Localization versus globalization.

In his introduction to this special issue on the architecture of Peninsular Malaysia and Singapore, guest editor Chris Abel examines the complex history an nature of Southeast Asian culture and shows how the interaction of global and local technologies, conditioned by climate and ecology, provides a stimulating vision for 21st century development in a rapidly expanding part of the world.

Looking at Kuala Lumpur or Singapore today, it is easy to conclude that the forces of a globalised consumer culture have all but won. Both cities, but especially Singapore -- the city Western critics love to hate -- exhibit all th visual attributes of familiar Western models: the central business districts; the air-conditioned office towers; the kitsch condos; the McDonalds franchises; the shopping centres all selling the same consumer products; the jam-packed highways spreading out into the suburbs, and the suburbs themselves with their Dallas-inspired mixture of neo-classical and Spanish-style villas. What is left of the original urban fabric of Chinese-built shophouses with their arcaded five-foot-ways, has been cut back to ever smaller enclaves of usually dilapidated streets or expensively tarted up but lifeless conservation areas. Otherwise, the odd urban fragment, temple or mosque serves as an occasional reminder of an earlier, other world, hanging on by the skin of its teeth. For many visitors, it adds up to a disappointing and disturbing spectacle of cultural abdication. In a typical comment, Rem Koolhaas recently summed up his own visit to Singapore with the disparaging remark that it was 'the only Chines city with its own Chinatown'.(1)

Imported cultures

Yet all is not quite what it seems to the Eurocentric eye. Comparisons between globalised and apparently uniform present and a supposedly purer Asian past misrepresent the essentially complex nature of Southeast Asian culture. Even prior to colonisation, the region had been exposed to layer upon layer of imported cultures which had been localised over time, and adapted to regional conditions. Hybridisation was not so much the exception as the norm.(2) When it did arrive, colonisation brought with it a whole new set of cultural imports to be absorbed, both Western and non-Western. Singapore, for example, was never a Chinese city of the same kind as those on mainland China, but developed in the typical dualistic pattern of a colonial city, with a European half and a native half, the latter -- already virtually a separate Chinatown -- populated by expatriate Chinese who migrated to seek their fortunes in Raffles' new trading post.

The history of Kuala Lumpur is even more complicated, since British colonists not only founded a city, as with Singapore, where no indigenous urban culture existed, but Chinese and Indian immigrants encouraged by the British soon dominated the rural Malay population, creating not only the typical, but misnamed native urban fabric of shophouses and temples, but also an awkward cultural and political situation for Malaysians to cope with ever since. The eagerness and apparent indifference to conservation with which Malaysian planners and architects have embraced more recently imported models of building is therefore, at least in part, due to a lack of identification with much of th local urban heritage. Something of the sort also applies to post-colonial Singapore, which is viewed by proud Singaporeans as an Asian city, not so much because it looks like one, but because it was created by Asians, as opposed to the historic rumps which were originally built, or otherwise controlled, by their erstwhile colonial rulers.

Structure of Asian cities

Aside from these historical complications, it is questionable whether cultural difference can be assessed solely by reference to the forms of buildings. This is not to say that architecture is not important, but that it is not the only measure of difference. In particular, experienced analysts warn against the habit of foreign architects and planners of imposing preconceived (i.e. Western urban models on Asian cities, which may look superficially similar to modern Western cities, but in fact function very differently. T.G. McGee, for example, explains that the economic cultures of Western cities are distinguished by the impersonal nature of the principal economic unit, the firm, which selects and treats its employees strictly according to their specialised economic value.(3) Work and family life are completely separate. The economic cultures of Asian cities, by contrast, are based upon two parallel systems: a modern, firm-based economy, and a pre-industrial urban economy, comprising complex networks of diverse and usually small operators and activities, all functioning within extended systems of kinship. In the latter, family life and work are intimately interconnected, and employment opportunities are generally spread as widely as possible within the family, even where underemployment is the result (in effect the system safeguards against the problems of unemployment).

