Sustaining the local color of a global city

Color plays a significant role in shaping the urban environment as well as serving as a vivid expression of the culture of its people. Sustaining the local color through urban heritage conservation has proven to be an effective means. Yet, these strategies often rest on the assumption that each heritage site has its color palette remaining unchanged over time. As cities become more cosmopolitan, with increasingly diverse and migrating populations, we question how this shift might influence the local color and its conservation strategies. In this study, we examined the chromatic reconstruction of 3,103 heritage buildings in Singapore using a combination of computational machine learning techniques and non-computational archival and fieldwork methods. Our analysis of text and image data spanning over 40 years before and after heritage conservation in Singapore reveals that for those heritage sites that are still inhabited, local color is not always constant but ongoing and imbued with diverse cultural meanings over time. Historicization, ethnicization and commercialization serve as the key trends in expressing meaning throughout conservation, manifesting in five dimensions, namely, dominant colors, color complexity, color harmony, average saturation and average value. The dynamic change in local color bears significant implications for heritage conservation. We argue that color should be seen as an indispensable part of the sociocultural ecology, rich in meaning and continuously evolving, rather than merely an objective attribute of the material artifact to be preserved in isolation. Urban heritage embodies the tension between preservation and dynamism. Focusing on historic sections of Singapore and using archives, fieldwork and machine learning, this study finds that color is an evolving part of the sociocultural ecology of a city and its heritage.