Ghosts in the Garden

The Designed Nation and the Micropolitics of Environment

For those accustomed to Euro-American democracies, the micropolitical attentions of Singapore’s administrators might come as a surprise. Journalist Cherian George recounts one example, personally witnessed. While attending Tree Planting Day in Esplanade Park in 1990, then prime minister Lee Kuan Yew was seen to kneel to the pavement and, with some dissatisfaction, extend his hand. George recounts that Lee “looked increasingly agitated”:

It was the park’s microclimate that he was most concerned about. Unceremoniously taking leave of the parks officials, he and Mrs. Lee took an unscheduled walk along the Esplanade, with security officers and reporters hovering. . . . He noted that although the sun had nearly set, one could feel the heat through the soles of one’s shoes. He squatted suddenly and placed a palm inches off the ground. He could sense the heat radiating from the pavement, he said.6

It is uncommon that warm concrete, a few degrees of ambient temperature, would be considered the stuff of state. Lee himself has noted this as a peculiarity of his leadership. The maintenance of each plant on the island was considered an important task, and he wanted investors and foreign leaders to “see well-maintained lawns and shrubs” when they “visited him in the Istana.” Lee noted in a late interview that the landscape was a “secret weapon” for Singapore and that its design was central to the nation’s transition “from third world to first.”7 For this reason, National Park chief executive Tan Wee Kiat joked (perhaps nervously) that he was “the only gardener in the world to report directly to the prime minister’s office.” This echoes the assertion of Victor Savage (cited in the preface) that Singapore’s landscape is the product of planning at the level of the individual shrub and dustbin.8

Nothing seems too tiny to escape the notice of the party. In fact, its discourse of stern care often has to do with demonstrable attention to detail. Islands in the geographical imaginary have a unique status, as zones in which life can be subjected to the fullest intensity of social power at a granular scale.9 In an era when most states appear committed to abdicating matters to private caretakers—or to ignoring them completely—the political culture of Singapore as island laboratory often appears obsessed with minute considerations.

This makes more sense when we consider the lasting influence of environmental determinism at the heart of its ideology. Indeed, much of the nation’s planning strategy has been informed by a Fabian belief in physical spaces as constitutive of the human character and its potentialities.10 Savage has chronicled the “belief in environmentalistic influences” among Lee’s lieutenants and has shown that this rather unfashionable idea continues to permeate the Singaporean project. As we will see, apparently insignificant or subpolitical elements gain importance by being linked across scales, in the metonymies of PAP thought, to larger spatial and social orders and their objectives.

This is not interpretive guesswork; the actions and statements of government render explicit its concerns with space making as a transformative social influence. Moreover, the clarity of state intentions is visible in the form of the landscape itself. In a few decades, Singapore has been quite literally reshaped: flattened, extended, sutured, and compartmentalized.11 Its knotted topography, an involution of knolls and longkang (drainage rivulets), was regraded into a flatland of engineered surfaces and infrastructural channels. As numerous commentators have noted, a sense of indeterminacy lingers. Cherian George has observed a phenomenon of Singaporeans feeling “lost at home,” disoriented by a lack of long-standing landmarks.12 Most strikingly, perhaps, the perimeter of the island—what geographer Thongchai Winichakul might call its “geo-body”—has been doubled since independence due to coastal reclamation.13 It is not uncommon to find that a road like Telok Ayer, which sits more than a kilometer inland, was once a towpath along the docks.

In true determinist fashion, the imposition of a modernized urban matrix has been understood by the PAP as a lever to galvanize labor practices and discipline and to control birthrates.14 While other nations were beating a market-led retreat, Singapore doubled down. As Lee (the younger) noted, “public housing was much more than an urban planning exercise, or an engineering and construction project. It was a social, economic and political endeavor.”15 And while Singapore is known for policies and campaigns aimed at creating a globally competitive workforce, these are not merely reinforced or transmitted—as in Foucault’s theorization—by the configuration of “dispositifs.” Rather, the production of architecture and landscape is where the very substance of the political is devised. Where the modern state considers its work via a governmentality, we might say that Singapore does so through what Arun Agrawal has called an “environmentality”: an iterative entanglement with actual lives, in situ.16

Environmentality, or Statecraft as Spacecraft

The government’s approach to spatialization (if we can forgive the clunky term) has been a mix of strategy and improvisation.17 It has occurred amid what urban economist Cedric Pugh calls “the most sensitive of interfaces”: a modernization of the built landscape via resettlement, in a context of heightened attention to the politics of housing.18 The efficient provision of subsidized flats, which today accommodate more than 80 percent of the population, remains a pillar of the PAP’s claim to legitimacy. For our purposes, it is crucial to understand three of its effects as a successful medium of embourgeoisement: in creating an ordered, legible national space; in producing a citizenry wedded to formal labor and invested in the national property market; and in effecting a total redistribution of built fabric across the island. Together, these laid the groundwork for a new, speculative city.

This uneasy venture was begun by the HDB shortly before independence. The PAP began its rule after the bruising 1959 general election, as a coalition between Lee Kuan Yew and fellow “first generation” leaders, including Goh Keng Swee, Toh Chin Chye, and Lim Kim San.19 After an early flirtation with socialism, the party pursued an increasingly capitalist-corporatist approach to national development and household capital accumulation.20

Prior to the PAP’s rise, the responsibility of housing the populace fell to the colonial Singapore Improvement Trust (SIT). Colonial authorities had repeatedly voiced concerns about overcrowding and “slum” conditions prevailing in much of the island for the first half of the twentieth century.21 Despite a chronic shortage of space, however, the SIT did little to increase the number of dwellings available to nonexpatriates. British authorities had maintained a mostly Malthusian policy; an invisible hand was expected to provide, and the administration “did not consider housing as part of the responsibilities of government.”22 The SIT’s principal tasks were regulating sanitary conditions, rationalizing roads, and drawing up plans for acquiring new land.23 Despite the creation of Tiong Bahru, an art deco Siedlung, the general record of the colonial administration was poor. By 1941, with conflict coming to the region, the SIT had managed to complete only twenty-one hundred low-cost units island-wide.24

The war and occupation by Japanese forces served to worsen the shortage. This was yet further strained by a peacetime baby boom and an influx of female laborers from southern China.25 A committee convened in 1947 estimated that “a quarter million persons or more than 25 per cent of the population already required immediate housing while the total was increasing at an estimated rate of 30,000 people per year.”26 The situation became even more dire. From the year of the report to the time of Lee’s government taking office in 1959, the number of residents swelled by another 641,000. Goh Keng Swee, in a similar study, used methods employed by Booth and Rowntree in Britain to calculate that 25 percent of the public lived below the estimated poverty line and some 73 percent in severely cramped conditions.27

