Preface

Why should specters haunt Singapore’s model of hyperrational, high-tech capital?

For much of the world, this tiny island represents the future. Or, perhaps, one of two: Slavoj Žižek has claimed that the world now faces a bleak choice between Western neoliberalism and a “Chinese-Singaporean capitalism” with Confucian values.1 Once ridiculed as a pariah state, as “Asia lite” and “Disneyland with the death penalty,” the so-called Lion City has now come to embody a vision of the forefront of governance and economy.2 It is a global center of financial operations, at once technologically sophisticated and volatile, set within a bureaucratic regime designed to manage social and personal risk. An image as the “Switzerland of Asia,” as a secretive haven amid the wealthy ASEAN region, complements its role as enabler of highly abstract, sometimes freewheeling commercial dealings. This is in no way hyperbolic. Singapore overtook Switzerland as the world’s largest offshore wealth hub at the end of 2020. Its rise has been bolstered by an expanding market in stocks and derivatives, investment banking, and monetary products. The SGX exchange is the most internationalized of all worldwide floors, with approximately 40 percent of listed companies originating outside the country.3 The city is a hub for currency markets and, with aggressive government support, is rapidly growing its share of an emerging reinsurance trade that covers the exposure of property assurers to disasters and climate change. The increasing reach of such markets and services has progressed to the point that one now sees entirely unironic references to the City of London as “Singapore-on-Thames.”4 The nation’s offerings overwhelmingly invoke the ur-rational, futuristic, and secular frontier of administration and economy.

This is reflected in the skyline itself, which is continually recreated through the speculative processes that it houses. Its restless self-making has fueled one of the world’s most profitable development sectors and propelled the island’s limited land to astronomical prices.5 The premium standard of its towers, malls, and offices contributed, in no small part, to the top spot on The Economist’s “world’s most expensive cities” list from 2002 to 2019.6 These have an unmistakable air of luxury, but also of the systematic and the technical. It is an architecture of silicone—of screens, large-paned glazing, and glossy spandrels seated in well-tempered tropical nature. Images circulate, in global media, of spectacular engineering in the pursuit of environmental control: indoor rainforests, waterfalls, and linear parks spanning between skyscrapers. Such monumental works have required great physical inputs. To accommodate a larger population of workers and shoppers, Singapore has doubled its preindependence coastline through land reclamation and replicated its surface area via high-rise construction. It has swallowed other islands, subsuming their sand and gravel alongside flows of stone, glass, metal, and other matter.7 This undertaking has established the city as a center within Asian networks of materials and labor and as an exporter of strategies in economy and urban planning.

This futuristic metropolis is also increasingly cited as a paradigm of secure urbanism. Liberalized trade coexists alongside a notably illiberal microadministration of space and biological life. Citizens navigate circumscribed political and civil liberties, their agency largely exercised in spheres of economy, consumption, and family life. Cleanliness and safety are reinforced through what geographer Victor Savage has called “absolute planning,” whereby “practically every tree and dustbin is in a designated public place, a product of overall design and conscious policy making.”8

Security, here, hybridizes social and physical discipline with operational know-how. As former Foreign Minister Brigadier-General George Yeo has claimed, Singapore has “developed the most efficient logistical system in the world, for the movement of goods, people, and information.”9 He noted the “talent” of his countrymen for spatial choreography, seen in the stellar success of the city’s container ports as a laboratory for the micromanagement of the nation more generally. Technologies like Electronic Road Pricing and the In-vehicle Unit, a dashboard-mounted device that dispenses road fees and identifies the owner of an automobile, allow for optimized and surveilled traffic. A network of cameras and screens reports drive times, waiting periods, parking spaces, and emergencies, should they arise. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the TraceTogether app tracked the location and vaccination status of citizens on their mobile phones as they moved in and out of protected urban perimeters. To borrow a phrase from Ian Hacking—one to which we will return—the state would appear to seek the “taming of chance,” despite an increasing commitment to speculative capitalism in its manifold guises.10

This Singapore model would appear to pose an effective alternative to the anxieties of the democratic: an inventive, paternalistic authoritarianism. An unlikely marriage of fiat and free market, its urbanscape serves as a monument to all that is pragmatic and hyperrational in contemporary capital.

