The Master Narrative and the Lived City - Half a Century of Imagining Singapore (original) (raw)

Introduction to The Hard State, Soft City of Singapore, ed. Chung and Douglass (Amsterdam University Press, 2020). This chapter outlines how imaginative representations of the city, told through the images they convey or evoke, form collective expressions of human agency in placemaking and the (re)shaping of urban space. Of equal importance are polemical developments that play integral roles in influencing conditions for artistic and social (re)production in Singapore. In foregrounding society-space relations and the city, we argue that physical spaces are subject to a multitude of social imaginings, which are then projected back into urban space to convey individual and shared meanings, identities and purposes. Such diverse ways of conceptualising space, which can sometimes be born out of resistance, present another mode of understanding and experiencing the lived city.