Ideas about housing, both before and after independence, were heavily colored by the imaginary of a sprawling, unhealthy, and unruly social body and the dominance of informal trade. In 1965, much of Singapore lived in kampungs: informal urban villages of mostly self-built housing in Malay style, roofed with corrugated zinc or attap (palm thatch). These were understood by the young PAP, as by colonial authorities before them, as dangerously ungoverned places. This was especially acute because of undocumented labor migration in the postwar years. As historian Loh Kah Seng has observed, these ramshackle quarters were assumed to be home to a general promiscuity, a mixing of elements that were better kept apart. A variety of ethnic groups (all immigrants to some degree) coexisted cheek by jowl, as did unmarried men and women, humans and animals, and individuals plying all manner of legitimate and marginal trade.28 Immigration from China raised the specter of Communist agitation on one hand and “secret societies” on the other. To make matters worse, many of the kampungs shared their grounds with sprawling Chinese, Indian, and Malay cemeteries.29 This was a landscape where the “living eked out an existence in close juxtaposition with the dead, and typically, graves spaced between one to nine meters apart covered the hilly portion of the land while squatters lived in the foothills.”30 A deploring study of the location and condition of burial grounds, conducted in 1952, shows two large informal cemeteries in Tiong Bahru—SIT’s erstwhile showpiece—alone.31 The life of the kampung continued to be administered by a range of quasi-formalized political bodies left over from early in the colonial period: trades, language groups, and (perhaps most vexingly) the hui guan or clan organizations that had provided a paternalistic framework for community functions like mutual aid, burial, education, and temporary housing.32 The mobility and impermanence of this informal urbanism, as well as its role in keeping the public out of the formal labor economy, were dominant motifs of official consternation.33

The kampungs, unsurprisingly, offered a ready symbol of the “old Singapore” that the PAP hoped to eradicate.34 Owing to a series of relocations, negotiations, and “fires of convenience,” Lee’s party began the process of rebuilding.35 And they made no small plans. At inception, the board was charged with producing 150,000 new “emergency” units of housing.36 It bore the mandate to prepare and execute proposals for new structures, to continue the ongoing project of land acclamation and “slum clearance,” develop heretofore “rural” areas on the island’s periphery, manage all new state properties, and—perhaps most importantly—provide loans at an established rate of interest. In a style that mixed socialism with petit bourgeois aspiration, the HDB expanded homeownership over a series of rolling five-year plans. Apart from a brief downturn in the late 1970s, their targets were realized without fail.37

This was solved through a cellular approach to national space, in the design of “New Town” estates—a leap, in effect, from buildings to urbanism. In these, the PAP’s micromanagerial governance devolved to local “grassroots” offices, where it was expanded and intensified.38 The first was Toa Payoh, begun in 1965—conceived in Robert Owen style with a fixed population, light industrial facilities, and a pedestrianized high street at its center.39 At the outset, these new urban villages were projected to house 245,000 people in 49,500 dwelling units—clustered, according to the voguish cybernetic planning theories of the time, around nodes of facilities: banks, post offices, cinemas and department stores, schools, CCs, child health and maternity clinics, playgrounds and open spaces—and, later, large shopping malls.40 The HDB initially managed all affairs associated with the grand Singapore housing experiment, a task of staggering administrative scope and complexity. The Board did not merely oversee cleaning, gardening, repairs, and upgrades. As an independent statutory organ, its responsibilities also included administering social campaigns, enforcing strict guidelines for the use of private and public space, “community relations” among families of different ethnicities and religions, and referring individuals to counseling in the case of deviant behaviors.41

Here, micromanagerial concern with physical detail was moored to a larger system of political significance: the government worked to install a version of itself at every scale. PAP order commonly nests the small with the large, in a total hierarchical chain. The desired effect was not merely that the New Towns resemble one another. More important, perhaps, was the process by which each estate, indeed, each HDB tower block, was explicitly designed to replicate the nation as a whole. As Siddique and colleagues and Kong and Yeoh have explained, it is stated policy to control the racial and economic mix of each of HDB’s buildings such that these mirror the national average.42 Having learned from the painful history of unrest among ethnicities—in intercommunal violence during the years 1950 and 1963–65—it became an official policy of HDB to forbid ethnic “enclaving.”43 The PAP developed an acute awareness of these “islands of settlement,” as well as a worry that the lives and labors of Indians, Malays, and Chinese dialect groups would be organized according to the protocols of clan associations and ethnic interest groups rather than by those of central government—hence the emphasis on the location of individuals from the nation’s ethnic constituencies.

The cellular replication of the overall nation directly affects the physical landscape, giving it an oddly reiterative character—as pointed out by many of those who have objected to its environmental homogeneity. Critics like Pasi Falk and Colin Campbell have characterized the national landscape as “a set of city centers writ small.” Benedict Anderson simply described it as “incredibly boring.”44 This is, in part, exacerbated by the pastel-painted schematism of the New Town architecture. Built chiefly from concrete and homogenous pavers and kept rigorously clean, these cannot escape the impression of being diagrammatic versions of something larger, messier, and more materially and socially sedimentary.

Regardless, the intended effects of this program are clearly manifested today. Eight out of ten Singaporeans live in HDB flats, servicing their home loans through formal employment.45 There is only one remaining kampung on the island, which is now visited as a “heritage” tourist attraction.46 Not least, the population now occupies a tiny footprint, leading to one of the world’s highest densities: around seventy-nine hundred persons per square kilometer.47

The State as Speculator

The re-creation of Singapore as an array of microstates (“estates,” as they are known) was not an isolated project. Rather, it was part of a long-range plan to clear land and reconstruct the nation’s physical and economic landscape around a zone of speculation, or, in the words of the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA), to “remake the Central Area into a vibrant and modern commercial center.”48 Whereas the residential “heartlands” were to remain an amalgam of systematic architecture, this commercial core is spectacular and malleable.

Singapore’s postindependence strategy—one might even argue, its “pragmatist” ideology—has rested largely on twin pillars of stability and capital accumulation. While this “hegemony of the economic” initially began as a Keynesian model of productive industries, managed markets, and monetary policy, it quickly evolved into a new animal.49 This transition occurred in the late 1970s, fueled by a powerfully emergent, late modern view of government and economy—a mode of capital based in rising service and finance sectors. National organization was coming to be seen less in terms of an equitable distribution of social goods, and more entrepreneurially: as a source of partnerships between public resources and private money. In this moment lay the beginnings of a reaccommodation between the technocratic state and the circuits of ascendant Southeast Asian “tiger” wealth.

A fitting spatial division of labor was suggested by the United Nations. In November 1963, an “international” planning study was issued, authored by the team of Harvard professor Charles Abrams, Susumu Kobe of the UN, and Otto Königsberger—an émigré from Nazi Germany and head of the Department of Development and Tropical Studies at the Architectural Association in London.50 Their “Ring Plan” proposed an arc of dormitory suburbs lining the north coast, from Punggol in the east to Jurong in the west.51 The new housing districts were thus, to varying degrees, exurban banlieue. The southern and central areas were to provide an economic “development zone” comprising a port, commercial/industrial and entertainment regions, and a nascent central business district built from the colonial city center. Although progressively modified by the URA, this plan continues to underlie the large-scale partition of the country’s land uses.

