SOS Bukit Brown

Rail, not roads, the way of the future in Singapore: Budget 2012

bukitbrown — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 16:37:08 +0000

In his recent Budget Speech for 2012, Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam stressed that the future of Singapore’s transport system lay with the public rail system. This suggests road-building over Bukit Brown may be a stop-gap solution to a temporary problem.

According to the Deputy Prime Minister, enhancing the public transport is “a significant initiative in this year’s Budget.” He went on to begin his discussion of transportation with the statement:

“Reliable and convenient public transport is critical to the quality of daily life for the majority of Singaporeans. When the planned Downtown Line, Tuas West Extension, Thomson Line and Eastern Regional Line are completed in a decade’s time, our rail coverage will be comparable to that of cities with the most developed rail networks today such as New York. We will also have 400,000 housing units within 400 metres of MRT stations, double the number today.”

This is consistent with the LTA 2010 Land Transport Master Plan‘s call to make public rail transport the mode of choice for commuters.

Given the emphasis on rail, why emphasise the destruction of Bukit Brown with the proposed road construction? A temporary gain in easing the commute for some drivers is not worth the permanent loss of natural environment, heritage, and national identity to Singapore. This comes on top of the potential downstream effects of flooding as well as the loss of a green area that can both retain water and act to lower the ambient temperature.

Saving Bukit Brown goes way beyond history lovers and tree huggers. It is about all Singaporeans, past, current, and future.

Singapore Heritage Society Releases Position Paper on Bukit Brown Cemetery

bukitbrown — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 16:28:20 +0000

The Singapore Heritage Society makes a great case for preserving Bukit Brown in its entirety. Read the position paper here.

SOS Bukit Brown response to Minister of State’s Note on ‘Bukit Brown… work in Progress’

woontienwei — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:00:11 +0000

Guided Tour at Bukit Brown

In response to Minister of State, Mr. Tan Chuan-Jin’s note posted on Friday, 3 February 2012 at 17:42.

SOS Bukit Brown stand by the position of our petition and we reiterate the need for a fundamental review and open dialogue about the future of Singapore.

We are glad that Mr. Tan Chuan-Jin managed to spend time on Bukit Brown with the documentation team.

Mr. Tan has also highlighted the need for land for more housing and this has opened up the debate about overall land needs in Singapore, as well as the increased demand for more land/space that arises from a rising population.

We are sorry to hear that Mr. Tan still prioritises construction and the ultimate destruction of Bukit Brown.

The proposed highway will only serve the small and possibly declining population of car owners in Singapore while the whole of Singapore will have to live with the negative consequences resulting from the destruction of Bukit Brown. SingStat notes that there are only 111 cars per 1000 people in Singapore and the government has announced plans to control the car population.

Urbanisation of Bukit Brown will contribute to the devastation of Singapore’s natural environment. It will have potential environmental consequences such as increased flooding, higher local temperatures and contribution to climate change.The recently released “Report by the Expert Panel on Drainage Design and Flood Protection Measures” states that urbanisation is a key cause for the recent spate of flooding in Singapore. The report further notes that Bukit Brown is in the Marina Basin drainage area – the same as the flood-prone Bukit Timah and Orchard Road areas. Building up Bukit Brown will be deadly to the wildlife, including the 13 species of endangered birds that inhabit the wooded area there.

Destruction of Bukit Brown will also contribute to the loss of the Singapore identity and heritage. As the first municipal cemetery of Singapore, 100,000 members of our pioneering generation are laid to rest there from as early as 1830s. These people have helped to make the success of Singapore today and Bukit Brown is the last place ordinary Singaporeans can collectively venerate them.

It is important that Singaporeans treasure our natural environment and history as it is what makes us Singaporean.

Simply creating more highways and housing estates is not the ideal long-term solution towards a more sustainable future for Singapore.

We are happy that Mr. Tan has been open about his views. We believe it is now necessary for a fundamental review and open dialogue with all Singaporeans about the future of Singapore.

Bukit Brown and Singapore’s Flooding Situation – Possible Linkages

bukitbrown — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:17:07 +0000

The recently released “Report on Key Conclusions and Recommendations of the Expert Panel on Drainage Design and Flood Protection Measures” notes that Bukit Brown is within the Marine Basin drainage area. This puts it upslope to the flood-prone Bukit Timah and Orchard areas. The Report also attributes part of Singapore’s recent issues with flooding to urbanisation. To date, there appears to be no public information about studies examining how developing Bukit Brown might affect flooding. This data needs to be in the public domain.

