The city of Singapore has a very short history of 185 years. However, since 1972 , Singapore has been confronting significant transformations owing to different agendas and priorities of the city government. The present morphology of the city can be best described as the accumulation of different layers, carefully controlled and manipulated by the State through planning and design. Hence, the public spaces within the city are formed as a result of the interactions among these layers. The inclusion of each layer not only shapes the physical form of the public space, but also adds a newer set of meaning by adding new functional role within the existing fabric. This article is a result of the preliminary investigation of a research project that observes the urban transformation of Singapore from 1972 to 2005 within the framework of this layered morphology. It will delve deeper to discern and identify the layers that act as the main determinant for shaping the urban public spaces in Singapore.
International journal of urban and regional research (2012)
Öz, Ö. & Eder, M.
This is a study of Istanbul's periodic bazaars and an attempt to place them in the context of contestation over urban space, urban poverty and informality. The periodic bazaars in the city are either disappearing or being moved to the outskirts. These trends reflect and reproduce spatial unevenness in the city, manifesting new forms of social exclusion and polarization. The city's increasingly commodified urban space has become an arena of social and economic contestation. We address these questions by focusing on the story of the relocation of one of Istanbul's most popular periodic bazaars, the Tuesday bazaar in Kadıköy. Our analysis reveals that the relocation and reorganization of bazaars in Istanbul in the 2000s have largely been driven by rising real‐estate prices in the city: land has simply become too precious a commodity to be left to the bazaaris. Furthermore, in the context of a pervasive neoliberal discourse on urban renewal and modernization that promotes the notion of a hygienic city, the bazaaris, it seems, have become the new undesirables of the urban landscape, leaving them under double siege from the commodification of public land and from spatially defined social exclusion.
