Singapore as an urbanized city.
In some ways, Singapore is like a urban structure or city. Even though we are in fact a country, we have such a small land area that everything is in such close proximity to each other that it can almost be considered a city. Its sort of like New York City with our CBD as New York’s metropolitan area and our surrounding housing clusters as the surrounding boroughs in New York City. We are surely as densely populated as most cities in the world and most of our land area is urbanized. The system whereby we run is also much like an urbanized city, where everything is centralized and there is much focus on the economic system. Hence, I feel that in some ways, we can see the effects of urbanization in Singapore.
Emile Durkheim wrote about the anomie, one aspect of urbanization whereby a sense of displacement and rootlessness would be experienced; a breaking down of social or moral norms to be unclear or not even present. I feel that this is in the process of occurring in Singapore. Much of our ideals of social and moral norms seem to be strongly rooted in our various racial cultures. We have right and wrongs that are taught and passed down by the older generation that are still followed. However, I feel this will not be the case in the next few decades as the newer generation grows and the older generation passes on. Looking at the new generation of Singaporeans, its clear that we are slowly losing our sense of roots and norms. Older traditions and values are gradually being eroded away. People’s opinions towards issues like cohabitation or homosexuality are changing and mixed. In the past, it would have been a clear cut ‘wrong’, but now its a blur idea of right and wrong. The most clearly blurred norms would probably be in regards to individualism and social collectivity. Our traditional norms focus much on contributing to the collective welfare of society, but the competitiveness of our society focuses on building up wealth and prestige for the individual. Its a contradiction between our traditional norms and the structure of our urban society. The structural limitation of the society prevents the individual from achieving the traditional norms. So, I feel that slowly the once clear-cut norms are being eroded away into a state of unclear and mixed norms. I guess not only urbanization has contributed to this, but globalization plays a large part it in too in spreading materialism or individualism.
Another theory of urbanisation by Georg Simmel was that urban dwellers cope with the onslaught of too many people, sounds, sensations, and demands by becoming more withdrawn and indifferent to external stimuli, including people. The city becoming an iron cage of work and bureaucracy; people having identity crises in a soulless mass-consumption society. I too feel that this is present in our society here. As compared to other countries, Singaporeans have relatively much less free time. We can’t afford not to work and we are caught in the continuous work cycle. We have much less time to interact and spend time with other people, very frequently becoming withdrawn from our families and social life. In terms of identity crises, I think that relative to other countries, we tend to have some sort of an identity crises. In a system where our life path seems to be laid out and structured, we blindly follow this life path, very frequently forgetting what we really want for ourselves and our loved ones. When I talk to people from other countries, its not uncommon to meet people who sell all their property and possessions and go backpacking across the world to ‘discover’ their identity and pursue what they really want. I don’t think many in Singapore would actually do that.
I guess that in many ways, Singaporeans do feel the effects of urbanization though other factors like globalization probably play a large part too. However, along with the negative ills, Singapore has all the benefits of being an urbanized society too; the efficiency, quality of living, diversity. Its always some sort of compromise between things.