For the full report mentioned above, see the Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources

Drainage in Singapore

The New York Times: In Madrid’s Heart, Park Blooms Where a Freeway Once Blighted

bukitbrown — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 02:46:39 +0000

December 27, 2011, on page A1 of the New York edition of the New York Times.
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN.

MADRID — Even on a chilly Thursday afternoon in December, the old men, engulfed in cigar smoke and reading newspapers, were sitting around chess tables under tall pines. Nearby, a young woman had strung her line between the trunks of two mulberry trees to practice tightrope walking.

Multimedia

James Rajotte for The New York Times

The sun sets over the Madrid Río park. More Photos »

Slide Show

Madrid Río

Behind her, hypnotized toddlers stared into a small oval fountain full of swirling water, and cyclists pedaled across new bridges with cement roofs that are shaped like upside-down canoes and also across a new steel forked bridge, an elegant nod to industrial-age steelwork, with a great view of the royal palace on its hill.

The park here, called Madrid Río, has largely been finished. More than six miles long, it transforms a formerly neglected area in the middle of Spain’s capital. Its creation, in four years, atop a complex network of tunnels dug to bury an intrusive highway, also rejuvenates a long-lost stretch of the Manzanares River, and in so doing knits together neighborhoods that the highway had cut off from the city center.

All around the world, highways are being torn down and waterfronts reclaimed; decades of thinking about cars and cities reversed; new public spaces created.

Most famously, in beauty-mad San Francisco, the 1989 earthquake overcame years of entrenched thinking: the Embarcadero Freeway was taken down, which reconnected the city with its now glorious waterfront. In Seoul, the removal of a stretch of highway along the now-revived Gaecheon stream has made room for a five-mile-long recreation area calledCheonggyecheon. In Milwaukee, the destruction of the Park East freeway spurhas liberated acres of downtown for parks and neighborhood development. Even the nearly-30-year, bank-busting Big Dig fiasco made Boston a better place by tunneling a downtown highway, though it was obviously nobody’s idea of a stellar urban redevelopment project.

In New York, city and state officials are inching closer to tearing down the Sheridan Expressway, a mile-and-a-quarter-long gash in the South Bronx connecting the Bruckner and Cross Bronx Expressways, perhaps to replace it with homes, commercial spaces, playgrounds, swimming pools and soccer fields arrayed along the Bronx River.

But Madrid Río is a project whose audacity and scale, following the urban renewal successes of Barcelona, Spain’s civic trendsetter, can bring to a New Yorker’s mind the legacy of the street-grid plan, which this year celebrates its 200th anniversary. That’s because the park belongs to a larger transformation that includes the construction of dozens of new metro and light-rail stations that link far-flung, disconnected and often poor districts on Madrid’s outskirts to downtown.

On my way from the park one day I came across Marisa Álvarez, a physical therapist, who told me that her commute from Móstoles, a sprawling, hard-hit suburb to the southwest of the city, took nearly an hour and a half each way before the new metro arrived. Now, it’s 45 minutes. The metro had changed her daily life, she said.

“This is like new lungs for us,” is how Pilar López described what the new park has changed in hers. At 73, she said she has lived for more than a half-century in an apartment in a housing project nearby, suffering the fumes and noise from the highway.

“When the highway was here, I sat on my sofa and watched television all day,” she told me. “Now I feel healthy again because I walk with my friends in the park for hours.”

During the 1970s, the M-30, a ring road constructed along both sides of the river, ripped a crippling gash through the city. Neighborhoods on both sides of it declined. Tourists had little or no clue this area of town even existed, and most Madrileños avoided it, save for trips to the soccer stadium of Atlético Madrid or along the highway, which turned into an infamous bottleneck.

That was then. Two centuries back, Goya painted bucolic picnickers in shaded pastures above the Manzanares. After decades of the highway, they’re returning.

The park is still a work in progress. A stretch of highway has yet to be moved underground, and the soccer stadium needs to be torn down. The whole place, in barren weather, anyway, has a slightly rough-and-ready air, which is what you would expect, considering that Alberto Ruíz-Gallardón, the city’s populist mayor (who has just been named Spain’s justice minister), a conservative, ordered the burying of the M-30 before there was any plan for a park.

Only several years after construction on the tunnels had begun in 2003, with the inevitable traffic snarls provoking a political firestorm, did the city organize a competition. Various big-name architects proposed erecting flashy buildings. The winner was a group of local architects, led by Ginés Garrido, who teamed up with Adriaan Geuze and his high-profile Dutch urban design and landscape firm, West 8.

They proposed no grand new time-consuming, budget-breaking monuments, but a suite of modest new bridges, along with the renovation of some great historic ones, amid a variety of green spaces. The park was to be generally informal, low-key and practical, in certain respects more American than European, full of playgrounds and ball fields and bike paths.

