September 15, 2026

Who gets to decide what counts as heritage?

In “From Product to Process: Community Heritage-Making in Singapore” (Cultural Connections, 2025), Associate Professor Hamzah Bin Muzaini (NUS Southeast Asian Studies) examines how heritage-making in Singapore has shifted from a largely state-led project to a more participatory process involving communities, grassroots groups, youths, and everyday heritage enthusiasts.

For decades, heritage in Singapore was closely tied to the making of “the Singapore Story”, a national narrative aimed at building shared identity and belonging. In the early years after independence, heritage was not a major national priority, as the young state focused on housing, employment, and economic development. By the 1980s and 1990s, however, heritage became more prominent, first as part of tourism development and later as a way to strengthen citizens’ knowledge of the nation’s past.

Muzaini explains that this earlier approach tended to treat community heritage as a product. Heritage was collected, curated, displayed, and authenticated largely by experts, institutions, and state agencies. Museums, historic districts, brochures, trails, and galleries helped communicate Singapore’s multicultural past, but communities themselves often remained passive contributors or consumers rather than active makers of heritage.

This began to change with the growth of community-led initiatives. One example is My Community, a grassroots group founded in 2010 to advocate for the preservation of Queenstown as Singapore’s first public housing estate. Through public tours, self-guided trails, oral histories, everyday objects, and community museums, groups like My Community placed personal memories and local histories at the centre of heritage work.

The article situates this shift alongside changes in the National Heritage Board’s (NHB’s) approach. NHB’s first Heritage Plan, launched in 2018, already included community stories, but still largely treated them as materials to be collected and displayed. Heritage Plan 2.0, launched in 2023, placed stronger emphasis on public participation, inviting Singaporeans to contribute ideas, shape heritage priorities, and take part in building Singapore’s heritage and museum landscape.

Newer initiatives such as Heritage Activation Nodes, the Youth Heritage Kickstarter Fund, and Heritage Research Grants reflect this more process-oriented approach. Instead of seeing heritage only as something produced by institutions, these programmes encourage communities and individuals to research, create, and share heritage projects of their own.

Muzaini argues that this participatory approach has important benefits. It allows micro-histories, personal memories, and ordinary places to enrich the broader national story. It also gives communities a greater stake in how history is remembered, especially when their experiences may not fit neatly into official narratives.

At the same time, he cautions against romanticising community heritage-making. Bottom-up projects can also be selective, nostalgic, or shaped by personal agendas. Community heritage should therefore be supported by research rigour, training, and critical reflection, rather than assumed to be automatically representative or authentic.

Overall, Singapore’s heritage landscape is becoming more open and plural. Moving from product to process does not weaken but expands the Singapore Story. By making room for everyday memories, local attachments, and community-led histories, heritage can become not only something Singaporeans inherit, but something they actively make together.

Read the article here.