Maintaining Singapore’s economic competitiveness requires land to be swiftly reallocated to industries that are hot from those that are not. Ensuring that average Singaporeans are not left behind demands that their main assets – their homes – rise in value, and not decay with age.

The cost of all this is an unsettling impermanence. Singaporeans will build and build, faster and more efficiently than other cities, but Singapore will never be finished. The bulldozers and jackhammers, the rubble and the dust are here to stay, and not the temporary inconveniences people like to think they are. Even more disconcerting is the fact that the place you grow up in will not be the place you grow old in, and that you can never go back, because what was there then is here no longer.

Conservation protects only the most widely shared of memories. Unfortunately, one’s list of personal landmarks generally would not merit a second look by anyone else. You invest your own private meaning into the places where you lived, studied, played and worked. They become repositories of memories in a way that photographs or diaries never do. Memories recorded self-consciously always miss the mundane. It is the things one takes for granted that disappear most irretrievably – like the feel of small mosaic tiles beneath one’s small, bare feet.

— Cherian George, Singapore: The Air-conditioned Nation, 2000