Not long after Ebenezer Howard’s Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, the English ‘garden city’ became an aspirational urban model for places in colonial Malaya like Kuala Lumpur, Kuching and Singapore. What originally responded to nineteenth century industrial expansion was in this context a reaction to early twentieth century laissez-faire urbanism, aiming to beautify cities, improve health, and boost commerce. From the 1950s, private developers announced their ‘garden cities’, which came to mean clearing unruly settlements and creating new centres for living and recreation.

In 1962, within the politics Malayanization, outgoing Commissioner of the Federal Capital A.D. York wrote that Kuala Lumpur would soon become “the most up-to-date city in southeast Asia”, a verdant garden city with modern facilities. However, it was instead the breakaway republic of Singapore that soon adopted the garden city as national policy, putting it at the forefront of urban strategy. From 1965, public gardens became a key subject of political debate, and by 1968, the Garden City became closely tied to the ‘Keep Singapore Clean’ campaign, resulting in large landscape transformations through both state projects and citizen action. As Kong and Yeoh suggest, this environmental cleaning paralleled a cleansing of the social/moral sphere, redefining people and place to invent a new nation.

This paper charts the public rhetoric of Singapore’s Garden City campaign. The policy was first enacted in state planning and public works, and through popular debate it then impacted civic practices, domestic habits and attitudes toward cleanliness. The result was an artificial ‘natural’ landscape, a lush tropical garden that defines the experience of the city, and still today, the identity of the state. The paper contributes to work on state policies in Singapore by considering the design of its environment, where ‘garden city’ is both tangible landscape and civic discourse.