Smile. Be spontaneous. And more innovative.
Singaporeans are used to being told what to do. But can Fusionopolis, a super-sized futuristic high-tech temple, make them creative? And, asks Erica Goodey, is it the best way to make cities more innovative places?
Life would be simpler for Singapore’s leaders if they could pass a law making all 4.3 million citizens more innovative. This is a state that, ten years ago, gave immigration officers small mirrors so they could check they were smiling enough while on duty. The mirrors symbolise 40 years of state micro-management. Another time, citizens were urged by officialdom – with no irony intended – to “be spontaneous”.
Sci-fi novelist William Gibson, visiting in the 1990s, sniffed: “If IBM had ever bothered to actually possess a physical country, that country might resemble Singapore. There’s a certain white-shirted constraint, an absolute humorlessness; conformity is the prime directive and the fuzzier brands of creativity are in short supply. Imagine an Asian Zurich operating as an offshore capsule at the foot of Malaysia; an affluent microcosm whose citizens inhabit something that feels like Disneyland with the death penalty.” Prime minister Lee Hsien Loong, son of the state’s founding father Lee Yuan Kew, knows that, to remain viable, his country must shake off that image and become globally famous for innovation and creativity.
The most powerful symbol of his ambitious national rebranding is Fusionopolis, a £158m centre bearing an eerie resemblance to New York’s Twin Towers, that is designed, so the project’s spin doctors say, as “a playground for the creative, innovative and visionary.” Fusionopolis is the third super-sized government-backed project (all branded with the Greek word ‘polis’) in a 490-acre development near the centre of Singapore called one-north. These futuristic-looking projects – the first two were Biopolis (the biotech centre) and Infopolis (IT) – have led some wags to quip that Singapore is becoming a polis state.
But Fusionopolis is no joke. It is the shiny hub of Singapore’s bid to move up the value chain to protect its economy from low-cost neighbours, become one of the world’s ten most competitive design hubs and take its rightful place as a great media city like London, LA and New York.
Fusionopolis may look futuristic but it’s based on an old-fashioned, technology-focused view of innovation
By the end of 2007, phase one – a 120,000m2 tower designed by the Japanese architect Dr Kisho Kurokawa – will house 3,000 scientists, IT experts and creative types (including the Media Development Agency tasked with doing what the name suggests) in what the makers call a “living testbed” packed with offices, labs, incubators, seminar rooms, experimental spaces and more cutting-edge technology than was ever imagined in the collected works of Jules Verne. The hope is that small businesses – which Singapore doesn’t have enough of – will move in to what Kurokawa calls “an official bohemia”, a concept that, anywhere else in the world, would be regarded as a stupendous contradiction in terms.
Many staff will live nearby in chic condominiums, using the shops, restaurants, fitness club and theatre that are all designed, in the vein of that famous “Be spontaneous” campaign, to encourage the kind of off-the-cuff encounters that have been crucial to human creativity since -Athens’s golden age in 500-323 BC.
The Fusionopolis towers – the second should be complete in 2009 – are the epicentre of Singapore’s multi-billion-pound 2010 Science and Technology Plan (STP2010) which calls for Singapore to invest 3% of its GDP in R&D by 2010. Loong is chairing a new Research, Innovation and Enterprise Council (RIEC), supported by a National Research Council, while four other state agencies have the arduous task of making sure local manufacturing industry does the 3 Gs – grow, glow and globalise.
There is a small irony in all this. To improve access to one-north, the state bulldozed part of a lush, tranquil district around the old Portsdown Road which had housed a little bohemia of artists, musicians and creative types. To critics, the interventionism, the showpiece projects, the five-year plans, even the bulldozer, all smack less of futuristic capitalism than of old-school Stalinism.
The government is aware of the contradiction. Lee Kuan Yew says: “We cannot create entrepreneurs, we can only facilitate their emergence. The root of the problem is an East Asian reverence for scholarship. A scholar, a farmer and a worker are all, in traditional values, more esteemed than an entrepreneur. We have to start experimenting. The easy things – getting a blank mind to take in knowledge – we have done. To get literate and numerate minds to be more innovative requires a different set of values.”
Yet after ten years of state investment and exhortation in IT, Singapore has produced just one globally famous high-tech start up: Creative, makers of the Soundblaster PC card. In the context of the global innovation in IT since the mid-1990s, that’s about as impressive as Liechtenstein’s contribution to the history of naval warfare. Biopolis, which opened in 2000, has increased biotech output by 23% annually but not yet nurtured a crop of homegrown biotech firms.
