In Singapore, it is nearly impossible to get oneself buried. And even harder to stay so. Since independence, most of the island’s traditional graveyards have been razed, and their occupants disinterred. The last major historical site, Bukit Brown, is about to be remade as a highway. It might seem contradictory, then, that greater numbers of the living may soon be able to work, shop, and play beneath the ground. This is not actually as inconsistent as it would first appear. Due to the specter of land scarcity, Singaporeans are quite used to regulations that tell them which parts of the nation’s soil they may occupy—and under what circumstances. Interestingly, however, the announcement by the Ministry of National Development of a subterranean master plan has been greeted, from some quarters, with unease.
This reaction is understandable. The underground has traditionally been a domain of fear. Recessive spaces, we believe, are where bad things happen. Humanity has viewed caves, cellars, and tunnels with revulsion, as the very opposite of its natural environment. In many cultures, these are the imagined home of dangerous and unclean creatures: trolls, witches, and monsters. They are also the rude dwellings of pre-moderns and anti-moderns. The “caveman” is the very discursive foil, the vulgar Other, of the urbanite. Normal people, we assume, need a very compelling reason to flee the light. Isn’t the most disturbing of all uncanny possibilities to be buried alive? Anthony Vidler, and before him Edgar Allan Poe, certainly thought so
In the Atomic Age, stone chambers and caverns were where the wildest phantasmagorias of national security became real. Pop media cast them as the hangouts of super-villains—the “underground lairs” of Doctor Evil and Blofeld. In reality, these provided control spaces for Cold War black-ops and nuclear infrastructure. Stereotomic projects are directly linked, at least in the American public mind, with the mobilizations of a defense shadow-state, an occult geography of black sites and mind-boggling earthworks. Most famous are “Site R” in Pennsylvania, and the Virginia DARPA command post, both concealed in hollowed mountains. Even scarier were the countless missile silos of the Armageddon, and their doomy accouterments, such as the underground micro-rail system of Washington, DC.
Unsurprisingly, this quiet undermining of the transparent, democratic world with colossal excavations is a key feature of the conspiracy landscape. It’s X-Files stuff. In his recent Bleeding Edge, Thomas Pynchon listed the “vast underground facility” among “all the paranoid production values”: exotic weapons, space aliens, time travel, and other dimensions.[1] The revival of Promethean digs—in Mexico, Japan, the USA, Finland and Canada, as well as Singapore—cannot help but trigger an historical anxiety. This is particularly acute, given today’s climate of Cold War revanchism. We have a once-again imperial, autocratic Russia run by former KGB, and an increasingly alarmist and extra-legal American intelligence sphere. These engage one another at classically geo-political “shatter belts” (read: Syria). Elsewhere, the glamour of Le Carré’s cloak-and-dagger world seems to be back, for the internet age, in Edward Snowden’s airport escape. Unsurprising, then, that excavation might suggest sinister associations.
This is even more the case because, in a strange and perhaps predictable mirroring, the underground is also historically associated with weirdos of various stripes. The word evokes radicals, criminals, and insurgents. This secondary meaning is what Haruki Murakami captured in his book of the same title: the disturbing symmetry between the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult and the Tokyo subway system that they attacked with sarin gas. The world below is where infrastructure merges with apocalypticism. As the film Take Shelter (2011) made clear, it is still the notional refuge for those obsessed with the coming storm. Here, again, the technical meets the insane.
It is against this cultural backdrop that Singapore’s underground city proposals have come to light. They are actually of different types, intended for varied occupants and programs. The MND’s master plan will apparently be a first step in coordinating these at a national scale. Most remarkable, and perhaps most discussed, is JTC’s plan for an underground “science city” beneath Kent Ridge Park. This would provide laboratory facilities, and presumably a welter of supporting programs, for 4,000 researchers. Renderings show five floors, connected to the surface via deep light wells, and punctuated by mature trees of the species Arbor photoshopensis—the only kind known to thrive under such conditions. The cost of land for developing large-scale institutions provides a major spur for such schemes, and could outweigh the expense of digging in unreliable soil formations, and against a high water table. A more workmanlike scheme is the one at Jurong Island, where five rock caverns will be used as an oil storage facility, thus clearing room on the surface for industrial land.
The Jurong Island project avoids the problem of people. As such, it is unlikely to cause much of a stir. As always, it is the human questions that raise alarm. How will the occupants cope without direct access to sunlight, views, or fresh air? We might ask, also, about the ecological footprint of a complex that must be artificially aerated, illuminated and protected from water infiltration. At first blush, living underground would seem to be the very opposite of today’s sustainable or human-centric urbanisms. The plan’s boosters will have a challenge in overcoming public skepticism, given that the idea is not intuitively appealing. This appears to be understood by the editors of the URA’s magazine, Going Places, who recently canvassed the public for imaginative subterranean urban ideas. The un-charming results included “brunch beneath the earth”—a joy for those with alcohol-induced photosensitivity, maybe—and space saving “underground HDBs.” Future charm offensives will likely produce more attractive possibilities.
But such concerns, correct or not, are beside the point. The plan may scandalize some observers, while others—technocrats and troglodytes, perhaps—will no doubt embrace it. A more interesting question is why this idea might be attractive to Singapore at all. Given that it is so obviously controversial, what is its allure?
One could argue that the attraction of the underground has everything to do with a peculiarly ambivalent relationship to the land. Singaporeans are determined to outwit nature, to defeat geography. If history bequeaths us a small island, we make it larger. We balance our population, rich and poor, on the smallest imaginable footprint—thereby expanding the land area, again, by multiplying it into the sky. The aesthetic of these gestures is one of grand daring.
In this context, it is precisely the extremism of excavation that would make it attractive. We can locate in this project a certain strain of charismatic thinking in the national project. For Singapore, reality is only an opening offer. The magic of this state—which international commentators have started, finally, to notice—is the gumption to engineer a far-fetched utopic outcome that is in absurd disproportion to humble beginnings. The message is that Singapore will not be defeated by Singapore, by an accidental cartographic legacy. In this context, the more audacious are the ideas, the better. And in spite of moves made recently to place the city-state on a sustainable footing, there remains a love of fragile, energy-intensive systems that abstract the person from nature to the greatest extent possible.