotive stories leading up to our independence and thereafter but our history goes way beyond 1965…beyond the heroic accounts of Lt Adnan during the Second World War…and even before Raffles. We all grew up with tales about Sang Nila Utama and his exploits. Real or otherwise, it will all make up part of our history. Our history provides us with a sense of who we are. With the passage of time, stories are interwoven with documents, images, captions, virtual constructs and physical markers left behind by design or chance.
5. Last week, we talked about culture, we talked about art. Those things, together with our stories, define who we are as a people. We are a young nation but that should not discount us from valuing a very rich heritage that all of us share. These memories are anchors to our past even as we look forward to our future. This is why we can proudly call ourselves Singaporeans and not just any global citizen.

Celebrating Our Heritage and Roots

6. When I came to MND, one of the first things I wanted to know what was being done on this front. Like many, I also wondered, are we developing too fast, or are we tearing things down when we should not.
7. It has been eye-opening and a humbling experience. I will say this, quite definitively: my colleagues in URA care a great deal about these things. In our earlier years, our urgent priorities were to quickly develop, get the economy right so that we can provide jobs for our people, and house our people. But we also realised, as pointed out earlier, that if we were not careful, we were beginning to lose some of our precious past. URA’s conservation arm was set up to ensure that we tread carefully. Many areas and buildings, as you can see from the slide, were deliberately saved from urban renewal. Today, we have conserved over 7,000 buildings and earmarked our oldest urban areas like Kampong Glam, Little India, Chinatown and Boat Quay for conservation. In fact, we drive past many of these developments every day, and we have actually taken them for granted and we forget. As Mr Low Thia Khiang pointed out last week, although we talk about heritage and history, sometimes not enough people visit them, and I think we should encourage more people to visit all these areas that have been kept. It is, and I want to emphasise this, not about economic and it is not about its development value, because if it were, many of these sites would have been long gone in order to maximise plot ratio.
8. In this vicinity around Parliament House, you will see the work of URA and other agencies like NHB and the Preservation of Monuments Board. This area was first set aside by Raffles in the 1820s as the Administrative district. Today, many of its buildings and civic uses have been retained.
9. The Old Parliament House just behind us, at its core, is Singapore’s oldest building. It is now a venue for arts programming.
10. The Old City Hall is where the Japanese surrendered and where self-rule was proclaimed, where our parents paid their PUB bills and where couples still go there to take their wedding portraits. This will soon be one half of The National Art Gallery.
11. I will add that our natural environment is also very much part of our heritage. We declared Bukit Timah and Central Catchment as Nature Reserves; they harbour one of the richest sources of biodiversity in the region. Thanks to the efforts of National Parks Board and stakeholders like the Nature Society of Singapore, we can continue to appreciate our natural heritage and bring people there, such as to some of our treetop walks. The majestic hornbills, for example, which used to be extinct in Singapore, can once again be seen and heard on our island as we try to bring some of the wildlife back into the city.
12. There is so much that we should celebrate and be proud of. No one is like us. We are an entire nation squeezed into just over 700 sq km. We need to decide how best to allocate land to live, to work and play, and as Mr Laurence Lien commented earlier, to build communities, and we have to decide how best to, at the same time, preserve our environment, our heritage and our history. Few cities, if any in the world, need to make these choices, because most if not all of the cities are part of a much larger country.
13. Clearly, conservation is but one part of a larger story to celebrate our history and heritage. We should also focus our energies on ways to document our stories and to share them. To be proud of the history and heritage that we already possess. Stories and memories make all the difference.
14. MICA plays a very important role in this. I fully agree with what Minister Yaacob shared on Friday. MICA’s Singapore Memory Project builds on much work already done over the past years and takes it further. It is an exciting and I think very meaningful project where all Singaporeans should come on board and add upon it. With advancements in technology, we can now collect and share memories in ways we could not before. We can weave our heritage together, individual by individual, memory by memory. And I think we need to move fast, because with the passing of time, as the older generation passes on, we need to capture those stories before it passes on.
15. NHB will continue to create heritage markers, and that remains important, and to bring trails to life to educate and inform Singaporeans. National Library Board and National Archives will also continue to document and promote our collective stories and memories. There is very much more that we still need to try and capture and to document.

