Annabelle Tan's dissertation researches why the urban landscape of Singapore is how it is today, seeking to understand and learn from what has been lost during the island's colonial and post-colonial eras. In doing so she explores ideas of tropicality, proposing a subaltern perspective as an alternative to colonial and neo-colonial standpoints. In her thesis, she looks at dominant infrastructures of three modes of tropicality: colonial, post-colonial, and neoliberal in the context of Singapore. This includes the relocation of people from semi-sufficient kampung village compounds to mass housing by both colonial and post-colonial governments, and the development, which emerged in the 1990s, of tropicality as a global commodity, demonstrated by Singapore's quest to be a 'Tropical City of Excellence'. Tan also explores alternative experiences of tropicality through the everyday realm of 'infra-structures', which she defines as 'a constantly shifting assemblage of people, relations, things and knowledge that is found in the crevices and shadows of dominant infrastructure'. In infra-structures, people are perceived as active agents rather than having the more passive role they inhabit in infrastructures.
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