While the sweeping renovation of Singapore created opportunities for “spec” development throughout the island, the greatest intensity was to be concentrated in the middle. These districts are home to the ultra-luxe malls and condo complexes that mushroomed during the postindependence years, particularly during the rise of the so-called tiger economies of Southeast Asia. The same period also saw the nation’s retail boom, cementing one of the highest per capita shopping markets in the world—due in part to a high savings rate and disposable income enabled by subsidized housing.

This created spectacular fortunes for a number of private developers, who rapidly overtook Euro-American wealth at the top of international rankings in Forbes and elsewhere. Many of these remain active, fueling the phenomenon of local megawealth. Singapore, Inc. emerged as an engine for the coproduction of public and private value and made the government into a well-heeled organization—not least, as principal owners of the limited land reserves available for new malls and luxury towers. And while the PAP has never allowed direct parcel sales to subsidize its budget, the profits have formed an endowment that (as noted earlier) generates billions of dollars per year for operating expenses.52 The state is also, in effect, a commercial landlord, one of the largest in a valuable rentier market. Receipts from an array of property investments have filled the coffers of the Government of Singapore Investment Company and Temasek Holdings, which has a portfolio worth more than S$300 billion.53 This makes Singapore a world leader among sovereign wealth funds.

As abstract and diversified as this portfolio now appears, it must be remembered that it was the material stuff of the city-state—land and buildings—that first propelled it to affluence. Most of this was consolidated as eminent domain, under a 1966 Land Acquisition Act that was, like much of Singapore’s law, built on the back of colonial emergency regulations.54 It has given the PAP the right to claim private holdings on a compulsory basis, to set the purchase price, and to limit the means of legal appeal by the prior owners—justified, in part, by the need to eradicate crowded kampungs and clear sites for HDB blocks. From 1959 to 1984, the government acquired 17,690 hectares, which “constituted about one-third of the total land area of Singapore then.”55 Notably, by the 1970s, much land acquisition was being justified as a cooling measure to sap some inflationary momentum from the city’s already booming property market. By the end of this period, the total ownership of land by the state equaled 76.2 percent, much of it purchased at bargain rates. A good proportion of this was also occupied by Chinese graveyards. The making-homeless of the dead, to make homes and money for the nation, is a significant part of this story—of that, later.

The state did not act merely to acquire and resell land, however. It was also an instrumental partner in allocating sites for new commercial ventures and frequently provided subsidized land and incentives. Although all developments were ostensibly “private” (or mostly so), the vast wealth realized by the pioneer generation of Singapore’s speculative builders relied heavily on the cheap and lucrative opportunities offered by the PAP. Eunice Seng has chronicled the intensity of public–private partnerships in creating Singapore’s first major urban megastructures, with measures like incremental payments for land and added salable floor area and property tax exemption periods that lengthened with every story of newly constructed buildings. For their part, the private firms were employed to extend the developmental capacities of the state. Seng argues that “this was the first programme in the world of its kind in which private participation on such a scale was promoted by a government.”56 The mantra of the time was that urban renewal could not be a state undertaking; it would need to be a transactional matter.

To this end, the government was intensively engaged in building the districts where private development was to take place. An early example was Shenton Way, the CBD strip housing the Singapore Exchange and offices of global and local financial services firms.57 This trend has continued, more recently with other economic sectors. The Jurong Town Corporation—another major landholding and development arm of Singapore—has acted as master developer for new industrial districts, building upon vast tracts in areas of the center and west districts.58 Zaha Hadid provided an ambitious plan in the early 2000s for Biopolis, a pharmaceutical and medical research hub that today contains numerous firms and laboratories. Discoveries made here share intellectual property rights with the state. In 2014–15, Mediapolis opened on an adjacent campus, with facilities for film, digital media, video games, and special effects for television and Hollywood and Bollywood films. These are all “research incubators” that support the manufacture of products. It is notable that some of the major players in the development field—among them Capitaland—are now partially or mostly owned by Temasek itself. The development of the state was a boon for the state-as-corporation, and profits in this sector were typically reinvested in high-quality public amenities, housing, and infrastructure.

It is perhaps an unsurprising outcome that the state’s megastructures, speculative products that house speculative activities, are increasingly marketed as sites of pilgrimage. Visitors from aspiring nations, from the region and from South Asia and China in particular, increasingly travel to see evidence of the Lion City’s successes in the form of iconic and symbolic architectures. It is of no small consequence that the Singapore Tourist Board has made a go of marketing hotels and office parks, alongside attractions like Gardens by the Bay, to those who would wish to witness the miracle of state-sanctioned entrepreneurialism firsthand. In fact, some of the most fruitful ventures, like the interior forest of the Jewel Mall at Changi Airport, are built as self-serving destinations; increasingly, the function of the airport is to serve passengers arriving to visit the airport. Spectacular architectures commissioned from Moshe Safdie and Thomas Heatherwick play an outsize role in this touristic machine, reflexively monumentalizing their own successes.

Paramilitary Gardening

Many of Singapore’s landmarks use the spectacular medium of tropicality, of the largely invented equatorial landscape, to market the increasingly valuable concept of the “eco-city”: a sci-fi utopia where high finance and technology sit, apparently without contradiction, in a verdant urban forest—a machine in a garden, where once was jungle.59 The insistent leitmotif of tamed tropicality among these urban marvels is not chance, nor does it simply mirror the current vogue for “green” cities. As noted, Lee Kuan Yew—the consummate biopolitician—was acutely aware of what landscape could offer to the national project. In his own words, “the presence of ample greenery in an environment clean of litter would signify that Singapore was a well-organised city and hence a good destination for tourists and foreign investments.”60 Not only is nature a spectacle worth paying for, it is living proof of a place fit for speculation. Gardening was imagined as an index of environmental control and thus of securitization to sources of global capital. This was understood as an essential service without which the nation’s planned economic future could not be realized. Lee often remarked that landscaping was an investment that brought the highest return and that Singapore’s green was “bearing gold and silver underneath, invisible to all sight as cars went whizzing by.”61

The Garden City has been, in its every aspect, an object of design attentions—and is one of the “concepts” most directly associated with Lee’s command and the nation’s image in its first fifty years. Party leaders discovered early that the tropical flora could provide a coherence to the spatial contradictions described earlier—the anxious contrast between proto-socialist public estates and glitzy downtown—while continually providing visual evidence of state capacity for potential investors. Equally useful was the very functional capacity of the garden to serve as both laboratory of governance and securitizing technology. Here, too, total design is equated with control over behaviors and outcomes—in the ongoing experiment with the national “garden,” per Carl Trocki, “progressive evolution leaves little to chance and random factors.”62