The Necessity of Trade-Offs in Our Land

16. And what about Bukit Brown Cemetery? You will realise that it is part of a much larger fabric that is our history and heritage.
17. I will say this: I believe that Bukit Brown is very rich in heritage value. Many of our forefathers who built this nation, such as Lim Chong Pang, Lim Nee Soon, Chew Boon Lay and of course, Chew Joo Chiat are buried there. Indeed, these names remain familiar to us because parts of Singapore are named after these pioneers. But the legacy of these pioneers does not just lie with the tombstones at Bukit Brown. It lies with their work among us. Those things can be celebrated as well.
18. In fact, this is why the Government had taken such a long time and deferred our development plans for Bukit Brown. Ms Irene Ng asked us not to rush. We have not. The 2 km long road across the cemetery will replace Lornie Road – we were looking at replacing Lornie Road with this stretch that will cut across Bukit Brown. This is part of the Outer Ring Road System. It is not a new thing. This Outer Ring Road has been around since the British days. What it does is it enables motorists to bypass the city. There is already a traffic jam at Lornie Road during peak hours, and the new road is urgently needed, not simply just for future developments but it is needed because housing is being developed in the northeast and northern part of Singapore. It represents part of the network to allow people to move back and forth, not just people driving, but public transport as well.
19. Ms Faizah Jamal asked if we considered other options. We did. Our efforts to enhance public transport, and manage and optimise traffic flows will continue. However, the road is required for the Outer Ring Road System, so we are left with few options. We considered widening Lornie Road, but that would have encroached into the Central Catchment Nature Reserve and it would also entail land acquisition, which, where we can, we try to minimise and avoid. A viaduct – that was something we had also considered, but it would have also had similar impact. For example, road diversion would have been required during the process of building some of these viaducts. Tunnelling - a tunnel would have caused more damage to the cemetery as major tunnels are typically constructed by the cut and cover approach, meaning you cut this hole for the tunnel and then you cover over it. Boring – if you were to bore the tunnel, for example, you do not have a bore that is large enough to create this 8-lane road, but you would have to create 3 separate tunnels in order to create that. You would have to go deep, but at the ends again, you would have to have the cut-and-cover method to provide for the exit points. And that would again cause quite substantive damage, more so than the road would. So the proposed road was decided upon because it had the least impact.
20. Our planning process also required agencies to evaluate the impact of the proposed road on the environment. PUB and National Parks Board studied the drainage requirements and its impact on the environment before the plan was approved. LTA is also carrying out a biodiversity study to address specific concerns arising from the road works. We are exploring – and I think it is quite possible – and we will ensure that wildlife can continue to traverse within the Bukit Brown area. Ms Jamal’s concern about drainage is valid, but for Bukit Brown Cemetery itself, development will not be taking place there until 20 years and beyond.
21. How about the rest of the cemetery, having decided on proceeding with the road? Most of our projected plans for housing will only be affected much later. In the nearer term, the southern part of the area, which largely centres around the Old Police Academy, will be developed for public housing, as an extension of Toa Payoh, which is why the whole area there is significant from a housing perspective. Toa Payoh, in fact, used to be called An Xiang Shan. It used to be a cemetery, as with Tiong Bahru, as with Bishan. These are now homes for many, many Singaporeans. In these places, our children are growing up, and forming their new memories of these new places themselves.
22. Plans for Bukit Brown were surfaced many years ago as part of the Concept Plan. And as the Concept Plan says, there will be public consultation, getting stakeholders to share their views. With the surge in interest, I asked for these plans to be re-surfaced, to go through in detail again to see if we had missed anything. Could we have shared better to the public at the earlier stages? I think we could have. Some of these things which we have provided to various groups, we could have done it perhaps on a much broader basis. But not all plans can be shared beforehand, largely due to market sensitivity especially where land acquisition could take place. And inevitably, it is our responsibility to make the final call on the trade-offs between competing land needs. I have been corresponding with many who actively champion the Bukit Brown cause. One shared with me that he felt moved when he was brought round the cemetery. I know how he felt. I feel it too, every time I go there to run and to explore the place, to bash through the bushes and stumble along new tombs that had been overgrown with plants and trees. The earlier exhumations at Tiong Bahru many years ago also raised similar community concerns. Recalling the opposition then, the late Mr Lim Kim San had asked a group who came to see him, and I quote: “Do you want me to look after our dead grandparents or do you want to look after your grandchildren?”
23. Mr Lim’s thoughts still ring true today. How do we preserve the past while we build the future? I will say this: this is a very difficult decision, but it is a decision we need to make.

