Cityscape and memoryscape: The Cold War and monuments of commemoration in Singapore

Abstract

From the 1940s to the 1960s, Singapore’s cityscape was dotted with military bases which had accompanying deathscapes devoted to the war dead from both WWII and the Cold War. First there was the establish ment of the Kranji War Cemetery and Memorial to the military war dead of WWII. At the same time in Singapore there were other cemeteries that were created as memoryscapes to the fallen in the Cold War—the Pasir Panjang and Ulu Pandan military cemeteries. With the end of empire and the exiting of the British from their Singapore military bases in the 1970s, the newly independent city-state of Singapore started to contest the use of these spaces by military cemeteries