Commentary: To conserve or demolish? Singapore needs a heritage middle ground

We do not need to save every building but we do need a system that weighs trade-offs honestly, offers owners viable paths to retention where it makes sense, and carries forward the physical traces of our nation-building era. 

That begins with how we regard the everyday buildings around us. Their value may not be the same kind of heritage as nineteenth-century shophouses, colonial civic buildings or national monuments. It simply lies in a different register: in everyday life, institutional memory, social use and the lived experience of a rapidly modernising city.

In a city built on transformation, the real question is not only what we conserve or demolish, but what we choose to let endure, and in what form.

Yeo Kang Shua is Associate Professor of Architectural History, Theory and Criticism, and Architecture and Sustainable Design at the Singapore University of Technology and Design.