This process began in earnest in 1967 with the naming and articulation of a new vision for a disciplined landscape.63 Trocki notes that “as Singapore became a global city-state, even its vegetation was brought under control, as specific varieties of trees, grass, shrubs, and flowers were selected for the carefully manicured parks and other public plantings.”64 As the HDB pursued its new mandate, the improvement of public greenery was increasingly entrusted to the National Parks Board (“NParks,” formerly the Parks and Recreation Department). From 1975 to 2014, the number of public gardens exploded from 13 to 330—a formalization of urban nature that came alongside an eradication of the small-scale agriculture and community gardens typical of the kampung.65 Roadside plantings were given a uniform language, and interstitial lawns were cut to putting green length. Here, too, private developers were conscripted, leading to a ninefold increase in new trees from 158,600 in 1974 to more than 1.4 million by 2014—and a total stock that was nearly 25 percent greater than in the late colonial period.66

The reinvention of “natural” Singapore was no simple undertaking and had to be done largely without precedent. When Stamford Raffles landed in 1819, the bulk of the island was covered in dipterocarp forest and surrounded by coastal mangrove. During the colonial period, this was progressively cleared and recreated as agricultural landscape. Pineapple, coconut, tapioca, pepper, and rubber were grown in the interior, and the coastal mangrove was eradicated to create pools for prawn farming.67 Variable demand wrought continual upheaval on the island ecology, but the effect on the dipterocarp was decisive. By 1850, the last remaining scraps of the indigenous forest stood around the Bukit Timah highlands, where steep topography made cultivation impossible. Concurrently, the broad exchange of plant species among the British colonies and those of other European powers, a practice termed “acclimatization,” had flooded Singapore with flora from Southeast and South Asia, Africa, Australia, and Brazil. By the time the PAP set about replacing scruffy thickets with a tidy and consistent local style, virtually nothing on the island was native.68 As ecologist Richard Corlett notes, very few of the species extant at the close of the twentieth century were there when Raffles arrived.69

This transformation was likewise fueled by the Singapore Botanical Gardens, an experimental engine of colonial agribusiness, plant creation, and dissemination. This complex institution—still a center of R&D for NParks—served to profitably combine the control and financialization of nature. An array of indigenes and foreign species were tested for their industrial and commercial applications, speed of growth, size, and hardiness. Other potentially lucrative products of its nurseries were, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, deployed locally to replace natives considered weak or without market value. More recently, the “Botanics” has become known for its new breeds of orchid, which are often named for visiting dignitaries and celebrities. Papilionanthe Miss Joachim, a novel hybrid propagated in the Singapore Botanical Gardens, is Singapore’s national flower. Here, as in other aspects of statecraft, the PAP enthusiastically adopted Britain’s experimental and commercial orientation. Lee noted the influence of this tradition, observing that the colonial administration had “done the basics” for the fledgling state in building the gardens.70

In the production of a local landscape style, the eradication of native forest provided a condition of great freedom for the new state, which was then in the process of splicing together available cultural and historical fragments—hailing from the Chinese, Tamil, Malay, Peranakan, Eurasian, and other ethnic communities—to create traditions and symbols that were recognizably “Singaporean” without being overly specific.71 Likewise, a broad range of exotic species—canopy trees, ground covers, creepers like the ubiquitous Ficus pumilla, shrubs, and flowering hedges—were combined into an entirely novel series of combinations. All were common in their ability to survive locally, but few had previously coexisted. The new planting palettes were tidily composed and codified into standards and manuals of gardening for public space. The resulting landscape, marked by an appearance of deracinated tropicality, was a novelty. The Garden City is not formed of ecological unities. Its public parks and roadside verges are largely an invention, a kind of nonspecific equatorialism.72

Species are selected for ornamental features, hardiness, lack of fruit or leaf litter, or growth rate. Distinct ecologies—equatorial dipterocarp, coastal and riverine, subtropical—are forced together along abrupt lines of transition.73 As a result of its unnaturalness, this is a heavily interventionist landscape. It requires a great deal of maintenance to keep from falling into imbalance, to preserve designed boundaries, to prevent fast-growing species from driving out weaker neighbors or merging into multispecial brush—as happened during the “anthropause” of the Covid-19 pandemic, when regular maintenance was impossible. Like the horticultural collections of the British, these are merely gardens of will: assemblages of plants that do not hail from coadapted communities and that would fall into disarray if not tended. These require, in effect, life support: the constant gardening and administrative care of the larger state. Their very survival is a daily testament to a competence and vigilance in maintaining collective order, to control destabilizing elements and a dangerous fertility. As Lee himself stated,

you can’t just plant a tree and walk away. The tree will die. . . . You need tree doctors, you need to understand what sound and how much sunlight it requires. . . . It’s a very complex thing that all people who run big organizations will understand.74

Environment thus serves as both corroboration and index of the managerial capacity of the state. The survival of the planting design, with its orderly demarcations, indicates if the state is functioning effectively. It provides constant feedback regarding the capacity of its administration and serves as an early indicator of failure or inattention. Organisms need intensive upkeep, and Lee’s recognition of this closely echoes Sheldon Wolin’s assertion that “the political emerges, in the literal sense, as a ‘culture,’ that is, a cultivating, a tending, a taking care of beings and things.”75

However, it is hard to overstate the transformative sociospatial violence that this procedure—the wresting of a garden from a dense, long-standing tangle of living beings—has required. In Singapore, landscaping borders on a paramilitary operation. Habitable space is torn back from nature; it must be bulldozed from urban villages, cleared from tertiary jungle, or “reclaimed” from the sea. Its reclusive topography must be unfurled and its flood-prone rivers canalized. Its air, which Lee considered soporific, must be cooled and dried. The environment is the enemy in a campaign, imagined as an insurgency or destabilizing threat. The presumption of constant insurrection by nature itself, a contra-modern force, provides an intense external pressure. It is a condition of perpetual emergency through which policies and technical capacities are sharpened, exercised, and extended. The Garden City requires landscape architects and planners, but also dedicated bureaucrats, horticulturalists, environmental engineers, architects, planners, policemen, former professional soldiers, tropical disease specialists, and housing policy experts.76

In the minds of its planners and technocrats, as well as in the public imagination, the city remains a jungle ad esse. Vegetation has long been cast by Lee, and others, as a negating aboriginal presence—as the essential tropical poverty against which Singapore’s success is read. Nature abhors a vacuum, and the negativity of the jungle is always ready to assert itself. Pioneering flora encroach at the edges, and airborne weeds take root in closely cropped lawns and planting beds. Hundreds of gardening crews are dedicated, daily and weekly, to their subjugation. Turf must be trimmed to prevent the incursion of weeds, which can recolonize in less than forty-eight hours. Verges of shrub and vine contract and must be pushed back—and with them, threats such as snakes, insect pests, and the dengue-bearing Aedes mosquitoes that infest neglected areas. Weekly pest control sweeps and searches for standing water are conducted, involving mechanical trimmers and blowers, chainsaws and atomizers for fogging oils and pesticides. To the uninitiated, these appear like paramilitary operations.

