A Land of Water: Imagining, Harnessing, and Engineering Singapore's Terraqueous Waterscape, 1800s–2000s

Singapore's relationship with water has always been dynamic and porous. However, the focus on the technopolitical projects of land reclamation has obfuscated internal waterways, abstracting and dichotomizing them from land. This paper builds on conceptions of "hybridity" in river histories by proposing a "terraqueous" lens examining the confluence of land and water, thus reclaiming water in Singapore on two registers: reclaiming water into the narrative of Singapore's urban-environmental morphology through a capacious view of rivers as a waterscape, while inverting the land reclamation narrative to adopt a multiscalar imaginary of watery reclamations of land—both in mega infrastructures and in periodic fluvial cycles within interstitial spaces like swamplands. This paper argues that Singapore has always been considered as a terraqueous waterscape by its inhabitants, whose experiential perspective—constructed by an embodied "sensing" of the environment—has undergirded all attempts to make sense of, utilize, and transform the geobody. We must thus regard Singapore's rivers as dialectical formations: as both water and land, nature and infrastructure, and materially and discursively constructed. Consequently, a terraqueous formulation of the geobody redresses a terrestrial understanding of Singaporean space. This paper examines three watershed moments—pioneering colonial surveys through the eyes of John Turnbull Thomson (1821–1884), the establishment and development of Chan Chu Kang Kangkar, and the post-independence anti-pollution campaigns—to illustrate a continued amphibious project premised on reimagining and reengineering the waterscape at multiple scales throughout history.