But Singapore isn’t giving up, hoping that interventionism, by deepening the country’s expertise, will ultimately create growth from the bottom up. John Thackara, a director of Designs of the time (Dott 07 – see p56) and of Doors of Perception, a knowledge network devoted to design and innovation, isn’t convinced. “Innovation needs to be situated in reality, not segregated from it. Projects like Fusionopolis – which I call Confusionopolis – look futuristic but are based on an old-fashioned technology-focused understanding of innovation. The inmates of these ivory towers are disconnected from the people who’ll use their applications and are not enriched by everyday experiences.”
“The thing that always motivates people is the question that they have to deal with. That’s why you see such a variety of innovation taking place in shanty towns or normal streets of Asian cities,” says Thackara, citing a small town in India whose residents collaborated to transport food more efficiently across difficult terrain.
On a project like Fusionopolis, he says: “So much development money is sloshing around, the inmates are fated to become inward-looking and self-referential. That’s when innovation stops.” The defining example of this tendency, he says, is Interval Research, an R&D centre created by Microsoft tycoon Paul Allen in 1992 that “burned through £60m but, being isolated by smoky mirrors up a Palo Alto hill, produced no innovations the world wanted.” In 2000, after much R and precious little D, Interval shut down.
Interval and Fusionopolis are fruits of the largely unproven belief that if you shove a load of creative types into a building they will, almost by osmosis, become still more creative, even though studies by Harvard Business School suggest any employee of normal intelligence can come up with ideas out of left field if encouraged to do so.
To Western eyes, Fusionopolis seems an anomaly in an era when many cities have become more creative organically, albeit supported by government, rather than being willed into creativity by force of legislation and investment. But this top-down approach, typified by such budget-busting mega-projects as the Seoul Digital Media City (see the box on the left) and Singapore’s polises is the Asian style.
Fusionopolis will acquire totemic significance as the symbol of a vision which, though defined by politicians and bureaucrats, has heeded many of the lessons learned as the twin concepts of the ‘creative city’ and ‘creative clusters’ have seized the imagination of urban leaders worldwide.
The rise of these buzz words can be traced back to Charles Landry’s book The Creative City (2000) which was intended as a “tool kit for urban innovators”. Landry’s work inspired Richard Florida’s bestseller The Creative Class which envisaged a class of “nowhereians” roaming the earth looking for a city characterised by the three Ts (talent, technology and tolerance) to work in. It sounds simplistic but his three Ts, as tested by a cynical economist, best explained the emergence of Austin, Texas as a hub of innovation.
A creative cluster can be bigger than a city and industry-based – like Silicon Valley – or housed within a city, like Austin’s IT sector, which the council began investing in back in 1983. A creative city is harder to define – though the tag has been applied to Barcelona, Vancouver and Amsterdam. Creative cities are usually, but not always, a focus for the creative industries. Fusionopolis must work if Singapore’s plan to double the creative industries’ contribution to its economy to 5-7% of GDP (which would put the industries on a similar footing to the UK and US) is to work. The other thread that unites Vancouver, Barcelona and Beijing and may yet benefit London is the use of iconic sporting events – especially the Olympics – to rebrand cities and act as the catalyst for hefty investment in infrastructure.
For Florida, “Creativity is organic, you can’t plan for it, you can only give it room and freedom to grow.” Singapore’s leaders have read Florida – they even quote him – but have, of necessity, ignored that dictum, while methodically putting into place many schemes other cities have used to brand themselves as innovative and creative.
Singapore has already developed – some, like Gibson, say over-developed – its downtown, and one-north may evolve into the kind of 24-hour downtown found in Denver, Colorado. Many cities still focus on office and retail space but cyberdistricts – like Seattle’s downtown and one-north – are more likely to drive urban growth in the 21st century. Each Singaporean ‘polis’ is focused on an industry, backed by high-tech investment (Hewlett Packard has already agreed to site R&D at Fusionopolis) and integrated into a support network feeding off local universities.
A scholar, a farmer and a worker are all more esteemed than the entrepreneur. We have to change values
One of Florida’s other mantras is that “The university is perhaps the single most important institution of the creative age”. In this instance, Singaporean policy makers have taken him at his word as they plan to make Singapore a global schoolhouse. Since 1999 the government has attracted exactly the right kind of academic brand names: MIT, Johns Hopkins University and the Chicago Graduate School of Business to the city-state. INSEAD, the European Institute of Business Administration, has founded its first campus outside France in Singapore. By 2016, when the £20m institute nestles against Fusionopolis and Infopolis, it will be almost as big as INSEAD’s campus at Fontainebleau.
