Interview with Marissa K.L.E and Sabine Tan: Environmental conservation and urban development as competing stories of place and space in Singapore

Marissa K.L.E and Sabine Tan talk to us about their recent Journal of Language and Politics  article, 'Environmental conservation and urban development as competing stories of place and space in Singapore', explaining key findings about narratives of place and space.

Photo by Kylee Possum on Unsplash

Semiotic representations of space and the environment are an interesting area of research, especially with fast-paced developments in society that impact the way we interact with and construct our environments.

Why did you decide to write this paper?

We decided to write this paper because of our shared interest in the semiotics of space and the ways in which meanings of space can be presented and re-presented for ideological effect.

In a land-scarce country like Singapore where focus is placed on making full use of the limited space available, typically in alignment with government policy that prioritizes economic development and growth, the topic of environmental conservation can be a highly debatable and complex one.

While environmental conservation has obvious links to environmental issues like the loss of biodiversity and its environmental impact, in the Singapore context, it is also tied to an increasing concern that change often happens too quickly, potentially eroding a sense of connection to not just physical space, but the associated meanings of space that play a role in forming a sense of national identity and belonging.

With economic development and growth as a priority, land development in Singapore is typically planned years in advance, executed by a dominant state via its relevant agencies. However, in recent times, with increasing awareness and participation by civil society in issues pertaining to the environment and national heritage, state policy and planning have also shown signs of evolution and change.

Our paper is thus an attempt to critically examine the semiotics of environmental conservation in the Singapore context at this juncture, using an inter-disciplinary perspective that aims to capture the multi-faceted character of a complex issue.  

What are the key takeaways?

The primary finding from our paper is how environmental conservation discourse can be semiotized such that communications about a physical space can be understood as narratives of ‘place’ and narratives of ‘space’.

These notions of ‘place’ and ‘space’ come from Michel de Certeau’s work on human movement and interaction within material locations as trajectories that, in their intersecting and interacting patterns, create what he calls ‘spatial stories’.

These ‘spatial stories’ are dynamic and ever-evolving; involving not just the physical and material, but the being and becoming of those who traverse these locations.

Therefore, narratives of ‘place’ are considered by de Certeau to be aligned with more stable, institutional and typically more powerful entities, with narratives of ‘space’ thought of as less stable, more malleable and prone to flux.

In the Singapore context, with the specific case of a forest – Dover Forest – that has been slated for development into public housing, we show how narratives of ‘place’ and ‘space’ are constructed by both the dominant state, as well as activists who wish to prevent the destruction, either wholly or partially, of the forest.

Interestingly, we found that narratives of ‘place’ and ‘space’ are not so easily categorized as de Certeau outlined in his work.

While narratives of ‘place’ in the form of economic and national development were found in the dominant state’s communications on the development and conservation of parts of Dover Forest, there were also instances where narratives of ‘space’ were incorporated into the state’s communications. However, these were done in a way that did not ultimately compromise the state’s objectives or the ideologies it valorizes.

In turn, for activists, while their overarching stand was to work for the preservation of the forest, the fact that they operated as civil society organizations or individuals meant that they typically operated in a rather fragmented way, lacking the organized coherence of the state’s operations. As such, it was perhaps unsurprising that their discourse contained elements of narratives of ‘place’, reflecting quite likely the state’s dominance when it comes to issues involving urban planning and land use.

Where do you plan to go next in your research?

Semiotic representations of space and the environment are an interesting area of research, especially with fast-paced developments in society that impact the way we interact with and construct our environments.

Critically examining these interactions and constructions, as well as the ways and means we communicate our perceived realities of these interactions and constructions would help us make sense of how we operate not just as individual beings, but beings in the very spaces that we ourselves co-constitute and co-construct, albeit to different degrees, with other individuals and entities in the varied contexts that even within themselves evolve and change over time.