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

Attempting to redress the ecological damage done to the islands known as Singapore goes back to late colonial times; more recently, contemporary climate change has affected the ability of the biodiversity of the region to flourish as it had done for millennia. In the 1960s, the new nation-state began to emerge from the colonial yoke, adopting many of the technologies and standards of the Western world to advance the needs of a once rural population becoming citizens of a world hub for the Southeast Asia group of countries. To encourage the process of urbanization from the kampong to a city in three decades, parts of the natural world, including mosquitoes, monkeys, and crocodiles, with which people were familiar, were planned into the new development of a city that was intended to become a business and trade hub. Plantings of selected trees and shrubs and the encouragement of bird breeding through...