Singaporean Creatures: Histories of Humans and Other Animals in the Garden City

Shortlisted for the 2024 Singapore History Prize!

Edited by Timothy P. Barnard
With contributions from Ruizhi Choo, Anthony Medrano, Miles Alexander Powell, Esmond Chuah Meng Soh, Nicole Tarulevicz, Jennifer Yip, Faizah Zakaria, Timothy P. Barnard

Modern Singapore is the city in a garden, a biophilic and highly managed urban space that is home to a variety of animals, from mosquitoes to humans to polar bears. How has this coexistence worked as we enter the Anthropocene? How have human-animal relationships shaped Singapore society—socially, economically, politically and environmentally—over the last half century?

This book is a work of historical and ecological analysis, in which various institutions, perspectives and events involving animals provide insight into the development of Singapore as a modern, urban nation-state, highlighting some of the challenges of planning and development. The book asks the reader to see Singapore's myriad creatures not as mere objects of human action, but as active participants in the making of Singapore’s urban future and will be of interest to scholars of environmental history and lovers of Singapore's nature. 

"A new volume of essays on environmental history furnishes a lively and persuasive account of Singapore’s relationship with animals from the mid-20th century onwards.... Thoroughly intriguing and readable, Singaporean Creatures is also a worthy “sequel” to Barnard’s earlier book Imperial Creatures, which explored Singapore’s relationship with other animals within an earlier time frame of 1819 to 1942." - The Straits Times

Timothy P. Barnard is an associate professor in the Department of History at the National University of Singapore, where he specializes in the environmental and cultural history of island Southeast Asia. He is the author of NUS Press' Imperial Creatures and Nature's Colony, and editor of Nature Contained.

Publication Year: 2024
288 pages, 229mm x 152mm
35 b/w images
Paperback
ISBN: 978-981-325-238-7