The Urban Wilds 77a reorganization and reconfiguration of the senses. While eating outdoors is
a traditional feature of life in Southeast Asia and hawker-style street food has
never lost its popularity, eatertainment experiences of the sort found in zoos and
other wildlife locations help to create new spaces of nature for the promotion of
an eco-culture in its association with consumerism. Frow’s “entrenched modes
of narrativizing” are reinforced by travellers’ tales such as Kandell’s as well as
official discourse and the Singaporeans’ own food obsession.
Conclusion: A synaesthetic extravaganza
All cities offer multi-sensory experiences; all are the “roiling maelstroms of
affect” that Thrift describes (2004, p. 57), but Singapore seems able to offer
more methodically manufactured memorable moments than most, for tourists
and visitors alike. Sensory experiences are prefigured at the very entryway to the
nation, and the island is a riot of tropical color provided by birds, trees, butterflies,
and flowers. In an ongoing extravaganza of affect, carefully curated rainforest
paradises are combined with the promotion of food—a national fetish—to produce
eatertainment experiences that help to reconfigure and reinscribe spaces of nature.
These elements, allied with the omnipresent lure of shopping, create an elaborate
form of synaesthesia: that is, a confusion of the senses where the stimulation of
one sense triggers a response in a different sensory modality (see Harrison 2001).
In addition to the activities of theming that help impart an overall narrative
unity to the marketing campaigns as described above, Bryman also lists hybrid
consumption and merchandising as key features of the overall package of
experiences. He defines hybrid consumption as a marketing strategy in which
forms of consumption typical in one sphere interlock or overlap with forms of
consumption normally found in another sphere. Hybrid consumption brings
together different domains of consumption in unusual ways and is typical of
hotels, museums, theme parks, shopping outlets and zoos (Bryman 2004, pp.
57–77). This chapter illustrates the importance of the strategy for Singapore,
revealing the centrality of the green aesthetic and its close alignment with the
government’s environmental practices of conservation of rainforest cover and
continued greening of urban areas.
If the merging of shopping, eating, and chilling in various forms of synaesthesia
is an important marketing strategy and a key feature of Singapore’s affective
allure, it is because food is one of the most effective modalities for the creation
of positive memories—one that will, moreover, generate nostalgia and encourage
return visits. The tourism board of Singapore, the managers of zoos and wildlife
parks, and others involved in the tourism industry are clearly well aware of the
importance of food for memory. In studies of ritual in daily life, David Sutton
(2001) has outlined the importance of food for cultural memory and for the
recalling of rituals and other significant community and family events. The links
he identifies are culture-specific and vary across cultures, but the memories that
may be triggered by the “Breakfast with the Orangutans” or “Dinner with the
Penguins” are less culturally specific and more globally oriented, particularly