Bukit Brown municipal cemetery

When the Urban Redevelopment Authority’s (URA) announced its plans for the residential development of Bukit Brown cemetery on May 30, 2011 it could not have anticipated the public reaction against it. Indeed, the ruling People’s Action Party’s (PAP) raison d’être as a developmentalist state since 1965 was one that predicated national progress on industrialization and global capitalism. Among the long-term consequences of which were the discursive positioning of heritage conservationism as an intellectual luxury for middle class liberals and the purging of civil society activism from the landscape in order to facilitate centralized planning and political control. Bukit Brown, after all, was a 160 hectare site that the vast majority of Singaporeans had, until then, never heard of; save for a few weekend joggers, horse-riding enthusiasts and families who returned for Qing Ming rituals. Nestled in the middle of metropolitan Singapore, cordoned off by private housing and a major expressway, and closed to burials since 1973, Bukit Brown had achieved an urban invisibility that had urban planners believing that its destruction would be barely noticed. Another reason for bureaucratic perplexity over the public uproar was the fact that residential plans for the cemetery date back to the 2001 URA Concept Plan, which even charted possible train routes running through it. The subsequent 2008 URA Master Plan offered further details for development. Public outcry rose a few notches when, on September 12, 2011, the URA disclosed that there would be an eight-lane road across Bukit Brown to be completed in 2016. Indignation grew as unfolding research revealed that that Bukit Brown Municipal Cemetery and the three surrounding Chinese clan cemeteries were home to possibly over 200,000 graves and collectively formed the single largest Chinese cemetery complex outside China. ¹ The graves in Bukit Brown also date from the mid-nineteenth century even before it was converted to municipal one in 1922 where prominent pioneers such as Cheah Hong Lim, Chew Boon Lay and Gan Eng Seng, alongside the tens of thousands of ordinary migrants rested.