Most important, it would be constructed in stages. Every month another section could be rolled out. The mayor wanted to stand with grateful citizens in front of news cameras in the first section of the park before re-election day in 2007. He did. Public grumbling about traffic jams gradually morphed into praise for a new green space.

Of course Madrid is now just about broke, and Mr. Gallardón’s opponents point to his civic improvements as one cause. They were indeed expensive, albeit a fraction of what the costs would have been in America. Pilar Martínez, who oversaw the park project in the mayor’s office, told me that the official price tag of Madrid Río hovers near $5 billion, all but $500 million of it spent to bury the highway. Twenty-seven miles of new tunnels were dug; countless tons of granite installed to make paths and fountains; some 8,000 pine trees planted. A new, elegantly simple boathouse has been designed, and a 19th-century complex of brick and glass buildings, including a derelict slaughterhouse and greenhouse, are now being renovated to house art studios and a dance theater.

Add to this wading pools for toddlers that landlocked Madrid parents already fondly call “the beach,” and a paved plaza, in patterned tiles, large enough to fit a few hundred thousand people.

New York has recently benefited from the growth and upgrading of its own parks, but much of the city’s expanding public realm is now dependent on private investment. At the epicenter of laissez-faire capitalism, a skepticism about big government, a web of well-meaning regulations and opposition groups empowered by easy access to the courts combine to create barriers to the investment of public money in major infrastructural improvements. Change happens slowly and incrementally, certainly compared with what Madrid has accomplished.

The sort of visionary will that produced W.P.A. projects from which the country continues to benefit seems almost anachronistic. It takes the rare political strongman, like Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago, to push through something big and great that is entirely for the public, like Millennium Park, 24.5 downtown acres of cultural attractions risen largely from rail yards and parking lots. (And the State of Illinois is now contemplating a 140,000-acrepark, potentially the largest urban park in America, on underused and post-industrial land on Chicago’s southern edge, but for the moment it’s just an idea.)

Like Millennium Park, Madrid Río needed no commercial justification, though it is clearly a boon to business and development. It arises from a political culture that presumes public service is an end in itself.

“Now people who opened their windows onto the sound of cars, open their windows onto the sound of birds,” is how Ms. Martínez, the Madrid official, put it. It’s only a pity that the city also awarded Dominique Perrault, one of the celebrity architects who lost the competition, a late commission. Evidently nervous about leaving the project without a new architectural landmark, the government approved his costly design for an oversize footbridge. Wrapped in an immense, incongruous spiral of Mr. Perrault’s signature stainless-steel mesh, the striking bridge blocks views and conjures up some giant antenna that has crashed in the park.

That said, a decade ago, bringing back the Manzanares River and the neighborhoods around it sounded impossible. As Madrid Río proves, the question for big public projects should not be what can’t be done.

No. It’s what can.

Please see the link for the original article.

Position Paper of the Nature Society (Singapore)’s on Bukit Brown

bukitbrown — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 16:18:25 +0000

Thank you to the Nature Society. In addition to setting out the position of the Nature Society on conserving Bukit Brown, the paper includes useful information on BBC as well as some data on government development plans. See: http://www.nss.org.sg/documents/Nature%20Society%27s%20Position%20on%20Bukit%20Brown.pdf

咖啡山

bukitbrown — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 14:53:24 +0000

早报 | 201-12-19

给人印象很深的是，有些坟墓看来很新。武吉布朗墓园关闭已数十年，但许多人还是关心自家人在这里的祖坟，定期修葺。咖啡山是新加坡华人历史的一个板块，但也是属于生者的……

近来报章常说到咖啡山，相关的争论我早已注意到，但一直没有自己去看看；奇怪——咖啡山地处哪里我大约知道，离我家也并不远，但未曾知道山中尚有路径，从车窗看，只能见到一片莽林。

从报上得知，围绕武吉布朗（即咖啡山）那场议论的活跃分子，亦有国大历史系的同事，因此向她打听讯息，上个周末就动身，用自己的眼睛看看。

在网上找到了咖啡山的地图，还记住网民的嘱咐：森林区，穿长裤长袖较合适，戴防晒帽子与矿泉水；另外还买了瓶驱虫剂。只是家里并没有手杖，也不愿意去买，因而干脆拆开了我们的扫把；太太还抱怨这样子在路上走颇为滑稽，我却置之不理。结果，在深草中探路，或上山下山，扫把柄还是相当管用。

