The Transformation of Waterfront Landscape, Identity and Imagination

Reflections on four coastal cities in the Straits of Malacca

Singapore, Penang, Malacca & Johor

Project Curator: Ng Keng-Khoon

| Tun Tan Cheng Lock Centre for Asian Architecture & Urban Heritage in Melaka | School of Design & Environment, Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore

“Waterfronts have been and continue to be spaces where an ensemble of actors, both societal and biophysical, and representing global, regional, and local forces, engage in intense struggles that change the urban.”

Gene Desfor (et al.) 2011 'Transforming Urban Waterfronts: Fixity and Flow'

The Vision of Landscape, Place and People

'Geographical representations - in the for of maps, texts and pictorial images of various kinds - and the look of landscapes themselves are not merely traces or sources, of greater or lesser value for disinterested investigation by geographical science. They are active, constitutive elements in shaping social and spatial practices and the environments we occupy. Reading landscapes on the ground or through images and text as testimony of human agency is an honourable contribution for cultural geography to make towards the humanities' goals of knowing the world and understanding ourselves: to the examined life.'

Denis Cosgrove, 2008

'Geography and Vision: Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World'

…We say, “landscape is nature, not convention” in the same way we say, “landscape is ideal, not real estate,” and for the same reason – to erase the signs of our own constructive activity in the formation of landscape as meaning or value; to produce an art that conceals its own artifice, to imagine a representation that breaks through representation into the realm of the nonhuman.

That is how we manage to call landscape the “natural medium” in the same breath that we admit that it is nothing but a bag of tricks, a bunch of conventions and stereotypes. Histories of landscape, as we have seen, continually present it as breaking with convention, with language and textuality, for a natural view of nature, just as they present landscape as transcending property and labor. . .

W.J.T. Mitchell, 1994 “Imperial Landscape” from Landscape and Power