This thesis explores alternative conservation logics by examining human–nonhuman relationships of care across forested landscapes in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, with a focus on Alexandra Woodland. In Singapore, conservation policies, both built and natural, are often shaped by Western neoliberal logics of control and capital. Within this framework of land-use metrics and data-driven benchmarks, the very communities and ecologies that rely on these spaces are frequently excluded or displaced. Ironically, efforts to conserve can end up erasing the very qualities that make a place worth preserving.

Against this backdrop, my research turns to the idea of hantu (Malay ghosts), whose stories persist in the region as informal systems of environmental stewardship. These myths, grounded in local folklore, function as spiritual deterrents, discouraging littering, careless defecation, and deforestation by invoking fear of supernatural retribution. Rather than relying on rigid, technocratic conservation strategies, the hantu’s “rule of law” offers a more relational, culturally embedded ethic of care.

The project culminates in an architectural proposal for transient structures shaped by these spectral narratives and forest rhythms—an architecture that listens rather than imposes, embracing a more open, sensitive relationship between human and non-human life. By foregrounding local cosmologies and affective ecologies, this thesis challenges dominant paradigms of conservation and reveals overlooked possibilities for inhabiting and caring for Singapore’s so-called Albizia dominated “garbage” forest fragments.