Manufacturing Green Consensus: Urban Greenspace Governance in Singapore

In an increasingly global economy, being green, or having an environmentally sustainbale place brand, provides a competitive advantage. Singapore, long known as the ``garden city´´ has been a leader in green city imaging since the founding of the equatorial city-state, contributing, in large part to the city’s profile as the economic giant of Southeast Asia. Using a political ecology lens, the paper aims to uncover the contested socio-economic narratives of green city imaging by examining the evolution of the garden city branding scheme since Singapore’s independence in 1959. Results show that entrepreneurial governance such as green city branding has important and uneven political consequences for the social and economic fabric of our cities.