Description
Book SynopsisWith 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.
Trade Review"The virtue of Hard State, Soft City lies in provoking challenging questions to the reader. Do humans live by bread alone?"
Susan S. Fainstein,
Pacific Affairs, Volume 96, no. 1 (March 2023).
Table of ContentsIntroduction: 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: In the Case of Contemporary Singapore Chinese Language Poetics
Chow Teck Seng
7. Noisy People, Noisy Places: 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 Social 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