Singapore has long held its own in the global labour market, wooing the best professionals to fill key skill shortages, and its 70,000 foreign residents now make up roughly a quarter of the population – the kind of sizeable, imported professional class usually found only in rich Gulf emirates.
Singapore has invested in amenities (one-north is a haven for exclusive private schools and colleges), tried to spice up its cultural life (using water as a theme for development and recreation by, for example, building a reservoir to host Formula 1 boat races) and spent millions to woo tourists and conference delegates. The country marked its hosting of an International Monetary Fund meeting in July 2006 with an online mural of photographs of beaming locals, but the effect was spoilt by a row after 27 activists were barred from entering the city-state for the meeting.
Will Singapore’s gamble work? Or is Fusionopolis – as Thackara insists – proof of the regime’s confusionopolis? Landry identified six prerequisites for a creative city: “Creative people, will and leadership; human diversity and access to varied talent; an open-minded organisational culture; positive and strong local identity; urban spaces and facilities; and opportunities for networking.” Ideally, he says, creative cities should be made more “by a jazz jam session than a symphony” and should be funky and edgy.
Benchmarked against these criteria, Fusionopolis – and Singapore – score well on leadership, urban space and networking but badly on the touchy feely stuff – open-mindedness, human diversity, even strong local identity (“the physical past,” Gibson complained, “has almost completely vanished,”) and funkiness.
Yet Landry’s one-size-fits-all approach to the making of creative cities itself lacks a certain creativity. Singapore’s transformation may be orchestrated, not improvised, but does that mean its doomed? There’s more than a little at stake here. Investment by multinationals has long driven Singaporean economic growth. The flow of foreign direct investment has, post 9/11, shifted from South East Asia to China. Singapore’s proximity to the largely Muslim nations of Malaysia and Indonesia has deterred some American investors. China’s surging economic power may, as prime minister Loong hopes, boost Singapore but it could, just as easily, hoover up the funds the city-state needs to reinvent itself.
Yet Singapore’s creative industries are already growing fast: by an average of 13.4% between 1988 and 2000, faster than the economy as a whole. If Loong’s plans work, the J-pop phenomenon – in which Japanese popular culture becomes a valued global export – will be followed by S-pop.
What is being tested now – in Singapore, China and Korea – is whether Asian governments can reach their desired destination by a route Landry hasn’t envisaged – or whether, as Thackara insists: “Anything that encourages the propensity of professionals to talk to each other rather than to get out into the world and see what needs to be done can never foster long-term innovation.”
Singapore’s founding father Lee Kuan Yew says that Westerners shouldn’t be too dogmatic about the future for East Asia. “We are agricultural societies that have industrialised in one or two generations. What happened in the West in 200 years is happening here in 50 years or less, so there are bound to be dislocations and malfunctions.” When Karina Robinson, a writer from the International Herald Tribune, visited Singapore to interview Loong she couldn’t help but notice the book on her taxi driver’s dashboard: Strategic Management: Concepts And Cases. With that kind of dedication, Singaporeans might just surprise Landry, Thackara and Gibson.
How Asia is gearing up for the digital race
Digital Media City, Seoul
Due for completion in 2010, this high-tech utopia (with eco-friendly lighting and electric personal transporters) is 1.7 times as large as Canary Wharf and will become a hub for animation, music, online content and R&D (MIT will have a lab here), creating 270,000 jobs and generating £6.3bn of revenue.
Fusionopolis, Singapore
This city within a city is expected to stimulate small-business growth.
Beijing, China
The city is booming ahead of the 2008 Olympics with its own silicon valley which has increased revenues by 30% a year, a massive investment in digital film and a huge digital Olympics project.
Capital gains
Beyond 2012 Should Londoners worry about a rise in Council Tax or can the Olympics be designed as value for money in the long term?
Neale Coleman, the Mayor’s Director of Business Planning and Regeneration, is hoping London’s Olympics’ success will extend beyond the business of counting medals.
“2012 can transform the capital,” he says. “When we’re designing new facilities and buildings, the Olympic Delivery Authority looks at London’s post-2012 needs, then retrofits for the games. Similarly, many transport schemes for the games, including the East London Line and the transformation of the North London Line, are ones we've wanted for years – 2012 just makes them possible.”
Three of the ten developing creative hubs identified by Creative London – the strategic agency for the capital’s creative industries – are in the east. Such as Lower Lea Valley, which, Coleman says, “has some of the worst deprivation in the country. But after 2012 it will have 40,000 new homes and tens of thousands of new jobs. People forget about this part of London but it’s actually as close to Trafalgar Square as Earl’s Court is.”
