Charlotte Malterre-Barthes | Akateeminen Kirjakauppa

Some Haunted Spaces in Singapore explores the paradox of modern urban planning and spiritual beliefs in Singapore, proposing a parsing of the island’s town and country planning based on abstract expressions of mysticism. An investigation of the collective imagination, this book examines elements of the built environment believed to be occupied by spirits: haunted spaces. Often dismissed as irrational, this mystical focus digs deeper than religious superstitions or teenage esotericism. In exploring the apparent contradiction between a city-state built up according to a rigid rationale of urban development and robust spiritual practices that endure to this day, this book reveals the resilience of interconnected spaces and memories, as well as forms of social resistance to the changes brought about by fast-paced urban growth and top-down national planning in Singapore.

The authors use their own and assembled photographs, technical drawings, models and texts to document, scrutinize and reconstruct allegedly haunted locations in Singapore, drawing on both contextual memory and physical characteristics. Intrigued by Singapore’s omnipresent ghost stories and fitted out with the tools of architecture and scientific investigation, the authors set off on an obsessive expedition across some of the island’s silent hidden areas, along the fine line between scientific rationality and absurdity. This book, the product of years of meticulous research, is a painstaking and yet casual attempt to scratch beneath the city’s surface and its physical realities to uncover occult realms.