ABSTRACT
When I first came to Singapore in 1994, I lived in a rented apartment on Bukit Timah Road close to the seven-mile market. Bukit Timah at that time was a community which had almost completed a profound change from a village on the road to Malaysia to a suburban condominium belt. When I walked to the shopping centre, I would stumble on a pathway still haunted by the presence of now-demolished shophouses. Every few yards, there would be a step down or up, a change of surface from bare concrete to chipped tile: the ghost of the floor of the five-foot way, that contested space1 of colonial modernity, was all that now remained of buildings swept aside by the modernizing project of nationalism. Six months or so later, the pathway was replaced with a new, even one of textured concrete.