The intensive nature of landscaping allows the state to control, in effect, which areas of the national landscape are inhabitable and which are not. This is dramatized by the many localized patches of “jungle”—encountered at sites within the urban fabric. Such pockets of free growth exist on sites earmarked for future development, alongside securitized zones.77 Reservoirs, sand and gravel dumps, army camps, and military exercise areas are bounded by a cordon of untended forest, termed “green buffer.” These punctuate the city center as well as outlying areas. In contrast to the lawns and bonsais and prim hedges, these are left to form a dense tangle. Only their edges are pruned, to avoid expansion into tidy neighboring areas. Their centers hold a tight compact of canopy trees, understory shrubs, and ghostly curtains of choking lianas. Passage into the interior is not advisable for the uninitiated, owing to swarms of mosquitoes, stinging insects, and reptiles. This forest figures in local discourse as a sinister intelligence. Ghost stories of former soldiers and national servicemen describe their encounter with nature in terms of a vegetal patience: an assumption that plants and their resident spirits await a recrudescence of the city’s modern surfaces. Stands of jungle, whether by intention or not, have an intimidating or admonitory aspect. The convulsive forest, held in anxious stasis, also reminds the public of what will happen if the state fails or decides no longer to perform its duties as tender and gardener. Each tangle is a miniaturized apocalypse: a surrender of the equatorial city to external threat. This is a potential of the Garden City concept itself, a feature of its designed fragility.

The duality of clearing and jungle, inhabitability and its opposite, forms a powerful ordering technology. Zones of occupation are carefully planned, and there exist few gray areas—no greenwood pockets that would allow for informal or unscripted modes of occupation. It is a literal shaping of the island’s “natural” body, directing flows of human traffic into prepared channels. The nation is not, as famously claimed by Rem Koolhaas, a tabula rasa. Rather, it is something akin to a hedge maze: a complex of living barricades. It gently supports the preemptive work of civil defense in a state that, despite strict regulations for public order, operates with a famously limited police presence.78

Homeless Ghost, Unhomely City

Of course, landscape alone does not suffice to ensure a quiescent, disciplined world city. Rather, the garden aestheticizes and reinforces homologous ordering relations that are constructed through architecture and planning and (as in any state) require legal structures to support the administration of action, speech, and biological life. A disciplined contraction of the body public created a Singapore well contained and conditioned, and dependent upon the benefits and entanglements of a formal wage economy. Literal and symbolic upward mobility required that seized land be dedicated chiefly to the pursuit of wealth, and to the large-scale imagineering of a city constructed within a garden. This model is not simply about security attracting foreign investment. Rather, it embodies a new economic order that balances volatility with security in all aspects, and in which security itself becomes a second-order structure for value. Securitization and speculation are, in fact, two halves of a common process and inseparable. From the early years, Lee astutely intuited that this paradox underlay an emergent world market in which lucrative sectors would be independent from industry—and in which mobile money would need safe harbor.

But again, not all goes according to design. The operations that cleared the low-rise, lateral world of kampungs and remnant forests were also explicitly understood as spectro-generative. In a historical irony, ghosts proliferated as ancestors were impoverished by the national project of enrichment. The asynchronism of risk capital required the past to be sacrificed so that the future might produce value in the present.

With this proliferation of ghosts comes an alternate conception of Singapore. This imagines spaces, forces, and values to be connected in a manner dramatically opposed to the metonymic structures of officialdom. Everywhere, we find spectral practices that would locate themselves not within the partitions and linkages of state planning but as arising from a cosmology that emphasizes holistic connections: flows, exchanges, and causal relations that bind national space as a totality, with those who live within it. These draw upon a recent history of contestation in which forces of secular modernization did not dispel the ghost so much as magnify belief in its powers. The imagined actions of gui rejoin places into a new spatial economy, crosscut the cellular honeycomb of Singaporean space, and posit, instead, a striated topology of connections and contiguities.

In the shadow history of the nation’s spatial redevelopment, the social and spatial realm of the dead has been increasingly usurped. This is a process that, ironically, releases the ghost from a bounded “place” and into a public realm, as a vagabond drawn to sites of environmental disruption—which means, in effect, everywhere. The power of the ghost to ignore state-imposed boundaries and territorial taxonomy arises from conceptions of qi and spiritual disturbance that link the human body and psyche to an environment subjected to natural and social violence.79 At the same time, this agency extends to the production of an alternative spatial order, one of localized expansions and convulsions, unexpected movements and diversions.

Ancestral practices within Chinese religion do not, by themselves, explain Singapore’s spectral anxieties. The rise to wealth has come, also, at great psychosocial cost: the destruction of lived worlds. Release of land for speculative development and formalized housing was achieved, in particular, via the state’s arrogation of burial spaces, bodily disposal, and funerary rites. This takeover sidelined a broad array of patriarchal, professional, and clerical bodies. In fact, this subject remains a controversial aspect of the transformation of Singapore.80 Geographers Lily Kong and Brenda Yeoh, among others, have described the battle over funereal landscapes as one of the sticking points in Singapore’s re-creation after independence. This remains a source of resentment that lies close to the surface.81 We have seen how concerns about available land propelled a transition from the kampung to the modern high rise—a victory of the vertical over the horizontal, through which the government established a speculative property machine. In this same moment, the expansive Chinese graveyards that were scattered across large swaths of the city were dismantled, their human remains transferred to multilevel structures at centralized locations.

It is difficult to overstate the extent of such excavations. In addition to larger cemeteries like Bukit Brown and Tiong Bahru, Orchard Road, Novena, and Dhoby Ghaut, many smaller clusters of Chinese graves existed on higher, sloping grounds according to geomantic tradition. These were ubiquitous, and one still can catch glimpses of remnant tombs in traffic islands and at roadsides, left isolated by infrastructure. Embankments along the Pan-Island Expressway, for example, still contain the resting places of some famous Singaporeans and are mentioned in tourist guides to the island. There are also sizable remnant sites that have been taken over by the state but have not yet been disinterred. The government policy on such land mirrors its approach to “protected” zones described in chapter 5; though remains have not been removed, these areas have been left for the jungle to reclaim. This makes them difficult to visit, and places a large burden of labor on those who would keep family plots clean and free of overgrowth.

A major loss of cemetery occurred with the extension of road and rail infrastructure—as in the case of Bukit Brown. The expressway and the MRT rail systems have both been directed through former burial grounds. A respondent familiar with geomantic practices told me that the creation of the MRT was regarded very negatively by feng shui practitioners, who saw it as “cutting the island into pieces.” Ironically, the technology that planners imagined as unifying the island was viewed as a destabilizing influence upon its geobody—precisely the kind of disturbance that, we will see, is understood to attract unhappy spirits. There is thus a popular conceptual intimacy between infrastructure and lost graveyards, the one being a central cause of the other. Such exhumations are often seen as illegitimate and do not void the “ownership” of these lands by the dead. This is one of several reasons why railways and highways are thought to be haunted with particular vehemence.

