Epitaph of a neighbourhood (extracted from an ex-Chipbee-ite's blog)

Epitaph for a Neighborhood – The Reinvention of Holland Village
Beijing isn't the only Asian city busily bulldozing its personality in the name of progress and development. After my recent week in Bali I spent three days in my former home of Singapore, where the long-threatened revamp of the Holland Village neighborhood has kicked into high gear. What a shame.
I spent my final three Singapore years in a Chip Bee Gardens terrace house. It was the best place I lived in Singapore, both because it was a quiet house with a yard and because it was five minutes walk from Holland Village. Here in my hermetically sealed high-rise flat in Beijing I sorely miss the squirrels, bulbuls and starlings (woop-woop birds my wife and I called them, and if you heard them you'd know why) that used to prowl the mango tree outside my second-floor study window.
Like pornography, good neighborhoods are hard to define, but you know one when you find it (apologies to Justice Potter Stewart). One thing that good neighborhoods seem to have in common is that they are not centrally planned, but come by their character organically over the years. That was Holland Village, a neighborhood that seemed to evolve over the years in spite of Singapore's planning, rather than because of it. In a town that increasingly pushes its personality to the fringes to build “new towns” that remind me of the domed arcology of Logan's Run, Holland Village was a pleasing mix of watering hole, bohemian enclave, teenage shopping district and large public-housing development. It's mixed character is nicely encapsulated in the slightly precious bar and restaurant street of Lorong Liput, which wraps around a completely local wet market and hawker center and ends at a ramshackle mosque built out of corrugated tin.
Holland Village was characters as well as places. The bent, old man who collects newspapers in his shopping trolley lined with dangling CDs (impromptu reflectors, we think) and lived off handouts from the hawker center. The old woman on the steps in front of the bank selling hand-made malt candy for a dollar, swirled out of a sterno-heated pot on two satay sticks. The cobbler plying his trade on the corner, wedged between the two competing, Indian magazine merchants. Bobby, the perpetually comatose dun-colored dog who lives at the hawker center. All were familiar, reliable and essential to the character of a neighborhood thriving in the shade of enormous angsana and rain trees.
The creeping revamp began about a year ago with the installation of an enormous, ghastly display advertisement with a Reuters crawl on the side of the Holland Village Shopping Center. (There had been earlier rumblings when the local cane merchant closed his store because he realized he could make much more money renting out his shop to a boutique than selling rattan boxes to tourists. But no one recognized that as a precursor to worse things.)
For the residents of Chip Bee Gardens, the next disruption was the re-opening of a long disused school campus as part of Singapore's private Anglo-Chinese School. The only motor access to the campus is through the tiny, narrow streets of Chip Bee Gardens, down which an increasing number of taxis and cars now speed. My ex-neighbors had to petition the LTA to place a speed bump in front of their house.
Now the excavation for the planned Holland Village subway station has begun. The magnificent trees have been cut down, the cobbler has left and auntie sells her candy in the broiling, tropical sun, bereft of shade. What little parking there was has been replaced with open pits and hydraulic excavators.
The hawker center and wet market have been closed to make way for a multi-storey parking lot. A Malaysian friend of mine who has lived in Singapore for years was lamenting the loss of the stalls where they knew her favorite dishes and were always ready to let her slide for a day if she forgot to bring cash. She also recalled how the old man with the shopping trolley was left stunned when the market was closed, with no one to provide him with the handouts he survives on. Even Bobby the dog, who is about the same age as the trolley man, was left in a panic, running between the empty market and the shops on the opposite side of the street, howling his discomfort.
Where will it all go? It's hard to argue with schools (even private ones) and public transportation without seeming like a nimby curmudgeon or a hopelessly pampered yuppie. In a year or two the hawker center will re-open in the base of the multi-storey car park. The subway station will be done, and I am sure it will be a tremendous convenience for the residents even though there are two existing stops within ten minutes walk. New seedlings will have been planted by Singapore's ever-conscientious National Parks Board.
But I can't help but feel that the government has decided that Holland Village needs managing. That it is an underexploited resource that should be developed in order to reach its full economic potential. In the age of the “integrated resort” (a euphemism designed to cause even a hardened PR man to grind his teeth) can we expect any less? Honestly, Holland Village's days were probably numbered about the same time that Mediacorp, Singapore’s state-owned television broadcaster, got around to making a soap opera called “Holland Village”.
Maybe it's just us overpaid yuppies who will lament the piecemeal dilution of Holland Village's character. Everyone else may be thrilled. But anyone who has strolled through the ghastly, disneyfied reconstruction of Singapore's Chinatown should have pause before getting too enthusiastic. My Malaysian friend referred to redeveloped Holland Village as “Ang Moh Kio New Town”. It was not meant as a complement.
Anyway, the world is a big place, and there is always a horizon to be crossed. A new and exotic place, steeped in culture, to help us recover some of what we feel has been lost. Like Siglap.