One does not have to look far to see this dual economic structure at work, even in Singapore. The country boasts vigorous cottage industries alongside its more obvious high-tech corporate enterprises.(4) The dual system is most evident in the multitude of small family businesses which still characterise the older sections of the city. But take a walk through the middle of any public housing estate or suburban shopping centre and the same diverse services, open-air food stalls and cottage industries abound. Take another few steps and look underneat almost any high-rise housing block and you will find the ground floor -- specially reserved for the purpose alive with a row of tiny shops and eating places, run by individual entrepreneurs and their family helpers, all bustling with activity, in stark contrast to the graveyard atmosphere associated with Western housing estates. Out of sight, operating from within some of the flats themselves, more industrious family enterprises may be found. The same dual economy is visibly active in Kuala Lumpur and other Malaysian cities, especiall so in the older city of Georgetown, on Penang Island, where cottage industries and five-foot-way traders still dominate the city and make their untidy presenc felt in an infectious street life.

Challenging Western domination

Many would argue that these are no more than signs of a temporary truce between opposing and irreconcilable forces, the last gasps of a more complex Asian urba culture, soon to be swept away by the global economic pressures which have already brought not only depersonalised firms into Asian culture, but also all the other uniform elements of the Western city. Globalisation in this view is a one-way street an irredeemable centralising force, concentrating economic and cultural power into fewer and fewer centres composed of ever larger economic units, most of them based in the Western industrialised countries. As such, the process continues what had already begun with colonisation. The recent explosio in information technology, so the argument runs, has lent a new impetus by facilitating the global circulation of capital and resources to suit Western interests, and raising the stakes beyond anything yet seen.

Much of this picture is based on the assumption that Western developed countrie will go on dominating the world economy as they have done for centuries. That assumption is now seriously undermined by the economic dynamism of the Asian-Pacific region, of which Malaysia and Singapore are prime exemplars, and the related change from an Atlantic-based world economy towards a Pacific-based one dominated by the competition between Japan and the US. How long it will be before the emergence of China finally tips the balance in favour of the Asian-Pacific countries remains to be seen, but only the most die-hard observer could claim that continued Western domination is a foregone conclusion.

Global paradox

Even were this not the case, other convincing arguments have arisen for not taking the pattern of increasing Western-oriented centralisation and standardisation for granted. Challenging the model of a homogenised world future, Stuart Hall argues that globalisation has its own unanticipated imperatives, and that the very processes which typify global economic and cultural activity carry within themselves their own tensions and contradictions.(5) In order to extend their markets into new areas, multinational corporations are finding it increasingly necessary to adapt themselves to the particular demands of local consumers, which means bending their activities and production lines to suit local cultures as well as other regional factors. In meeting these new demands, the shape of the multinational corporation is rapidly changing from a centralised institution with corporate headquarters in the North, to a more flexible confederation of smaller and semi-autonomous units, better able to respond to local conditions. It may all b just another subterfuge designed to disguise the same old corporate ambitions, but, as Hall suggests, it just might lead to a more diverse and unpredictable global culture than that usually envisaged.

In similar vein, in his book, Global Paradox, John Naisbitt argues that the demand for increased flexibility and quickness of response is compelling large firms to down-size in order to compete effectively in a diversified global market.(6) Small firms, by contrast, are finding that affordable information technologies and flexible tools of production are greatly increasing their rang of operation, creating hitherto undreamed-of access to new world markets and in the process creating unexpected competition for the established multinationals. As Naisbitt puts it: 'The bigger the world economy, the more powerful its smallest players.' Small is not only beautiful, it is also efficient; the virtues of pre-industrial economies are rapidly becoming also the virtues of post-industrial ones.

Such arguments tie in with the more abstract but equally compelling theories of self-organising systems which first emerged in the '60s and are now enjoying renewed attention trader the general rubric of complexity theory. Viewed in these terms, which are rooted in biological and ecological models, the organic processes which are leading towards centralisation and integration on a global scale, are having equal and opposite decentralising effects on a sub-regional scale. The result may sometimes look like chaos and fragmentation at a local level, but is more accurately described as a spontaneous adjustment of human activity to cope with exposure to a larger and less predictable world environment.(7) The whole reciprocating process is boosted by an environmental crisis which demands at one and the same time a global awareness of the interconnectedness of all things, and local action to raise levels of self-sufficiency in such vital areas as food and energy consumption. If there i such a thing as an emergent global culture, it may well arise out of these complementary processes.

