By OOI KEE BENG
JUST RETURNED FROM Singapore after an effective two-week stay there, I am prone not only to wax lyrical about the public transport system the city-state has developed, but also to ponder deeply over the central importance that spatial management has in urban life.
Urban life by definition is a crowded one, where space is contested and controlled, even when shared or at least serially used.
Rural life is not without such challenges, no doubt. Two humans just meeting immediately requires a sizing up of each other and of the importance of the meeting; but when there is much physical space, the need to determine dominance or ownership, or to decide to share, is seldom as critical as in the city.
There is another sense of space prevalent in the countryside, which is seldom felt in the city though. And that is the presence of wilderness. This is undomesticated space, untamed and, even if owned, unutilized for the moment. In an urban setting, you tend to have only private space and public space. Wilderness creeps in only on rare occasions. Even city parks are public spaces.
Wilderness and the State
But with the proselysation of nation-statehood across the world following the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 when it was decided that drawing concrete lines between polities within the Holy Roman Empire would bring peace, no-man’s land quickly disappeared—wilderness in the sense of unclaimed land faded away.
This powerful notion has through centuries of settler and other forms of European colonialism become unquestioned. We are a world of nation states now, and all national borders on Earth interconnect as a perfect jigsaw puzzle. (Let’s leave Antarctica out of this for now).
What’s not my country’s land, I should assume belongs to another country. We do take this concept for granted today, albeit to a much lesser degree the more “undeveloped” a country is, perhaps due to the state not being able to enforce and exercise its ownership of all land within its borders that is not owned privately.
Statehood, and state capacity, then is largely about exercising and exhibiting state ownership over land. Over space, in fact. And about managing it, planning its function and status, and controlling access to it.
In developing countries, consciousness of the presence of spatial wilderness, be it in the city or the countryside, is inescapably more poignant and real, mirroring as it does the limited extension of state power and/or of state players’ lack of understanding of the right given them by contemporary universal consent to control all land within the nation’s boundaries.
State control over land is ultimately supreme in the Age of Nation States, a monopoly limited only by contingencies, circumstances and legacies, rather than by any principle.
Described another way, all the Earth was wilderness until man intruded. And as man settled and claimed territory, their settlements had to work out issues of ownership and access—for private persons and for the emerging state. The King’s land became a thing, and below that, private land became a thing.
Physical Space Vs Cultural Space
But spatial conceptions and control involve other dimensions as well, and this is where it gets really interesting. To my mind, one that is fruitful to contemplate and that holds great significance in the study of multicultural countries and cities, and in imagining possible forms of state formation, is the one spanning what we may call “Physical Space” and what is better understood as “Cultural Space”
Physical Space is more how a nation state considers territory to be: It’s either mine or its not mine. There is certainty. Either I get to decide what to do with it, or I don’t. Technically, there is no “wilderness” within my borders.
This is Euclidean Space. Single dimensional.
Cultural Space is an expansive and creative place, conjured out of human practice and mutual agreements. This space is more like Quantum Space. It is a Multiverse. While Physical Space can be precisely measured, walled in, and have its global coordinates determined, Cultural Space is by nature fluid and multitudinal.
By Culture here, I do not mean a named assortment of congealed legacies, but the novel interactions and conjurements that take place in the present, in the everyday, and which are rather undetermined, unpredictable and unnamed. Any human interaction involves parleys on spatial use and determinations over distances. It may be easier to understand culture in this sense as the sum of ongoing socio-economic matters occurring at ground level.
Whenever we decide to name and define an culture, we have in fact begun to push it from Quantum Space where all things began as novelties, into Euclidean Space, where all things are static, predictable and controllable. Pushing it back out—deconstructing the definition—is no easy task, if even possible. And yet, Culture as phenomenon and not as a name continues changing all the time; and so, the signifier, the nominal leash given it, cannot but seek to limit the novelties Culture always creates when perceived in a Multiverse.
Tanah Melayu Vs Nusantara
As a last but illustrative point for Southeast Asians, let me compare the terms “Nusantara” and “Tanah Melayu”. The first term is used traditionally to describe the cultural fluidity and openness of Southeast Asia, the world’s largest archipelagic region. It is every much a maritime and not a territorial understanding of Space. It is necessary a Multiverse portrayal of the region.
With the coming of nation-statehood, and given the defensive nature of post-colonial nationalism, a conceptual shift from Quantum Space into Euclidean Space sadly happened across the region. This is displayed in the difference between the newly coined “Tanah Melayu”, a territorial perspective, and the traditional notion of the “Nusantara”, a vague concept expressive of uncertainties and novelties. While the latter propounds and celebrates the multidimensional nature of the archipelago, the former seeks to consider the Malay Peninsula, and not the seas that had always sustained its people, to be a Euclidean—in fact, a European-like—phenomenon.
Dato’ Dr Ooi Kee Beng is the Executive Director of Penang Institute, and Director of its Forum for Leadership and Governance (FLAG@PI) Programme. He is also Visiting Senior Fellow at ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute. His latest book is Signals in the Noise (Singapore: Faction Press, 2023), a compilation of writings from 2018 to 2023). Homepage: wikibeng.com.
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