摘要：This article demonstrates that the beginnings of the heritage conservation debatein Singapore extend back to the colonial period. It argues that the early colonial andpostcolonial debates on heritage conservation in Singapore were influenced by aWestern hegemony over what constituted heritage and how it could be conserved.A non-governmental organization, the Friends of Singapore, emerged in 1937 andbattled to preserve what it saw as the heritage of Singapore. The organizationhelped the colonial government draw up a list of historic sites, monuments, andbuildings for preservation in Singapore’s 1958 Master Plan. The coming to powerof the People’s Action Party in 1959 began a debate within bureaucratic circles onurban renewal versus heritage conservation. The People’s Action Party believedit had a mandate to demolish what it saw as old slums in the central city area andreplace them with better housing in the form of modern government high-rise apartments.In the 1960s, various government committees considered the 1958 heritagelist and proposed setting up a government body to administer the preservation ofheritage buildings. The Preservation of Monuments Board (now called the Preservationof Sites and Monuments) was charged with carrying out this task when it wasestablished in 1971. However, by the late 1970s, Singapore’s Urban RedevelopmentAuthority increasingly became the state agency to conserve whole zones while thePreservation of Monuments Board was allocated the task of gazetting for the preservationof individual buildings and sites