Pacific Age vision

The architecture in Malaysia and Singapore that is now surfacing out of this caudron is, true to Southeast Asian traditions, a hybrid of imported and local elements. Many of the heading architects in the new movement received their professional education abroad, in the UK or Australia, and were thus exposed early on to an international architectural culture. For those belonging to the first and second generations of post-war Modernists to return to their origins, the benefits of the exposure were often offset by the later realisation that they were ill-equipped to understand and respond to their own regional culture. What has followed has been a slow and difficult process of re-education, with few clearly defined goals other than a shared conviction that Southeast Asian architects must somehow strive to belong to both architectural cultures, the local and the global.

The approaches to these apparently conflicting demands are many and varied, but overriding all is a growing consensus that if the new architecture is to meet the challenge of the environmental crisis, then -- aside from more parochial issues -- it must be firmly grounded in ecological principles. At the very least, it should be a tropical architecture, responsive to and expressive of it geographical and climatic situation. The technological means for achieving this end range from timber-framed structures updated from traditional models, to high-tech materials and techniques of production. But the works that define the movement share a common pragmatic concern with energy conservation, combined with a celebration of the lush tropical nature and a climate that invites open-necked shirts and year-round open-air living. The result now emerging is a loose-limbed, permeable, generally lightweight architecture that is recognisabl modern in the best experimental sense of that ambiguous description, but is als true both to its specific locations and to a Pacific-wide tradition of framed building.

What is most significant is that the search for an authentic tropical architecture appropriate to its time and place should also now be taking in the wider urban environment, represented conceptually and empirically -- by the cit in Southeast Asia. The idea of the tropical city, or, as it is more ambitiously called, the intelligent tropical city, is increasingly now the focus of attention from both theorists and official planners, driven by the growing realisation that idealised urban models based on other climates and cultures do not apply in this part of the world, what is needed instead is a home-grown model. What was a vague but attractive notion is rapidly taking shape in a number of as yet unrealised, but far sighted plans and projects in both Malaysi and Singapore. They portray a 21st century vision of sustainable urban development, based mainly on energy-efficient, decentralised and pedestrian-oriented urban subcentres connected up to the main city centres by mass rapid transit systems -- already in operation in Singapore and under construction in Kuala Lumpur. For intelligent, read a city with a self-regulating infrastructure and a population plugged into a global culture's resources via the information superhighway. For tropical, read a city and architecture tailor-made for its natural and cultural ecology. It is a particularly fitting vision for the Pacific Age, in which the local informs the global and vice versa. The extraordinary thing is that in Southeast Asia it could just become a reality.

1 The remark was made in a lecture By Rem Koolhaas on Singapore, at the Architectural Association, London, on May 7 1994.

2 O.W. Walters, 'History, Culture, and Region', in Southeast Asian Perspectives Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1989. See also Chris Abel, 'Regional Transformations', The Architectural Review, November 1986.

3 T.G. McGee The Southeast Asian City, London: G. Bell and Sons, 1967 and The Urbanisation Process in the Third World, London: G. Bell and Sons, 1971.

4 Margaret Sullivan Can Survive, La: Cottage Industries in High-rise Singapore, Singapore: Graham Brash, 1985.

5 Stuart Hall, 'The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity', Anthony D. King (ed) Culture Globalization and the World-System, Binghampton: Macmillan 1991.

5 John Naisbitt Global Paradox, London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 1994.

7 Chris Abel Adaptive Urban Form: A Biological Model, unpublished thesis submitted to the Architectural Association School of Architecture, 1968; 'Evolutionary Planning', Architectural Design December 1968, and 'Urban Chaos o Self-Organization?' Architectural Design, September 1969.

8 See, for example, Ken Yeang The Tropical Verandah City, Kuala Lumpur: Asia Publications, 1986; Tay Kheng Soon and Robert Powell, 'The Intelligent Tropical City', Singapore Institute of Architects Journal, November/December 1991; and Azman B. Hj. Awang, 'Kuala Lumpur -- Towards Becoming an Intelligent City', Majalah Arkitek, September/October 1992.

Chris Abel taught architecture in the Science University of Malaysia, Penang, from 1981-82, and is the National University of Singapore from 1985-86, and is currently senior lecturer at the University of Nottingham. His forthcoming books, Regional Transformations and Architecture in the Pacific Age, will be published next year by Butterworth Heinemann and Academy Editions respectively.