Research Workshop: Singapore and the Infrastructural Imagination: Locating the City-State In and Of the World

Last week, we hosted a 1.5-day workshop in Singapore co-organised by Orlando Woods, Director of the SMU Urban Institute; Visiting Professor Simon Marvin from the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Urbanism; and Visiting Professor Colin McFarlane from Durham University.

The workshop brought together researchers and scholars to examine how infrastructure is evolving beyond conventional understandings of material provision and increasingly shaping how we think, act, work, live, and interact.

Opening: Rethinking Infrastructure

Orlando Woods and Colin McFarlane opened the workshop by introducing the concept of “infrastructural extension”. The discussion considered how infrastructure is increasingly extending beyond physical networks and facilities towards the modulation of social, economic, technological, and everyday life.

Session 1: Infrastructures at Work

The first session examined the changing relationship between infrastructure, labour, and artificial intelligence. Discussions explored the gap between AI-related expectations and current realities, as well as narratives around robots addressing “dull, dirty, and dangerous” labour shortages.

The session also considered the tension between ambitions to increase robot density and concerns about job displacement. A further theme was “infrastructural weirdness”: the ways in which infrastructure can produce unexpected or out-of-place spaces and conditions that persist beyond their original purpose.

Session 2: Statecraft and Infrastructural Aspirations

The second session explored Singapore’s global real estate investments through the concept of extended urbanisation. Discussions considered the relationship between internationally oriented developments and interventions within Singapore’s heartlands.

The session highlighted how infrastructural and urban development ambitions are shaped by concerns around Singapore’s vulnerability, competitiveness, and the need to continually position the city-state within a changing global landscape.

Session 3: AI Infrastructures

The third session examined artificial intelligence as a form of cognitive infrastructure and considered its implications for urban futures.

Discussions addressed the tension between more romantic visions of AI and pragmatic approaches to its implementation. Participants also considered the possibility of AI becoming an obligatory passage point for urban planning and the implications this may have for the organisation and experience of urban life, including the potential atomisation of social and spatial relations.

Session 4: Infrastructural Platforms and Assemblies

This session examined Singapore’s digital identity and payment systems as a layered infrastructural stack, demonstrating how new digital systems are often built upon and shaped by earlier institutional and technological logics.

The discussion also explored the templating of Singaporean urban expertise for international export, the limitations of existing vocabularies for describing emerging infrastructural phenomena, and Singapore’s approach to digital sovereignty as a middle power navigating between the technological and geopolitical influence of the United States and China.

Session 5: Infrastructural Convergence and Extensions

The fifth session examined Singapore’s regional expansion through the data centre economy and other forms of strategic capital deployment across neighbouring regions.

Discussions considered the changing scale and form of development, including a shift from large-scale mega-projects towards smaller-scale initiatives. The session also explored how local communities engage with and respond to development projects, highlighting the social dimensions of infrastructural expansion.

Session 6: Life’s Infrastructures

The final session explored how nature, food, and waste are increasingly being reconstituted and understood as forms of infrastructure.

Greening was discussed as a form of health infrastructure, while hawker centres and community canteens were examined as care infrastructures that contribute to social cohesion and everyday social support.

Closing Reflections

In the closing session, Simon Marvin synthesised the workshop discussions around three broad forms of infrastructural extension:

1. Extensions of infrastructure — the expansion of infrastructure’s spatial, material, and temporal reach.
2. Extensions through infrastructure — the ways infrastructure reorganises areas such as labour, health, and food.
3. Extensions to infrastructure — the incorporation of areas such as greenery, care, and artificial intelligence into increasingly infrastructural forms of governance and organisation.

Across the 18 papers presented during the workshop, it became clear that these different forms of infrastructural extension are considerably more complex and varied than the initial framing suggested. Together, the discussions demonstrated the need to reconsider what constitutes infrastructure, where its boundaries lie, and how infrastructure increasingly shapes contemporary urban life.

We thank all participants for their contributions and for the thoughtful and critical discussions throughout the workshop. The organisers are also exploring the possibility of developing a special issue for Urban Studies, building on the themes and discussions that emerged from the workshop.

Download Programme Booklet here.