The sudden mass eviction of the dead is a fact that still causes considerable unease.82 The assumed “ownership” of former cemetery land, by those who were interred there, has a broader effect—as noted by many of my interlocutors, cemeteries are often presumed to have existed wherever a haunting is said to have occurred. The contemporary absence of the cemetery means that, imaginatively at least, it might have existed anywhere.83 In a peculiar sense, the grave has become a sort of topos of origins for Singapore, a birthing medium—as claimed by Claudio Lomnitz for Mexico, the nation is understood as having been erected quite literally upon the foundation of death.84 In a sense, the whole island is thought to have been preowned. Hui Ping, a young retail assistant, admitted to finding this amusing:

They’ll say, “This school used to be a cemetery,” or some war zone or something during the Japanese occupation. There are so many stories around. Whenever they have sightings of ghosts, they will say, “Oh, previously it was a cemetery, a mortuary, or something.” Even if nobody actually knows this. It’s funny how often you hear it.

Many Chinese ghost stories also involve Muslim burial sites. Mr. Kok, a property investor, recalled an incident that occurred while he was returning from a holiday with his family. They were driving home quite late, as the son was required to return to army service the following day. Their route passed through Margaret Drive—near the central Ayer Rajah Expressway—which, Mr. Kok noted, was “used as a Muslim cemetery last time.” As he was turning onto this small road, he noticed his son staring intently out the window.

“I asked him what was the matter,” Kok recalls. “He said to me, ‘What are all these Malay people doing walking on the road at this time of night? Where are they going?’”85

In such narratives, there is often an implicit assumption that sites cannot be easily repurposed. Specific graveyards remain foci of debate over the value of redevelopment.86 In this context, it is common practice for HDB, as well as other government authorities, to convert cemeteries to parks or fallow land for a period prior to allowing it to be redeveloped. This was the case with housing estates in Bishan and Tiong Bahru. In fact, Bishan was the subject of some concern after its eventual redevelopment, as “there were fears that it would face low occupancy due to its past.”87 This was also the case with the commercial center named Ngee Ann City on Orchard Road. As it was home to the former Teo Chew burial grounds, an elaborate prayer tent is erected on the forecourt every year at Qing Ming, although the graves have long been exhumed. The former Bidadari Cemetery was converted to a public park before its eventual re-creation as an HDB estate for forty thousand homes within the next decade.88

This was not merely about historical and existing graves; it was also about future ones. The new state mandated the rather un-Chinese alternative of cremation, and columbaria, as the only viable solution for the “land-scarce” island’s future. Not only has land burial become difficult to obtain, it is also possible to occupy a plot for a maximum of fifteen years before being disinterred and cremated or reburied in a smaller soil volume (in the case of Muslims). Presently, only one cemetery remains. Bodies are deposited not in true soil but in a prefabricated “crypt”: a cartridge-like unit that can be extracted when tenure is over.

The seizure of traditional burial grounds and practices was widely resisted by the clan organizations—in particular, the Ying Foh Fui Kun (or Hakka Association). As Teo and colleagues have noted, this was a moment in which “the state came in a direct confrontation with a complexly organized Chinese community, with its own communal perspectives and priorities not necessarily supportive of” the PAP’s exhumation scheme.89 The Ying Foh Fui Kun requested a number of concessions in exchange for their land—but the government denied most, relocating remains to peripheral columbaria in Mount Vernon, Yishun, Choa Chu Kang, and Mandai. Although clan organizations (or gong hui) still provide funerary insurance and distribute graveyard plots to those who can afford the high costs, limitations of land put this out of reach for most Singaporeans.90 In a 2008 article titled “Gravedigging: A Dying Trade,” the Straits Times reported only nine active gravediggers employed in Singapore.91 As Teo and colleagues note, this is a moment in which “the decline of ritual practice is itself inextricably linked to the diminished role that regional, dialect and clan associations play in Chinese social life after independence.”92

Tong Chee Kiong has attributed this transition to centralized crematoria to a metamorphosis in Singaporean funerary practices, as well as in understandings of death. This is particularly evident in the contemporary experience of Qing Ming, the day when graves of ancestors are traditionally cleaned and offerings are made by their descendants. The hyperdensity of columbaria like Mandai—an analogue, in death, of what is experienced by most HDB dwellers in life—makes Qing Ming into a rather hectic affair. This has affected notions concerning the visibility and “location” of the dead. As one informant told Tong, “one cannot see the ancestor while conducting the rituals.”93

Of course, these concern only the fixed dead, that is, those who have been situated via proper rituals and appeased by regular offerings. “Hungry” ghosts are more problematically dislocated. They are described as “homeless” or “on the road,” in contrast to wealthy spirits or those with family. They have been orphaned by premature or violent death, the termination of lineages, or the drift of migrant populations, such as domestic workers.94 Their graves are unmarked, and (at least during the seventh month) these may be understood to be anywhere, particularly in public and in “open” areas. As we shall see shortly, they make liberal use of routes of movement and exchange.

Though many informants specified violent death as a cause of hungry ghosts, common aspects of social change in Singapore were cited just as frequently. This would have been the case with Mei Zhen Jie’s mother, for example, had she not bent the rules and decided to continue observance for her own parents instead of for her in-laws (as is traditionally the practice). Indeed, ancestors can easily be “orphaned” in families with only daughters. Veneration is commonly undertaken by the eldest son, and the ancestral altar would be placed in his home; this was described to me as a cause of the traditional Chinese preference for male heirs. Small families in particular run the risk of having no one to make observances. Childless couples are most vulnerable.

This type of problem is on the rise, as practices of ancestral observance evolved when Chinese families lived in large, intergenerational, rural households. These fit less well into the new Singapore of nuclear families and sixty-square-meter public flats. In contrast to the kampung era, when the Singapore population was rising through births and in-migration, growth has recently diminished. Rates are now the slowest in the nation’s history and remain so despite government attempts to increase the population to 6.6 million by the end of the 2020s. Respondents expressed a fear that ghosts will increasingly become “orphaned” as fewer descendants remain to perform the rites. Moreover, as Terrence observed, the way in which the HDB system is organized—in terms of the maximum sizes, and the award of first flats by lottery—tends to divide families.95 Young married couples purchasing units at subsidized rates have, until recently, had little control over the location. This contrasts starkly with the old kampung compounds, in which less privacy and personal space was expected and frequent, and small-scale additions to buildings allowed growing domestic units to remain under one roof. The result is a shift away from conditions that would allow for regular observances.96

