ABSTRACT
The city meets the traveller with glass shopping malls, high-rise condominiums, thousands of teas and curries and sea creatures for sale, air-conditioned tunnels running beneath and between tall buildings. Desires for tropical flowers, entertainment, performance, massages, and food here are proscribed within definite limits, neatly packaged consumer exchanges under the watchful authority of the city state. A wide variety of cuisines proliferates in Singapore, and travellers of course try what they can: chicken rice and crab at hawker stalls, delicate oolong from a Chinese tea shop, the malodorous durian fruit. Modern Singapore was forged through the violence and commercial forces of empire too: English colonization in the nineteenth century and Japanese occupation during the Second World War. Singapore stages the relationship between the city and the sea in a way that roars proudly, insisting on its right to mix unlike things: tropical nature and advanced technology, city and state, China, India, and Malaysia, authoritarianism and capitalism.
