Overview

As Singapore develops after its independence, a number of former cemeteries in Singapore were cleared of graves with the land redeveloped in the recent decades. Most of these cemeteries had closed when they were either full or were relocated.

Due to the scarcity of land in Singapore, land use is often prioritised for urban development and public housing. As the demand of such land use increased, many former cemeteries and burial sites were gradually cleared to make way for redevelopment. According to Wikipedia, by 1985, a total of 21 cemeteries had been cleared, and an approximate 120,000 graves had been exhumed by the Housing Development Board.

Extending from a MOE Tier 2 research collaboration between Chinese Studies and Geography where we map out temples in Singapore (visit demo) and their respective relocations across the years, one dataset that interests us was the historic locations of burial grounds in Singapore and the impact that urban development had on the pattern of its clearing across the years.

Location of Cemeteries in Singapore

We relied on the historical paper maps, that were always georeferenced through the effort from the GIS-Strategic Initiative of Department of Geography, as a source of both the name and location of historic cemeteries in Singapore. As this mapping effort requires massive amount of labour to visually inspect the historical maps for cemeteries, we put in place a basic web-GIS app that allows our team of student research assistants to easily collaborative environment.

Our mapping process is currently on-going, view the interactive map below to see the number of cemeteries that have been currently mapped out by our team of research assistants.

Staff Team

This nature of this research project is an inter-disciplinary and collaborative one involving members across different departments and entities. The following is a preliminary list of members who participated in the making of this demo at this early stage. Full details of the team will be updated here soon!

Our RAs

Due to the laborious nature of this exercise, we are deeply grateful to the following passionate part-time research assistants who painstakingly helped to visually inspect every historical map in our collection to locate every burial ground that can be seen. Without their help, this effort will not be possible!

(Note: This page will be updated once we are done collating profile info of our RAs.)

Collaborative Cemetery Mapping Initiative

To make the mapping process easy, we put together a web-based GIS tool with a simple and focused UI to allow our team of part-time research assistants to work using their own laptops/devices at their own convenience.
The latest result of their mapping effort can be viewed from the map above.

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