墓园大门很容易找，周日天气格外晴朗，风和日丽，咖啡山毫无阴森气氛，反而是遍地茂密的森林，绿汪汪的许多老树木；阳光从树叶间透出，洒落弯曲的步道，十分舒畅，不亚于临近的自然保护区。山中大小道路都保养得很好，散步起来很轻松。走了一会，马路上的车声渐渐消失，只听到各种鸟鸣；蝴蝶亦时隐时现，是一片丰盛大自然。

跟麦里芝蓄水池与武吉知马自然保护区一样，咖啡山区域丘陵多，山间又有低谷，地貌多变，山坡与谷中细流，森林与草坪，一弯一景。山水如此婉妙，一代代华人选择在此下葬，也是不难理解的。

我们这一次到咖啡山，当然想了解其文化意义。武吉布朗最早的坟墓，据说来自19世纪初期；其历史也就涵盖了新加坡的全部历史。今天的咖啡山，靠南边的多为平民的葬地；北边山坡上则是本地豪门家族的坟墓，有许多富于特色的墓葬工艺。

拐进一条小步道，再往上爬，穿越两尺深的草丛，找到了几座工艺特别优秀的坟墓；文字中英双文，两侧是画有南洋风景的瓷砖以及二十四孝浮雕的岩石，左右则矗立着两个水泥锡克武士，充当护卫。坟墓许久没人管理，遍地是枯叶，瓷砖有些已剥落在地，捡起时吓跑了一只蜈蚣。

不远处有另外一座墓引起我们的注意，这里的护卫并非印度士兵，而是五只怪兽——是饕餮，抑或是猫？怪兽同样是水泥制作，贴着许多彩色琉璃瓦片，瓦片多处已丢失，怪兽形状看不大分明。这原是一位女士的坟墓，41岁逝世，后代为何为她修建如此特别的一座坟墓，今天似乎已无从考究，只能当作咖啡山历史的谜团之一。

在山间走路，迎面来了一群参观者，而其中便有我历史系的同事。我们便跟着团走，拜访了几位本地名人与商家的坟墓；最大的是富商王三龙之墓，设计浩大，装饰繁复，位于咖啡山最高处，风水最佳的地方。据介绍说，王家的后代都还定期来这里拜祖宗。

给人印象很深的是，有些坟墓看来很新。武吉布朗墓园关闭已数十年，但许多人还是关心自家人在这里的祖坟，定期修葺。咖啡山是新加坡华人历史的一个板块，但也是属于生者的。

快到了中午，走完了一大圈，天也渐渐变热，我们便走回到马路，搭车回家。一路上还在思索这次咖啡山一行的所见所闻。位于岛国中心一带，咖啡山联接着新加坡的过去与现在。咖啡山，既是自然遗产，又是文化遗产。

为什么在这里要修马路？多修马路并不会解决交通问题，而只会吸引更多车辆——类似的经验，许多其他城市早已有过。忽然想起，政府几十年前，有远见而投巨资填海，修建滨海新区；今人却要用这个最昂贵的地盘，来修建一个人造公园。而武吉布朗原有的自然林区，却要填平来盖别墅？新加坡很爱讲持续性发展：咖啡山，是自然与人文两方面持续性发展的最佳案例。为何不从此开始？

编按：目前被人们误称为“咖啡山”的武吉布朗（Bukit Brown）坟场其实原非咖啡山；陆路交通管理局后年要进行的新道路建设工程，受影响的为武吉布朗坟场。

Why Supporters of The Green Corridor Should Support Bukit Brown Too

bukitbrown — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 16:10:03 +0000

December 16, 201

By Eugene Tay

The Green Corridor is a former railway while Bukit Brown is a cemetery, so different yet so similar. The Green Corridor and Bukit Brown both connects the past and future, and both involves heritage and the environment. I hope that all of you can support the preservation of Bukit Brown, just as you have actively supported The Green Corridor so far.

I supported The Green Corridor proposal by NSS because I felt that it would improve Singapore’s long term resilience. The biggest threat to Singapore is apathy, and when Singaporeans do not feel a sense of belonging and are not bothered with what goes on here, then Singapore is in trouble.

For Singapore to survive and prosper in the long term, it is necessary to have more opportunities in preserving our shared memories and creating our shared vision. And keeping the railway lands as a Green Corridor is one opportunity not to be wasted.

Similarly, I feel that Bukit Brown is another excellent opportunity that enables Singaporeans to feel they belong here by remembering our past and creating our future.

Remembering Our Past

Bukit Brown tells the stories of our forefathers who built Singapore, and creates opportunities for history education and discovery. The cemetery connects Singapore’s past and present, and allows us to understand that Singapore’s success is built up by our forefathers’ sweat and tears, and should not be taken for granted.

We should preserve Bukit Brown because it helps us remember our past and keeps us rooted to Singapore.