And yet, Singaporeans also—pace Max Weber—report spectral encounters, visit graveyards to divine lottery numbers, and offer food and money and proxy commodities to ancestors. Such activity reaches a peak during the lunar seventh month, the Zhong Yuan or Hungry Ghost Festival, when the Otherworld is said to open its gates and temporarily allow spirits to return to the city.11 Chinese opera and pop performances, auctions, and feasts are held to placate spirits that may feel angry or unrequited and cause mischief or misadventure. Throughout the year, public discourse and social media relate tales of supernatural events at office blocks and civic buildings, train stations and roads, condominiums and public housing. The island’s machinic Hilberseimer facades belie a world of unexpected compromises with often-unruly revenants.

There are reasons for these apparently unlikely preoccupations. As we will see, ghosts are not incidental to the Singapore model of economy; rather, they are integral to its emergent practices, spaces, and imaginings. Why this should be the case, why spectral rites and anxieties should exist amid the ostensibly “disenchanting” vectors of global finance, is the subject of this book.

I did not set out to write about ghosts. What follows is the result of a haunting. In 2005, I was three years into a (now-twenty-year) career designing buildings and landscapes in Singapore when my work on a residential tower was abruptly halted. This was a speculative development by a government-linked corporation. On the site stood a colonial “black-and-white” bungalow in the process of being dismantled. One room, empty but for a few old personal items and a photo of a young Eurasian woman, appeared to refuse demolition.12 Bulldozer drivers were stricken with an odd malady like the effects of radiation sickness.13 The events resulted in a standstill, with the contractors refusing to continue and a Taoist spirit medium being called in.

This may seem eerie, and unusual. But here such cases are common. They occur with regularity in the building sector and on government projects especially—to the extent that ceremonies to placate resident spirits are performed as a matter of routine. Moreover, many large state organizations, including the Singapore Police Force and the National Museum of Singapore, have “ghost-busting” teams on retainer to act quickly in case of uncanny happenings at their buildings.

It should not be a surprise, then, that similar incidents occurred during subsequent architectural projects also. These became the starting point for doctoral research in urban geography at the University of California, Los Angeles under Denis Cosgrove, John Agnew, J. Nicholas Entrikin, and Andrew Apter. Through expanding networks of association, over a slow process of more than a decade, I continued to collect ghost stories (firsthand and received) from friends, acquaintances, and a host of tertiary connections. In a profound sense, participant observation was inevitable—not something “out there” but a central aspect in the life of a tight-knit community, of which I remain an intimate. My embedded position as in-law to a family of Singaporean Chinese property developers meant that I was party to seemingly endless stories about ghostly incidents, haunted real estate, and the good or ill fortune resulting from these. As a result, I have benefited immeasurably from being halfway assimilated—and thus a rather spectral or uncanny presence myself. As I have argued elsewhere, ghosts and migrants in Southeast Asia share a known intimacy.14

While I pursued the subject with the traditional methods of the qualitative urban social scientist, fieldwork was increasingly an activity interpellated into professional routines and relations. I continued to practice concurrently as a designer, and colleagues and contractors approached me with other stories, feeding what was becoming a well-known fascination. At the same time, occasional incidents at construction sites provided a perfect ethnographic opening, because (as we will see in chapter 6) architects frequently become embroiled in ritual attempts to mollify hostile ghosts. A second tranche of research unfolded in a topological manner, beginning from alleged sites of spectral trouble, their specific histories and material conditions. Interviews branched outward, initially, through the organizational tissue of the building industry and its spiritual consultants: from workers to foremen to management; from architects and landscape designers to technical consultants to development staff and “C-suite” executives; from amateur practitioners of ancestral rites to priests, spirit mediums, and temple administrators. Later, as the project moved more deeply into matters of economy, the focus of engagement shifted to entrepreneurs, investors, fund managers, and merchants, to eventually encompass virtually all modes of employment, class positions, and faiths.15

This felt less like a cartographic process than a sounding of the depths, a slow and piecemeal charting of returning voices and signals. The spectral image that results—what has come to be Spectropolis—appears very little like the map that it was intended to be. It is more like a city seen at night through humid air: a vascular field that scintillates with the passage of sociable energies, essences, and interactions. This nocturnal view of Singapore’s famously sun-drenched modernity reveals unexpected entanglements, historical debts, and traffic: the outlines of a “second city” that I began to sense nearly two decades ago.16 At the very least, I hope that Spectropolis will offer a new glimpse of this model of aspirational futurity as alive with old spirits, coursing among the new.