Remembering our Past, Co-creating our Future

24. Given our development plans, does this mean that the heritage of Bukit Brown and our other historical areas are lost to future generations? I think not. Last week, Mr Laurence Lien and many of you here shared about empowerment and the need to be able to participate and I agree. There are areas that we should co-create. And Singaporeans have stepped forward.
25. Since October last year, the URA has been funding the documentation of around 5,000 graves which may be potentially affected by the road. Dr Hui Yew Foong championed this initiative and is now leading the effort. He has brought on board Dr Loh Kah Seng, who is helping to capture the stories which are important and Dr Gan Su-lin is exploring how best to record the religious and cultural rites involved with exhumation. I think many of these rites and practices will fade with time if we do not document them. I want to also recognise the work of the many volunteers who stepped forward and put in many hours. I visited them recently and met volunteers such as Ms Wendy Tan and Mr Chua Seng Huat who, coincidentally, are from my constituency, architecture post-grad students Zhen Ru and Qiao Ling, and champion documenter Mr Seow Kit Chua whose record is documenting 41 graves in half a day!
26. There is still actually very much more that we can do together. I am discussing with some of you who care for this part of our history and with our various agencies about our next steps and to explore actively what else we can do to retain, capture and promote this story that is Bukit Brown. And this is again, I would say, part of a much, much larger story which is about where we come from and who we are. This is not the end of the road.
27. In similar fashion, we formed a consultation group, comprising nature lovers, heritage buffs, cyclists and the like to discuss how best to shape the future of our Rail Corridor. That is also another important part of our history and heritage and our biodiversity. We have a vision together, that indeed a continuous green strip can co-exist and complement developments along the corridor. Work goes on to define that space together.
28. Co-creation also extends to other areas like our common space where we work on how best to take a more compassionate approach towards our pets and dogs and animals. Mr Yeo Guat Kwang spoke about a more responsible pet ownership ecosystem and how we can streamline and update regulations for pets. This is something that we are going to work on, again with many of the stakeholders.
29. Promoting responsible pet ownership is an area where we need to work with the community. I would particularly like to acknowledge many of the animal welfare groups, many individuals who have come forward, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA), which has shared with us a proposal to enhance animal welfare legislation. We are working on this year.

Conclusion

30. Mr Chairman Sir, Singapore’s development should not and need not come at the expense of our heritage, our identity and our sense of belonging. We have been able to conserve and preserve much. But we do also need to make hard choices on how our land is used. That is the reality that we face. When we are unable to preserve certain aspects of our heritage, it does not mean that we do not care; it does not mean we have no regard for who we are. We can and must conserve and celebrate it in different ways.
31. This journey in building our nation has to be taken together as we remember our past and build our futures. There is much that we should take pride in. And there is much common space for us to work together on.
32. Our Singapore story is a special one. What makes us who we are can be found here, in our heads, and here in our hearts. And nothing, no development, can take that away from us. Thank you very much.