Creating Our Future

Bukit Brown presents the opportunity for transforming the cemetery into a world-class living outdoor museum or heritage park. If this transformation adopts a bottom-up approach and with stakeholder engagement, it would allow us to come together, plan and work towards a future Singapore where heritage, nature and our economic needs can co-exist.

We should preserve Bukit Brown because it enables us to work together and build bonds and resilience, and to create a space where our children and their children can enjoy and be proud of.

Support Bukit Brown

Singapore is a young nation and needs more common spaces like The Green Corridor and Bukit Brown to remind us how we got here and why this is home, and to create opportunities for building our future social resilience. Support Bukit Brown, just as you have supported The Green Corridor.

Here’s what you can do:

1. Sign the petition to save Bukit Brown 100% at the SOS Bukit Brown – Save Our Singapore website.

2. Join the Heritage Singapore – Bukit Brown Cemetery Facebook Group to understand more about Bukit Brown and keep yourself updated.

3. Spread the message by sharing with your friends about Bukit Brown and urging them to sign the petition.

“In the end, our society will be defined not only by what we create, but by what we refuse to destroy.” – John C. Sawhill

Earnest Engagement

bukitbrown — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 16:04:00 +0000

The Straits Times
www.straitstimes.com
Published on Dec 18, 2011

The Government has pulled out all stops to work with heritage groups on the Bukit Brown project. Some 5,000 graves in the cemetery will have to be documented before they make way for the development of a road. As work to record the graves started a fortnight ago, an advisory panel comprising representatives from government agencies and heritage groups has been formed to help the documentation team gain access to the various interest groups when needed.

The Government has also made Minister of State for National Development and Manpower Tan Chuan-Jin the point man in the exercise. He, in turn, has roped in the top brass of various government agencies to attend to interest groups and the media on all matters regarding the area’s redevelopment plans. A recent meeting between his team and five members of the Singapore Heritage Society (SHS) lasted more than two hours. As an SHS committee member reported afterwards: ‘We asked them so many questions… Nothing like this has ever happened before.’

Both civil servants and civic society acknowledge that such efforts to balance preservation and redevelopment are unprecedented. There have been scant records of Kwong Hou Sua and Bidadari cemeteries, which were dug up in the last decade. Such public-private partnership should become the norm when it comes to sensitive redevelopment projects. It is a clear demonstration of the kind of approach Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong outlined at the recent PAP convention, where he spoke about changing the outreach strategy, and consulting Singaporeans more actively. There are, of course, the critics who will carp that the ongoing engagement over Bukit Brown is but a public relations exercise, since the Government did not think to consult civic groups before it decided to build the road across the cemetery. That would have been much better, but it is not too late for the Government to learn from this episode.

Create small memorial park at Bukit Brown Cemetery

bukitbrown — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 17:17:54 +0000

The Straits Times

www.straitstimes.com

Published on Dec 13, 2011 ST Forum

A Singaore Heritage Society book, Spaces Of The Dead: A Case From The Living, describes how Japanese soldiers, including convicted war criminals who committed atrocities in Singapore during World War II, are remembered at the Japanese Cemetery Park here through memorials that describe them as ‘martyrs’ or ‘patriots’, and which continue to be visited by people from Japan.

It thus seems ironic that Bukit Brown Cemetery, with its graves of the pioneers of the Chinese community here, now faces an uncertain future. While Singapore’s urban redevelopment needs are understandable, some ‘heart’ can be applied to the deliberations on the future of Bukit Brown.

It is not merely another old cemetery but one of Singapore’s last surviving historically significant ones. Once demolished, the graves of our forefathers will be lost forever. No amount of documentation or virtual rendering can replace the intrinsic value of Singaporeans being moved or even inspired by the sense of connectedness to this place we call home, that we get by being there physically.

I hope that, at least, the more historically and aesthetically significant graves or headstones can be relocated and preserved in a smaller memorial park to be created out of the current Bukit Brown Cemetery. The fine line balancing the case for the dead and the needs of the living can be drawn.

As a nature park, Bukit Brown can continue to have its place. Singaporeans can enjoy their relaxing strolls, exercise or nature romps in an area whose rolling hillocks are well noted for their rich flora and fauna.

Granting a new lease of life to Bukit Brown by ‘refreshing’ it as a memorial park will also enable Singaporeans and their children to be educated, reminded or inspired by the contributions of our nation’s forefathers.

The sensitive redevelopment and preservation of Bukit Brown to ensure its continued relevance to Singapore and Singaporeans will be a fitting tribute to the pioneers who paved the way for us to be where we are today.

Edwin Pang