DoA Symposium: Building / Community in the Tropics and Beyond
09.00–10.30 Memories
Vivienne Wee, Ethnographica, Singapore
Shu-Mei Huang, National Taiwan University, Taiwan
Moderated by Saptarshi Sanyal, NUS
As memories in a material sense, records form palimpsests that both inscribe and erase. Acts of remembering are also acts of forgetting, shaping access to land or place, and claims to identity and culture. What is archived and narrated can enfranchise or disenfranchise communities. This session explores how new architectural, environmental, and landscape practices might address erasure and displacement in memory and records, and how interdisciplinary methods can recover marginalised histories across academic and public realms of heritage and culture.
How changes in Singapore society have impacted on building houses for people
Vivienne Wee, Ethnographica, Singapore
Momentous changes in Singapore society in the last 60 years have impacted on the building of houses for people. In the past, people lived in kampungs (villages) in Singapore. Now close to 80 per cent of Singaporeans live in HDB flats. The building of village houses differs significantly from the building of high-rise buildings with flats. This lecture discusses the ways in which these differ. But the crucial question is this: who lives in the houses or flats that are built? The building of village houses or flats have implications for the types of people who are alive. In the past, the people who came to this island did so because of the work they could find, based on their talents and skills. After the Republic of Singapore was declared an independent nation-state on 9 August 1965, people are schooled for jobs in an industrialised economy, everything else deemed secondary.
Bordering Futurity: Infrastructural Enclaves and the Remaking of a Tropical Peninsula Between Indigenous Territories
Shu-Mei Huang, National Taiwan University
Amidst the mountains and seas of the beautiful tropical peninsula of Pingtung, this study examines the simultaneous closure of Nuclear Power Plant No. 3 and the planning of Taiwan’s first national rocket launch site. While the state rebrands the region as “Bright Pingtung”—a high-tech frontier—these projects operate as infrastructural enclaves that enforce exclusionary boundaries. The research project analyzes how borders function as social institutions that actively exclude Indigenous communities. By classifying targeted lands as non-Indigenous territories, state planning systematically bypasses the consultation mandates of the Indigenous Peoples Basic Law, erasing Indigenous memory and presence from the negotiation table. This research traces how a new form of displacement is mobilized through the “(b)ordering” of these enclaves. It argues that the strategic framing of territories, combined with the selective deployment of legal and technological mechanisms, legitimizes the continued exclusion of Indigenous rights under the guise of national advancement and energy transition.