With Singapore serving as the subject of exploration, the volume explores the purview of imaginative representations of the city. Alongside the physical structures and associated practices that make up our lived environment, and the conceptualised 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.

Simone Shu-Yeng Chung is Assistant Professor at the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore. She holds a PhD in Architecture and M.Phil. in Screen Media and Cultures from the University of Cambridge and practiced as an architect in the UK.Mike Douglass is Emeritus Professor and former Chair of the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Hawai’i where he was also Director of the Globalization Research Center. He holds a Ph.D. in Urban Planning from UCLA.

Introduction: The Master Narrative and the Lived City-Half a Century of Imagining SingaporeSimone Shu-Yeng Chung and Mike DouglassPart I (De)-Constructing Master Narratives of the City1. Singapore Songlines Revisited: The World Class Complex and the Multiple Deaths of ContextMark R. Frost2. On the Banning of a Film: Tan Pin Pin's To Singapore, with LoveOlivia Khoo3. The City State of Singapore's Territorial and Social Management Dilemmas: Reminiscing about Classical AthensRodolphe De KoninckPart II The Arts as Prisms of the Urban Imaginative4. The Address of Art and the Scale of Other PlacesWeng Choy Lee5. Forming Cityscapes: Small Interventions and Appropriations in the CityGideon Kong and Jamie Yeo6. The Sinophone as Lyrical Aesthetics Redefined: In the Case of Contemporary Singapore Chinese Language PoeticsChow Teck Seng7. Noisy People, Noisy Places: Trouble and Meaning in SingaporeSteve FerzaccaPart III The City Possible in Action8. Place Management/Making: The Policy and Practice of Arts-Centred Spatial Interventions in SingaporeHoe Su Fern9. Conviviality in Clementi: The Flowering of a Local Social Housing CommunityGoh Wei Leong10. Mediating Community in Bukit BrownNatalie Pang and Liew Kai Khiun11. Collaborative Imaginaries: Social Experiments, Free Schools and Counterpublics in SingaporeHuiying Ng12. The Invisible Electorate: Political Campaign Participation as the Production of an Alternative National SpaceEmily Chua Hui ChingConclusionSimone Shu-Yeng Chung and Mike DouglassIndex