Box Story: Place Plan for Kampong Gelam Historic Area

Kampong Gelam is a historic district with ties to Singapore’s Malay, Muslim, Arab, and other communities. It was gazetted as a conservation area in 1989. The district is anchored by iconic buildings such as the Sultan Mosque, and the Malay Heritage Centre, which are both national monuments. With food, retail and textile businesses operating in over 600 shophouses and representing traditional trades as well as home-grown brands, Kampong Gelam has in recent decades evolved into a well-loved leisure and heritage destination popular with both residents and tourists.

Place management efforts started in 2011 with Saeid Labbafi, a permanent resident of Singapore, whose family owned many carpet shops along Arab Street and had been operating in the historic precinct for close to 20 years. Seeing an opportunity to enhance the neighbourhood he loved, Saeid felt that more could be done if everyone banded together. In 2014, he founded One Kampong Gelam (OKG), an association dedicated to placemaking activities in the area. The group grew to have about 70 members by June 2021.

The Sultan Mosque in Kampong Gelam (Urban Redevelopment Authority)

To expand on the OKG's efforts, an informal partnership known as the Kampong Gelam Alliance (KGA) was set up in 2018. Made up of a more diverse group of stakeholders, including property owners, businesses, institutions, residents and hotels in the neighbourhood, the KGA complemented the OKG's efforts to deepen place management efforts for the area.

The URA facilitated a discussion among KGA members as well as Kampong Gelam’s larger community in end-2020 on how to harness the area’s heritage to serve residents better.

The discussions bore fruit in November 2022, when the KGA unveiled an initiative to guide and sustain the growth of Kampong Gelam over five years, as the area’s stakeholders strived to make the precinct more relevant to residents of all ages.

The Kampong Gelam Historic Area 2023–2028 Place Plan is a strategic roadmap that aims to enhance Kampong Gelam’s heritage, offerings and experiences for stakeholders and visitors alike. It is based on a collective vision for the precinct shaped by feedback and ideas from over 1,600 Kampong Gelam stakeholders and members of the public.

The KGA collaborated with the URA to identify five focus areas to underpin the Place Plan—Identity, Economy, Placemaking, Connectivity and Activation—and a corresponding range of projects that could be introduced progressively over the five-year period. The hope is that these projects will transform and enrich Kampong Gelam into an even more attractive, inclusive and resilient historic area while also preserving its “soul”.

Even as the Place Plan was being conceived collaboratively between the KGA and URA, Singapore’s National Heritage Board (NHB) concurrently worked with the URA and Kampong Gelam’s stakeholders on the Kampong Gelam Citizen Engagement Project. The project mapped over 40 heritage businesses in Kampong Gelam and involved 47 volunteers in helping to document the unique stories behind these businesses and how they had contributed to the precinct’s unique cultural identity. The volunteers’ efforts culminated in a digital map made available on the NHB's resource portal Roots.gov.sg, where visitors can find out more about these businesses that help to make Kampong Gelam such a rich centre of cultural heritage.

A mural at Kampong Glam completed as part of the five-year plan (Pexels)

The growth of citizen-led initiatives such as those to guide the development of Kampong Gelam illustrates a maturing of resident society as it moves away from public perceptions that the “government knows best” and that it must always take the lead in planning and development. This shift towards a more collaborative ecosystem bodes well for Singapore’s future as it grapples with increasingly complex challenges.