Introduction

In the early 2010s, Singapore underwent a political maturing of sorts. This was the time of the post-2008 financial crisis, Wall Street protests and renewed anti-capitalist fervour, and as Singapore's 2011 General Election threw up public rumblings about labour, the environment and transport, the public began to tap into alternative media to express their frustrations. Half a decade on, Singapore's public sphere now has a greater number of citizen groups, higher expectations of governmental accountability, and more public discussion about the merits of government policies.

But to what extent do these emerging imaginaries reflect a growing investment in building creative and collaborative practices that are independent of the state? In this chapter, I use Arjun Appadurai's (1996) conceptualization of imagination as a social practice to ground my theoretical frame. He argues that the imagination itself is ‘an organized field of social practices, a form of work (in the sense of both labour and culturally organized practice), and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility’ (Ibid.: 31). New imaginaries grow steadily, circulating through practice in the city, and only become visible at points of disjuncture, which happen as part of global cultural shifts when different imaginaries bring embodied ideologies into contact with one another.

In this chapter, I look at three vignettes featuring civic participation in Singapore, that intentionally inhabit the city's other space-times. I consider how people rework space and time in these examples to counter the psychological and material structures that constrain civic and creative spaces.