The Hard State, Soft City of Singapore

Cover
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The Master Narrative and the Lived City – Half a Century of Imagining Singapore
Simone Shu-Yeng Chung and Mike Douglass
Part I: (De)-Constructing Master Narratives of the City
1. Singapore Songlines Revisited
The World Class Complex and the Multiple Deaths of Context
Mark R. Frost
2. On the Banning of a Film
Tan Pin Pin’s To Singapore, with Love
Olivia Khoo
3. The City State of Singapore’s Territorial and Social Management Dilemmas
Reminiscing about Classical Athens
Rodolphe De Koninck
Part II: The Arts as Prisms of the Urban Imaginative
4. The Address of Art and the Scale of Other Places
Weng Choy Lee
5. Forming Cityscapes
Small Interventions and Appropriations in the City
Gideon Kong and Jamie Yeo
6. The Sinophone as Lyrical Aesthetics Redefined
The Case of Contemporary Singapore Chinese Language Poetics
Chow Teck Seng
7. Noisy Places, Noisy People
Trouble and Meaning in Singapore
Steve Ferzacca
Part III: The City Possible in Action
8. Place Management/Making
The Policy and Practice of Arts-Centred Spatial Interventions in Singapore
Hoe Su Fern
9. Conviviality in Clementi
The Flowering of a Local Public Housing Community
Goh Wei Leong
10. Mediating Community in Bukit Brown
Natalie Pang and Liew Kai Khiun
11. Collaborative Imaginaries
Social Experiments, Free Schools and Counterpublics in Singapore
Huiying Ng
12. The Invisible Electorate
Political Campaign Participation as the Production of an Alternative National Space
Emily Chua Hui Ching
Conclusion
Simone Shu-Yeng Chung and Mike Douglass
Index
List of Figures and Tables
Figures
Figure 1.1 Hock Hiap Leong on Armenian Street in the 1980s
Figure 1.2 36 and 38 Armenian Street today
Figure 1.3 Portrait of Dr. Lim Boon Keng (1890s)
Figure 1.4 A briefing by a HDB official during the Malaysian Minister’s visit to HDB (1965)
Figure 1.5 Poh Tiong Keng at Kim Keat estate of Toa Payoh
Figure 1.6 Television Singapura broadcasting the Minister for Culture giving a speech (1964)
Figure 1.7 Lee Wen, World Class Society (1999)
Figure 2.1 Publicity image for the film To Singapore, with Love
Figure 2.2 Outside Ho Juan Thai’s hotel room window in Johor Bahru
Figure 2.3 Tan Wah Piow’s ‘two little suitcases’
Figure 3.1 Putting everyone in their place
Figure 3.2 Housing foreign workers on the margins
Figure 3.3 Moving burial grounds out of town
Figure 5.1 Selected page spreads from Forming Cityscapes
Figure 5.2 All the subjects serve a communicative function
Figure 5.3 Improvised notices pasted on temporary objects
Figure 5.4 A directional map; and the map in use
Figure 5.5 Desire paths that have resulted from various practical needs
Figure 5.6 Stickers as visual interferences to urban objects and signs
Figure 5.7 A thin wooden board placed over slightly elevated ground
Figure 5.8 Instances where the absence of people or actors in a photograph strengthens their imagined presence
Figure 5.9 Selection of photographs with similar photographic ‘subjects’
Figure 5.10 Selection of photographs with similar photographic ‘themes’
Figure 5.11 Loose selection of additional images
Figure 6.1 Left, part 1 of Xi Ni Er’s ‘LOST’. Right, part 2 of ‘LOST’
Figure 6.2 The three circles of influences of the Sinophone articulation network
Figure 6.3 ‘Words dedicated to the Bronze Statue of Raffles by Liang Yue’
Figure 6.4 A pictorial multilingual meta-poem ‘LOST’ by Xi Ni Er
Figure 6.5 Chua Mia Tee, National Language Class (1959)
Figure 6.6 ‘We Speak to Fish using National Languages’ by Zhou Decheng aka Chow Teck Seng
Figure 7.1 The Coleman Street entrance to the Peninsula Shopping Centre
Figure 7.2 The Doghouse
Figure 7.3 The Doghouse bar
Figure 7.4 The Straydogs guitar signed by all members of the band
Figure 7.5 A Doghouse gathering
Figure 7.6 Jamming
Figure 9.1 Aerial view of a part of Clementi New Town
Figure 9.2 Examples of corridor gardening in a public housing block in Clementi
Figure 9.3 Christmas decorations on the parapet overlooking a playground in Clementi
Figure 9.4 Lift spaces are currently used only for health and safety-related notices
Figure 9.5 Example of a void deck with benches and tables in Clementi
Figure 10.1 The first version, iBBC, released on Google Playstore
Figure 10.2 A visitor uses iBBC to recognize the tomb and retrieve related records
Figure 10.3 Background information, related images and other links on iBBC
Figure 11.1 *SCAPEnodes’ Same Same But Different festival poster (2016)
Figure 11.2 Growell Pop-Up schedule in 2015
Figure 11.3 Ground floor of Growell
Figure 11.4 Foodscape Collective’s crowdsourced map of home gardens, based on ArcGIS
Figure 12.1 Map of the GE 2015 electoral constituencies
Tables
Table 6.1 Relations in the Sinophone with respect to language, script andgeopolitical affiliations
Table 11.1 Overview of each case study
Table 11.2 Schedule of the completed Babel sessions as of March 2016
Table 11.3 Selected interviewee quotations
Table 11.4 Economic distinctions and their relevance to each case study
Table 11.5 Models of autonomous research platforms
Table 12.1 Results of all of Singapore’s general elections as an independent nation