After 2012, the Olympic Park will become the largest urban park created in Europe for 200 years. A 92,903m2 press centre in Hackney will turn into offices bringing high employment opportunities.
Coleman knows London must plan effectively: “Athens didn’t – we don’t want to invest in venues that will be boarded up. Some say Athens made a loss but they include spending on new airports and underground systems and transforming air quality – which made Athens an international city with booming tourism.”
London’s approach is more like Barcelona’s -– a conscious strategy to drive regeneration. Coleman says: “We link the delivery of the games to giving the city a better quality of life.”
Creative capitals: the organic approach
Barcelona
Barcelona switched the creative lights on with risk-taking civic projects in the run-up to the 1992 Olympics. Reclaiming car-choked public spaces, re-orienting the city towards the sea and commissioning audacious public sculpture were just some of the ways the city capitalised on its architectural heritage and Catalan identity. Almost 8% of municipal budget is allocated to culture. You can see the results in smaller innovations like street furniture and major projects like the MACBA contemporary art museum which opened in 1995 in the city’s red light district. High-profile theme years such as 2002’s Gaudi year, events such as SONAR, the new media and electronic music festival, and a star-studded continent-conquering football team help make Barcelona shine.
Helsinki
The Finnish capital has rebranded itself using its climactic disadvantage – long dark winters – as the hook for a world famous festival of light. Taking advantage of one of the most educated workforces in the world, and driven in part by Nokia’s leadership, the city has been even more ambitious in the IT sector. As well as becoming a world-class centre for IT and scientific innovation, Helsinki, which accounts for a third of Finland’s GDP, now leads Scandinavia as a centre of design, strengthening links between government, universities and business. A five-year plan to boost Finland’s design culture culminated in Design Year 2005, and the creation of a designated Design District which has, at its core, the Design Forum, the Design Museum and the Museum of Finnish Architecture.
Freiburg
Freiburg, a town in southern Germany with a population of 220,000, has become famous as a pioneer of ecological urban development. The pilot eco-city gave Germany its first experimental solar-powered house in 1978. The city’s Fraunhofer Institute, which researches renewable energy, attracted such like-minded organisations as the Ölo-Insitute and the International Centre for Local Environmental Initiatives. Freiburg is still at the forefront of green innovation, pioneering strict building regulations (only low energy housing has been permitted on public land), recycling schemes (more than 62% of rubbish is recycled) and a scheme in which residents can buy shares in solar panels and recoup dividends when the energy is sold to the city’s grid.
Vancouver
Hollywood North, as Vancouver is also known, is at the heart of British Columbia’s new media boom. New media employs some 15,000 people in the region. The Canadian city is a global hotspot for digital gaming, visual effects and post-production, with a ready supply of graduates from 11 universities and colleges. Over 80% of the region’s new media firms produce new intellectual property, which has prompted British Columbia to spend £18.7m on a new digital media graduate course. Consistently listed as one of the cities offering the best quality of life of the planet, Vancouver’s traditional role as a location for film and television production – and its unofficial status as the world's computer-gaming capital – has fuelled the knowledge economy.
The Wellington makeover
How Peter Jackson made his hometown a creative hub
Local boy turns hometown hero is a movie cliché Peter Jackson, the New Zealand filmmaker behind The Lord Of The Rings, is living. He says: “With the allure of the Rings, I knew I’d attract a diverse array of creative talent from all over the world to Wellington.”
Jackson’s Weta Workshops is the largest of the region’s 2,510 film and creative companies which generated £205m (4.3% of local GDP) in 2003. New studios could contribute another £220m to the local economy in the next decade. The benefits don’t stop there. City mayor Kerry Prendergast says: “Tourism, business and migrant attraction have all leveraged off Weta’s profile.”
Chris Lipscombe, deputy chief executive of economic development agency Positively Wellington Business, says: “The Rings films enabled New Zealand’s finest to work with world-class practitioners, upskilling the local industry and increasing production spend.”
Jamie Selkirk and Richard Taylor, directors and Jackson’s co-owners of Weta, say: “Wellington is geographically remote, but digitally it’s almost in the same room. Weta had the talent, but not the numbers. Wellington became a creative zone for Peter Jackson’s dynamic vision. Digital technology enabled this vision to be transformed into incredible product, delivered instantly to the other side of the world.”
Article first published in Design Council Magazine, Issue 1, Winter 2006