In the two years leading up to Singapore's golden jubilee celebrations, a public workshop in 2014 followed by a conference the year after called Singapore Dreaming brought together artists, public intellectuals, academics and ‘other thinkers across diverse disciplines’ under the Singapore Dreaming Project (2015). As a self-proclaimed ground-up initiative, its stated purpose was to ‘think the unthinkable, and to formulate new possibilities’ by moving ‘beyond structural or dogmatic layers of constraints’ to ‘imagine, share and explore alternative versions of a Singapore’ beyond the narrative constructed by the government during the country's first half-century of nationhood (Yeoh 2015). One session of the 2015 meeting was particularly revealing of state and civil society relations in Singapore. The main concern that arose from this session was prompted by a statement reportedly made by a senior government official who, in asserting that the government was moving at a deliberative pace toward allowing greater individual liberties, cautioned people to be patient for change to occur and to do so without confronting the state with demands. In Singapore's legal and constitutional framework, ‘confronting the state’ can be taken to include strong criticisms of the government or government officials through the media, academic publications, or gathering for public protests (Human Rights Watch 2018, 2019).

This human condition pervades and bounds the urban imaginative in Singapore. As the chapters in this book readily reveal, citizens continuously find themselves working in the interstices between patience and confrontation to try to divine the limits of almost any kind of social action. Singaporeans are also conflicted about how to act. There is great, widespread appreciation of the successes of the government in making a prosperous nation-state. Loyalty to country is real. To some observers, the term ‘air-conditioned authoritarianism’ – coined to describe Singapore – sums up why the citizenry avoids openly criticizing the government and instead acquiesce to trade-offs, favouring increases in material welfare over individual freedom and active participation in governance. Yet, many issues related to inclusion, social justice, citizen rights, the environment, erosion of associational life and vernacular heritage still draw people to strive for change.