Modernization policies thus “created” ghosts not only through disinterment but also in their effects upon living Singaporeans. Though multiple vectors of transformation are at work (involving religious demographics not least), the result is a widespread assumption of gui as variously “dispossessed” and adrift across the island. The irony of this, amid the wealth and secular modernity of the state, is not lost on the public. The resulting condition was perfectly expressed by “gardener auntie” Mrs. Tan—an avid believer who nonetheless expressed amazement at the ongoing presence of ghosts in the contemporary.97 They are “everywhere now,” she said. “My sister, her daughter can see. The mother is a medium. Her son goes to school, the school toilet got ghosts. In the carpark, in the lift, she says it is full of ghosts. Funny, hah. Singapore’s so modern, still have all these things.”98

Spectral Ecology, or Anmetonymy

The fact of ghosts being “everywhere,” however, does not mean that their spatial habits are not precisely theorized. Nor does it imply that the razing and remaking of spaces is understood as spectro-generative only in terms of a generic presumptive logic, a kind of smoke–fire relationship. To close this chapter—and our account of the unheimlich doubling that links physical modernization to spectrality—it is important to clarify how spirits and material-spatial disturbances come to be theorized, in Chinese religion, by means of a “spectral ecology.”

The dominant spatial logic of the PAP is often exerted through a variety of projects simultaneously. The trimming of untidy nature and conversion of the sprawling kampungs into delimited Cartesian flats, for example, came alongside efforts to discourage long hair in men—alongside wide collars and bell bottoms and other manifestations of an unrestrained bodily boundary. Such campaigns enforced a tightening of the spatial envelopes around the citizen at a number of scales, simultaneously. However, there have long existed other, more popular and expansive conceptions that purport to link the individual to their environment. I have written elsewhere about mass “body hysteria” during the 1960s and 1970s, in relation to anxieties about Singapore’s nature (and, in particular, its coastline) during periods of tension with Malaysia and Indonesia.99 Such collective panic, which assumes a direct link between the geopolitical and the biophysical, the island and the anatomical individual, can take place only when other ontologies of spatial order are in place. These ontologies arise from Chinese notions of qi and of environmental holism, and they inform also an ecological understanding of ghosts.

As parts of a holistic system, environmental and human well-being are seen, in geomantic and cosmological terms, to be inextricably linked. A general disturbance in the broader social or natural context is thought to immediately affect both collective and individual health, as flows of energy are constantly moving between natural context, our constructions, and ourselves. Qi passes through all of these, interchangeably, as instances of a common medium; it is understood to be energetic, but (as in quantum physics) its behavior forms the basic building blocks of matter as well. This is why feng shui—the orientation and materiality of architecture in context—is considered to have a direct effect on inhabitants’ health and prosperity. We will see, in chapter 6, how this affects the haunting of sites and their remediation or augmentation via mediumship. In particular, the balance of male and female jing (animal life force, produced in the kidneys) is directly affected by unbalanced qi, with male yang jing falling to dangerously low levels. The total dominance of yin energy is associated with the condition of ghostliness.

Given this, assaults on the broader socionatural equilibrium may also upset the energetic equilibrium of the populace. Destruction of the natural environment or the historical synergies of buildings with their sites, disturbance of grounds or ecologies, interruption of flows or connectivity in the landscape—all these may operate negatively. Given this, it is not hard to see why Singapore has been perceived to be energetically “sick” in the postindependence decades and would continue to be so amid its ongoing urban churn. Upheaval in the destruction of traditional lifeworlds and the razing of homes and villages, combined with the disinterment of carefully placed spirits and their own powerful energies, have contributed to a massively imbalanced field of forces. In the Chinese medico-cosmological worldview, this is a landscape and a people in an extreme state of disturbance. This disturbance, moreover, has been (with a few exceptions) uniformly distributed across national space.

Via the complex relationships of energy and matter, Chinese medicine and cosmology hold to a vision of radical connectivity. Disruption at a greater level, in our world or in di yu, has the power to affect individual living bodies. This is because all are linked by common energetic flows and circuits. By the same token, disruption or destruction of qi in the natural environment can cause both social and biophysical unrest. As qi is a resonant phenomenon, bodily energy and that of a given place have interacting effects. As Scott Mendelson puts it, “chaos in society is a disturbance in the yang quality of order in the universe, which in turn resonates as disturbance of yang in the body.”100 This is one of the reasons that orderly and stable governance is so important in Chinese traditional thought. It is seen to keep the linked energetic interactions of the world in balance and to prevent chaotic and hazardous situations. As such, there is an immediate relationship between governance and health: the presence of unrest causes a disruption in the flow of yang (male, anodyne, orderly) energies and a disproportionate surge in yin (female, chaotic, spectral) ones.

Ghosts themselves have a very direct relationship to such tumult. Gui are themselves able to disrupt the flow of energies—especially as they are thought to be beings of predominantly yin (cold, damp, and antimasculine) energy. Through the contagious character of yin, they are assumed to bring infertility, ill health, and bad luck. Ghosts, especially hungry ones, are also thought to be attracted to sites of energetic imbalance and disturbance. The latter exert an almost magnetic effect.

This was a recurrent theme in the stories and explanations of my respondents. I asked Mr. Kok why he believed that national servicemen are thought to see ghosts and to be preyed upon by them (see chapter 5). He noted that this was only natural, as they are subject to hardships and upsetting experiences, that their “spirits are frequently low” and their energies depleted. He noted that “we have this idea, also, in Chinese religion, and also with qi, that when your strength is low you attract ghosts to yourself, and you can see them.”101

Mei Zhen Jie noted, in passing, a variant of the same belief having to do with perception. She explained, “If your spirits are high, you won’t see them. If they are low, you surely will.” Eric offered another version of this idea, whereby “if you are lowly born [in Chinese astrological theory] you are more susceptible to evil influences, and bad luck, and all this sort of thing. If your star is shining very high, these negative influences would tend to steer away from you.”102

For Jean, a doctor in her sixties, ghosts are opportunists. They reserve their visitations for moments when her life becomes hard to bear, when endurance is strained. She said, “They come to me when I am having problems anyway. And they come to test me; in that moment I will get through or I will sure fail.”103 Jean has a son who is seriously affected by anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, who regularly sees ghosts around her. Though Jean herself cannot see them, her son is “constantly telling me, ‘There is one behind you, he looks lost.’ Or ‘one sitting next to you who died violently, you can still see the damage.’” It is a common belief, also, that those who suffer from depression—alongside neurodivergent conditions such as autism—are attractive to ghosts and have the gift of sight. Famous spirit mediums often have such “burdens” (in much the same way that epilepsy and other conditions have traditionally been seen as problematical gifts from heaven). Children, also, are seen as energetically low and “open” to communication with the spirit world.

