ABSTRACT
In 1997 on National Day in Singapore the majority of the nation watched an event live on television staged in the National Stadium.1 What they also saw were the thousands who had queued up to be there in person to watch the armed forces as they reconstructed the history of urban development in Singapore, which they did with a scaled-down model city made up of landmark buildings on wheels. The crowning moment was the arrival of the National Stadium itself, surrounded by a towering city of inhabitants who literally watched themselves watching themselves watching . . . (see Fig. 14.1.)
The argument that follows concerns the emergence of certain trends associated with phenomena of archiving, which I regard as a constitutive component of modern urbanism. The main claims of the argument are as follows: first, that a specific mode of archiving, which I propose to analyze under the phrase the new archive, should be regarded as a constitutional factor in the social and political reality of modern urbanism; second, that this mode of archiving militates
powerfully against any attempts institutionally to deal with the realities of modern urbanism; and, third, that the trends associated with the new archive are especially dominant and powerful in the city state of Singapore.
