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The crowded, bustling, “squatter” kampongs so familiar across Southeast Asia have long since disappeared from Singapore, leaving few visible traces of their historical influence on the life in the city-state. In one such settlement, located in an area known as Bukit Ho Swee, a great fire in 1961 destroyed the kampong and left 16,000 people homeless, creating a national emergency that led to the first big public housing project of the new Housing and Devel- opment Board (HDB). HDB flats now house more than four-fifths of the Singapore population, making the aftermath of the Bukit Ho Swee fire a seminal event in modern Singapore. Loh Kah Seng grew up in one-room rental flats in the HDB est...
Over the past two decades, Singapore has advanced rapidly towards becoming a both a global city-state and a key nodal point in the international economic sphere. These developments have caused us to reassess how we understand this changing nation, including its history, population, and geography, as well as its transregional and transnational experiences with the external world. This collection spans several disciplines in the humanities and social sciences and draws on various theoretical approaches and methodologies in order to produce a more refined understanding of Singapore and to reconceptialize the challenges faced by the country and its peoples.
Treated from a range of disciplinary perspectives, this book addresses and challenges issues of space, historicity, architecture and textuality by focusing on Singapore's singular position in the region and as a global city.
This is the story of Singapore through the eyes of artists and photographers. Each image conveys a strong sense of place, and together they tell the story of a nation and the island they transformed from a fishing village to a global city state.
This book attempts to revisit Singapore's urban experience since her independence three decades ago, and unfold the planning and development process behind its successful urban transformation. Topics covered by the chapters include: visionary planning; local planning; IT in planning practice; planning industrial estate development; urban conservation; recreation planning; and planning urban transportation.
Place names tell us much about a country — its history, its landscape, its people, its aspirations, its self-image, The study of place names called toponymics unlocks the stories that are in every street name and landmark. In Singapore, the existence of various races, cultures and languages, as well as its history of colonization, immigration and nationalism has given rise to a complex history of place names. But how did these places get their names? This revised and expanded 4th edition of the book incorporates additional information, from archival research as well as interviews that have come to light since the last edition. Also included are many new entries that have presented themselves as Singapore’s built environment undergoes redevelopment. Expanded by over 100 pages.
This book documents through first-hand experience and academic research the historical, cultural and economic interactions affecting land use in Singapore. Offering a unique study of nostalgia in Singaporean heritage, it discusses the subjective nostalgic meanings and interpretations that users of peripheral, heritage and green spaces in Singapore create and maintain, through a combination of informal observations and interactions combined with research into local history and heritage. It addresses the subjective meaning-making processes of individuals within the larger theoretical frameworks that structure understandings of changing land use and economical changes which impact on contemporary cityscapes, centered around peripheral and de-privileged areas of Singapore’s economic development.
This book examines how a predominantly negative view of community has presented a challenge to critical analysis of community performance practice. The concept of community as a form of class-based solidarity has been hollowed out by postmodernism’s questioning of grand narratives and poststructuralism’s celebration of difference. Alongside the critique of a notion of community has been a critical re-signification of community, following the thinking of philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy who conceives of community not as common being but as being-in-common. The concept of community as being-in-common generates questions that have been taken up by feminist geographers, J.K. Gibson-Graham, in theorising a post-capitalist approach to community-based development. These questions and approaches guide the analyses in researched case studies of community performance practice. The book revises theoretical debates that have defined the field of community theatre and performance. It asks how the critical re-signification of community aligns with these debates and, at the same time, opens new modes of critical analysis of community theatre and performance practice.
Singapore housing has often been held up as a success story, especially the development of its public housing. This book aims to document the research and publication on this aspect of Singapore's development. Covering the periods prior to and after 1960, the annotated bibliography brings together in one volume both published and unpublished works.
It sometimes seems as if suburbs are taking over the world. For the last two centuries, most urban growth has been on the edges. This book surveys not only the "Brady Bunch suburbs" of the United States but also improvised communities on the edges of Latin American cities and the high-rise suburbs of Eastern Europe and East Asia. Some suburbs have been carefully planned to the last detail by master architects while others are the result of thousands of individual decisions by households and builders. Together they have built the places that billions of people call home.