If Singapore is a garden city, who are its gardeners?

• Main Author: Zahirah Suhaimi
• Other Authors: J Patrick Williams
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Social sciences::Sociology::Culture; DRNTU::Humanities::Linguistics::Discourse analysis; DRNTU::Social sciences::Sociology::Social structure; DRNTU::Social sciences::Sociology::Social change
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/51701
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This paper discusses the relations between state, society and environment by conceptualising the urban environment of Singapore, the Garden City, as a cultural domain (re)produced by interactive processes between these relations. I take a critical cultural approach in analyzing the dominant discourse surrounding the Garden City as represented by a sample of newspaper articles from Singapore’s dominant print media, The Straits Times. Through ethnographic content analysis (ECA), I track the metasemiotic discourse of environmentality and extract significant emergent themes and using critical discourse analysis (CDA) I examine the recontextualisations of environmentality within these themes. In my analysis, I have found that even within dominant discourse, metasemiotic discourses become recontextualised to convey nuanced, rather than ideologically distilled, messages. The documentation of textured interaction within a hegemonic discursive space, I argue, highlights the capacity for ideological resistance for negotiating the environmentality governing the nation.