Article In:
Journal of Language and Politics: Online-First Articles

Environmental conservation and urban development as competing stories of place and space in Singapore

ORCID logo | National University of Singapore (NUS)
ORCID logo | Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS)
In this paper, we focus on the context of urban development in Singapore, where some of the country’s remaining forests have been earmarked for development, to examine how discourses of development and conservation are semiotized via multimodal representations of the forest landscape in environmental communication. To show how these discourses interact, we use one of the forests identified for development, Dover Forest, as a case study, employing de Certeau’s (2011) concepts of ‘place’, ‘space’ and ‘spatial stories’ to demonstrate how the Singapore state’s narratives of place emphasize national development imperatives connected to neoliberal market logics, with conservationists utilizing narratives of space that emphasize conservation, though the latter emphasis is not made unproblematically without impact from narratives of place. Implications of the analyses are briefly discussed with reference to de Certeau’s theory in light of the complexity of environmental conservation discourse where a dominant developmental state agenda persists.
Keywords: environmental communication, critical multimodal discourse analysis, neoliberalism, authoritarian environmentalism, neoliberal conservation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Environmental communication and the ‘spatial turn’
  • 3.Method and data
  • 4.Analysis and discussion
    • 4.1Modern neoliberal urban developmentalist agenda
    • 4.2Technocratic governance; consultative authoritarianism with claims of consensus
    • 4.3The need for order and control to manage disorderly nature
  • 5.Implications and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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