The Hard State, Soft City of Singapore

Description

With Singapore serving as the subject of exploration, The Hard State, Soft City of Singapore explores the purview of imaginative representations of the city. Alongside the physical structures and associated practices that make up our lived environment, and conceptualized space engineered into material form by bureaucrats, experts and commercial interests, a perceptual layer of space is conjured out of people’s everyday life experiences. While such imaginative projections may not be as tangible as its functional designations, they are nonetheless equally vital and palpable. The richness of its inhabitants’ memories, aspirations and meaningful interpretations challenges the reduction of Singapore as a Generic City. Taking the imaginative field as the point of departure, the forms and modes of intellectual and creative articulations of Singapore’s urban condition probe the resilience of cities and the people who reside in them, through the images they convey or evoke as a means for collective expressions of human agency in placemaking. 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