# Mapping Singapore’s Shifting Ethnic Enclaves: Sites of Impermanence and Belonging Singapore has long been an immigrant city – ever since the 13th and 14th centuries, when Javanese and Sumatran traders and fishermen first coalesced on the island as part of larger trade networks across Nusantara. Ever since the colonial British administration, when Lieutenant Philip Jackson drew up the [Raffles Town Plan](https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_658_2005-01-07.html) to carve out land downtown for the increasing Chinese, Malay/Arab as well as tentatively Chulia migrants and traders, governmentally-demarcated ethnic enclaves have existed and thrived in Singapore. These districts, among others such as Emerald Hill and Katong/Joo Chiat, subsequently developed into nexuses in which communities and industries have gathered around, paving the way for their gazetting as heritage districts in 1989. Yet even as [tourists ](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/paid-content-singapores-best-kept-secrets-are-its-culture-rich-neighborhoods)and [Singaporeans](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00377996.1996.10114489?journalCode=vtss20) throng Chinatown and Kampong Glam today, even more migrants from different parts of the world, particularly South, Northeast and Southeast Asia, have more recently come to Singapore to work and make this city their home. These transient, low-income laborers, high-skilled workers, and expatriates have all developed their own unique communities alongside Singapore, and in turn, their own unique and usually informal ethnic enclaves. Over this past summer, I have tried my best to map the shifting patterns of ethnic enclave development across the city-state, from formally-demarcated districts under the Raffles Town Plan and officially gazetted post-Independence heritage neighborhoods to shopping malls serving as informal enclaves for smaller, shifting national communities. Many of these migrant communities, such as Thai, Filipinos, and Myanmese/Burmese, are culturally, linguistically and formally situated outside the traditional CMI, or Chinese-Malay-Indian racial model inherited from British models of governance, and which the Singaporean government continues to utilize in social planning, education and policy-making. And this social and legislative exclusion – largely also due to employment status – often translates to the creation of new urban spaces, each one of them imbued with their own unique histories and economic logics. You can find my **ArcGIS Map** of Singapore’s old and new ethnic enclaves here: . I have also conducted some sociological fieldwork and urban photographic documentation of these spaces, many of which are both incredibly distinct spaces in their own right yet profoundly transient. The redevelopment of Golden Mile Complex, famously known as ‘Little Bangkok’ for its profusion of Thai grocery stores, restaurants and nightclubs and for being the informal enclave for the local Thai community since the 80s, this May serves as a sobering reminder for just how fragile these spaces truly are, even if they might appear otherwise. A lot of these communities are governed simultaneously by economic logic and legislative rules – migrants from particular nations or ethnic groups typically gather in shopping malls or shopping streets in Singapore because of businesses catering to their own tastes and preferences as well as legal provisions or loopholes that tacitly allow their congregation. More gradually, a positive feedback loop occurs in which a particular building or street becomes known as the ‘watering hole’ around which a particular ethnic or national group gathers, creating an informal ethnic enclave. The absence of any one of these factors, particularly property rights enabling shops and businesses for the community to exist, disrupts the socio-capitalist dynamic of these urban spaces and often quickly leads to their demise. I documented many of my own observations and experiences in these informal ethnic enclaves, specifically the loss of Golden Mile Complex and what it means for the local Thai community, how ethnic enclaves like Peninsula Plaza (Burmese) and Lucky Plaza (Filipino) have responded to demographic changes and respectively thrived, why the temporary Joo Chiat Vietnamese ethnic enclave has essentially dissolved, and the socially and temporally competing identities of Chinatown, as a gazetted historical district for local descendants of Southern Chinese and gathering point for newly-immigrated Northern Chinese. You can access these posts at the **blogspot**: or through hyperlinks in the ArcGIS map above. It has been an extremely rewarding journey documenting these spaces, many of which were both familiar and foreign to me. I would like to thank the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative for supporting this longstanding passion project of mine, which I first conceived when I was still living in Singapore. In documenting, interrogating and charting the histories of these spaces throughout the city-state I used to call home, it has made me deeply consider what living in a multi-ethnic, multicultural city truly looks like, as well as what it means to belong to one. Researcher: [Jovan Lim](/people/jovan-lim)