No Room to Swing a Cat? Animal Treatment and Urban Space in Singapore

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)IntroductionSingapore, the Garden City, has undergone a massive program of urban reform, renewal, and resettlement since independence in 1965. The government of the People's Action Party, which has enjoyed uninterrupted rule, dispersed the population of the overcrowded central-town district to peripheral towns, which were built on land appropriated from old village communities. Through education, land reclamation, military conscription, and public housing, the government created a disciplined industrial workforce (now housed in flats built by the Housing Development Board, or HDB, and linked to factories and offices via highways) along Fordist lines, thus engineering tremendous changes in the human landscape of Singapore (Barr and Skrbis 2008; Chua 1997; Dobbs 2003; Loh 2007; Wee 2007). This massive control over space defined the postcolonial history of Singapore, whose modernity depended as much on facilitating motion as on preventing it (Netz 2004, xii).Although historians have delineated the relationship between authoritarian rule, economic development, and social engineering in Singapore, they have been slow in integrating the work of geographers, who have addressed how landscapes, both material and immaterial, serve as representations and social channels that foster and maintain the state ideologies of human progress and nation building. The government redeveloped the city center-now marked by skyscrapers and the reconstructed racial enclaves of Chinatown, Kampong Glam, and Little India-to showcase Singapore's global connectedness and historical legacies. It developed Marina Promenade and the banks of the Singapore River into a tourist attraction and up-market residential zone that appealed to expatriate executives and foreign visitors. It also created new art spaces such as the Esplanade (home to Theatres on the Bay) and renovated colonial landmarks and dilapidated shophouses to present Singapore as a vibrant arts and hub worthy of admiration at home and abroad (Kong and Yeoh 2003; Chang et al. 2013; Ho et al. 2014).In recent years, historians began to recognize the impact of the natural environment, and attempts to reconfigure it, on the economic, political, and social history of Singapore. They have established that the British colonial authorities and the postcolonial People's Action Party government were interested not only in demolishing outdated structures and flattening the landscape but also in conserving heritage and preserving monuments and parks (including the Botanical Gardens, a new addition to UNESCO's heritage sites as a cultural landscape) to promote scientific research, urban redevelopment, and the construction of a modern national identity (Barnard 2014; Blackburn and Tan 2015). Educated in English-language universities, Singapore's leaders understood that modernization and national success emerged from urban industrial growth, as in the American and European historical experiences. To maintain economic and political legitimacy, they would need to succeed by these terms (Kwak 2008, 87-88).Nevertheless, historians studying Singapore's past have not picked up on animal geographies, which not only inquire into relationships between nature and society and how nature shapes human practices, but also define animals as central agents in the constitution of space and place, and all that entails (Wolch and Emel 1998, xiii). The of geography is unleashed when space constitutes, constrains, and mediates social relations. As Lily Kong and Brenda S. A. Yeoh elaborate, the power relations that define and contest the specificities of the Singaporean nation are negotiated through elements of the landscape, including the landscapes and practices of everyday life (2003, 15). Specialists on Southeast Asia have conducted a fair amount of research on animal-welfare activism and the discursive and practical uses of animals in both colo- nial and postcolonial contexts. …