Events

This symposium is organised by Asia Research Institute, in collaboration with NUS Museum, at the National University of Singapore.

Alongside the physical structures and associated practices that make up our lived environment, and the conceptualized space to be engineered into material form by bureaucrats and scientists, a perceptual layer of space also exists that is produced through people’s everyday life experiences. Termed by Henri Lefebvre (1974) as “representational space”, it is space which is “directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users’, but also of some of artists and perhaps a few of those, which as writers and philosophers…” While such imaginative projections onto space oftentimes might not be as tangible as its functional designations, they are nonetheless equally vital and palpable. In the words of Jonathan Raban (1974), “The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps.”

With Singapore serving as the subject of exploration, we seek to promote discussions on the purview of imaginative representations of the city. As we grasp the richness of representational space, we also begin to contest the (in)famous claim made by architect and urban theorist Rem Koolhaas (1995) about Singapore’s qualification as a Generic City, one whose urban landscape exists in a perpetual state of tabula rasa, subject to abrupt erasure or extreme alterations under the rubric of national progress. The cyclical topographical remoulding for the greater good of the nation, compounded by the hegemonic disciplining of its population, inevitably promotes the construction of mental reproductions of the quotidian by its inhabitants – to affix a genius loci in order to make sense of the dislocating changes surrounding them. In the process, memories, aspirations and meanings are ignited that fill the interstitial realm of imagination projected onto urban spaces. It needs to be remembered that a city’s raison d’être is more crucially defined by its users than by the functional ensembles orchestrated by government or commercial enterprises. For this reason, the noun ‘state’ carries a double meaning: one is to foreground and acknowledge the various forms and modes of intellectual and creative articulations of Singapore’s urban condition; the other is to invite us to address the challenges to nurturing (or even preserving the autonomy of) the domain of terra imagina vis-à-vis state authority.

This symposium aims to bring practitioners and academic researchers together to uncover insights into the imaginative representations of Singapore in two ways: the particularized approach looks at the creative practices and contributions of individuals, as well as the impact of specific projects; a macro-level approach is orientated towards identifying broader trends and institutional structures that have played a role in shaping the conditions of creative production within Singapore. By taking the urban imaginative field as the point of departure, we will probe the resilience of cities through the images they convey or evoke.

REGISTRATION

Dr Simone Chung
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore
E | ariscsy@nus.edu.sg

Prof Mike Douglass
Asia Research Institute & Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore
E | michaeld@nus.edu.sg

SECRETARIAT

Ms Valerie Yeo
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore
E | valerie.yeo@nus.edu.sg