If gui are associated with any condition in which energies are imbalanced, low, or disrupted, we can understand how the influence of the PAP—and modernity at large—could be seen as ghost producing in perpetuity. Certainly this occurs via the disinterment of graves and in the destruction of the kampung, a process by which ancestors are displaced and the sociospatial conditions for their care are undermined. Less explicitly causal, but no less pervasive, is the prioritizing of speculative “creative destruction” and its climate of generalized upheaval. Owing to the restive forces of national development and the constant re-creation of the island’s surface for profit, specters are continually “stirred up” by a widespread imbalance and the dismantling of established configurations of qi in both its material and energetic guises. It should be noted that, though ghosts are drawn to zones of disturbance, they are also seen to militate—at least, until convinced otherwise—against the transformation of prior formations of space and landscape. This has a direct effect, as we will see, on their perceived motivations in disrupting state projects. The dead are understood to jealously protect what remains and at the same time to protest against chaos that is inflicted on existing natural and urban conditions.

A vanguardist project of anxious future making, by contrast, is one in which present conditions are by nature unsatisfactory—in comparison to continually (re)imagined futures. The violence of the Singapore story involved a world literally upended: an expansive horizontal carpet translated into vertical slabs. The process typically involved demolition, deforestation, and fires (in the kampung) that destabilized the social balance, as well as that of the five phases of qi, or wuxing—wood, water, metal/gold, earth, and fire—necessary for geomantic harmony and the parity of flows in male and female energy.104 This is hardly in the past; even within current HDB estates, a restless cycle of upgrading works means that the physical environment is never left in peace.

The assumed affinity of ghosts with disturbance also gives a Chinese explanation of the prevalence of haunted spaces associated with tragedy. Interestingly, this follows a logic of attraction that parallels Freud’s conception of trauma—as unsettled energy.105 Commonly, this invokes atrocities, both actual and assumed, committed during the Japanese occupation from 1942 to 1945. This is particularly the case in Changi—a site that the Singapore Tourist Board and the Economic Development Board have worked to make synonymous with a convenient and spectacular airport complex. Likewise, Sentosa—a place of massacres during the Second World War—has been converted into a pleasure island of golf clubs and international casino gaming.

Changi is a signal example, still remembered by the public as a place of massacres under the Japanese. As Mrs. Tan recalled, “they say Changi, because of the war, is the most ‘dirty’ one. They killed so many people, so bad energy is still all in that place.” Mrs. Tan feared Changi Hospital, in particular, as a site of wartime atrocities as well as a decommissioned medical facility. She noted the Japanese history, but no less that “hospitals have the most [ghosts] because a lot of people pass away down there.” Hui Ping emphasized the same thing in a millennial idiom, that Changi Hospital remains “spiritually unclean, with bad vibes,” as she had recently been told by a friend who had trespassed into one of the wings at night. “The amazing thing was, she could somehow still smell this anesthetic smell—like the cleaning chemicals and all—even though it has been abandoned for a long time.”

Mrs. Lee, a Peranakan woman in her eighties, told me,

The Japanese time was awful. There are a lot of awful stories. My brother was one of the men that was shot. Machine-gunned. They lined them up on Changi Beach. My father-in-law, also. They would just go to the house, and they would just take the men and they made them stand along one of the streets, and gun them down.

A few of the roads where executions occurred, such as Lermit and Old Holland Roads, are still avoided by older Singaporeans, under the logic that their problematic histories could predispose them to future accidents and unlucky events. Beatrice, sixty years old, recalled,

Mrs. Boon, she used to live near us, on Lermit Road, near where the Japanese had a gallows. Her husband used to go out for a lot of dinners. And she used to say, “[My husband] goes out for his dinners but I like to read and I’m never alone.” And I said, “What do you mean you’re never alone?” And she said, “Oh, they come into my room.” “They,” OK? So I said, “Your kids?” And she said, “No, my children are away at school. They just come in and they just sit there.” And I said, “Aren’t you scared?” And she said, “No, they’re just sad. They are drawn here, but they are not out to harm me.”

Such stories stress how violent histories hold a certain magnetism for ghosts. Importantly, gui at these sites need not have any relation to those who died there but may simply be drawn by the aura of the place. These unhappy spirits may, in turn, cause further violence in an ongoing cycle. As Hui Ping noted to me, “some particular roads are said to be quite scary, because of the number of accidents that happen. For no reason a car will just skid off the road.”

This is particularly poignant in the case of Singapore, where tragic associations are carefully expunged from sites on which speculative regeneration—for housing, retail, or tourism—is planned. Sites of tragedy are determined by history and not by planning; hence they have no place in the order of the nation as designed. The success of the city relies, to a great degree, on forgetting. Interestingly, however, it is not the historical specificity of a tragedy that is important in the island’s ghost-culture. The events of the Japanese period are not asking to be recalled, necessarily, in a precise manner. For the most part, historical tragedies do not “haunt the feast” in a plea for factual recollection. Rather, these exist alongside banal death or deforestation or social unrest in a general logic of disturbance, making invisible alterations to the fundamental substance of the contemporary city, a recalibration of matter and energy that influences its contemporary.

There is thus an invisible web of ecological relations linking governance, the physical environment, biophysical health, and ghosts—one that, moreover, assumes direct forms of causal relationality amid the turmoil of the postcolony. As a result of this spatiopsychological upheaval, ghosts are simply everywhere. They do not distribute themselves according to a model of compartmentalized nationhood in which a homuncular state is replicated at discrete locations. Rather, they are assumed to participate in a holistic system of flows, a spiritual current or liquidity. Like electricity or air, ghosts move in the differentials of high- and low-pressure zones: varying concentrations of qi, life essence (jing), and, as we will see, materials and landscape. And, not least, value—which is understood as a variety of energetic flow that can interact with both ghosts and qi/jing. An “anmetonymic” system is at work here: a type of fluid dynamics in which space is characterized by spiritual energies drawn to scars in the landscape and felled trees, to highways and rail networks and corridors of settlement and disruption. Seams of low or imbalanced energy become, in effect, highways for the spirit—much like ley lines or other occult shortcuts long presumed to bypass the distances and coordinates of Cartesian space.

So much, then, for Singapore’s great renovation. As we shall see in the coming chapters, such an ecology presumes a universe in which the city can be bent or folded, pierced and short-circuited through the canny use of ritual forms and a tactical (if apparently back to front) deployment of money and surplus—that is, through the use of spectro-economic techniques introduced in the first half of this book. Such operations in situ work upon the energies of urban plots. These become both loci and substance for deals with ghosts and for improved human lives, within and beyond the frame of real estate and development. The ghost-world follows conceptions of space that emphasize not hierarchy but connection, reciprocity, attraction, balance, and dynamic causality. This system is hardly without contradictions, varied interpretations, or legalisms of its own. But crucially, in the confluence of energetic flows and coextensive natures and energies, no spatial point is isolated. Where PAP ideology imagines the state in plan and cross section, as distributions, the ghost-world posits a striated topology of laminar flows: pulsions of physical and cosmological connectivity. And although this conception rejects the assumptions of high-modern planning, it offers—as we shall soon see—a labile imaginary for the present.