Pulau Ubin is one of the two last kampung landscapes in Singapore. Its dwindling communities and physical settlements translate to the gradual weakening of traditional social structures and cultural values that shaped its landscape and communal life in the past. Though called different terms by former and existing residents, these community values are understood by the larger public and perpetuated by various state agencies as the “kampung spirit”. It reimagines certain values associated with the kampung – such as neighbourliness and reciprocity – and reapplies them to the modern Singapore landscape. The use of the ‘kampung’ as an anchor to instil a sense of place and rootedness represents a nostalgic yearning for lost social and cultural values that have been replaced by the new conditions under the high modernist state (Loh  2009). These conditions are guided by the new imperatives of the economy and society under the political-economic and cultural configuration of the developmentalist state, which stands in opposition to the idea of an organic community.

State and non-state agents after the 1980s, have had an increased interaction with the remaining kampung landscape and residents on Pulau Ubin. With them comes the reconstructed understanding of what the kampung values and its ‘spirit’ is. This raises the question: how might these new interactions, grounded in the concept of the “kampung spirit”, contribute to the continuity and reinvigoration of Pulau Ubin’s communities and the kampung landscape in the present and future?