Publications

This paper explores an alternative territorial sensibility – ‘diasporic territoriality’ – that is rooted in the search for belonging outside of a putative ‘homeland’ amongst dis/placed communities. Drawing on ethnographic research with 26 members of Singapore’s Sikh diaspora, we examine the everyday spaces of diasporic belonging that simultaneously reproduce and resist colonial imaginings of Punjabi territory. Many first-generation diasporas continue to define themselves through regional affiliations inherited from colonial legacies, with Singapore’s gurdwaras serving as a spatial ‘fix’ for mapping territorial logics from the Punjab. However, these colonial imaginaries are increasingly contested and ‘unmapped’ by younger generations who seek to socialize in alternative spaces of belonging based on shared pieties and upbringing. By reimagining belonging beyond essentialist framings of home-diaspora connections, the idea of ‘diasporic territoriality’ contributes to decolonizing prevailing understandings of territory and belonging. Doing so provides a provocative counterpoint to re-evaluate state-sponsored narratives of integration within the context of multiculturalism.

International schools are somewhat ‘place-less’ in that their denationalised educational systems and nationally diverse student bodies are typically removed from the physical context in which each school is located. However, this placeless internationalism is complicated by international schools that also affiliate themselves with a national system or enrol a significant number of students who aspire to remain in the ‘host’ country. This paper develops the example of the Global Indian International School in Singapore to illustrate how the feeling of place is impacted by its dual orientations as both ‘Global’ and ‘Indian’. The school attempts to (re)create an Indian schooling environment in Singapore, cultivate a sense of Indian identity, and prepare students for internationally mobile futures. Drawing on qualitative interviews conducted with students and teachers at the Global Indian International School in Singapore, we explore placemaking practices in educational spaces and consider how they are impacted by the potentially conflicting goals of grounding students in their ethnic or cultural identities whilst simultaneously equipping them for internationally-oriented futures.
 

In June 2020, the National Parks Board (NParks) launched Gardening with Edibles, an initiative that saw the distribution of nearly 460,000 seed packs to interested households. Each pack contained approximately 1,000 vegetable seeds, allowing Singaporeans to grow a few rounds of crops ranging from tomatoes to leafy vegetables like kailan.¹ The initiative’s main purpose was to drive home the importance of food security as part of a wider national campaign, Our Singapore Food Story.²

Due to Singapore’s heavy reliance on imported food, most locals rarely have a hand in producing the food they eat. In 2020, fewer than 3,100 Singapore residents (or 0.14 percent of the labour force) were involved in industries such as agriculture and fishing.³ Gardening with Edibles bridges this wide disconnect between farm and table by providing Singaporeans with the experience of growing their own food.

Edible gardening is not a recent phenomenon in Singapore; Gardening with Edibles was preceded by the Grow More Food campaigns. These initiatives and practices of edible gardening in modern Singapore emerged from a confluence of food security concerns and planning ideals from the Garden City Movement in Britain and demonstrate just how deeply rooted edible gardening is in the Singapore Story.

Reservoirs are developed to store water in reserve for future use. But once built, reservoir sites inevitably hold more than just water, often serving as a key habitat for a range of species. This paper examines how one such animal has transformed water storage facilities and nearby landscapes into contested ground in urbanising areas of Texas, USA. Living around the reservoirs, feral hogs complicate the process of urbanisation by degrading the stockpiled water and infrastructure at the storage sites themselves and by damaging private property throughout the surrounding landscape. Tracking local efforts to manage the hogs, the case study illustrates the spatially extensive stakes of such porous infrastructural ecologies of storage, particularly their role in mediating the ongoing process of the urbanisation of nature.

“What gets measured gets managed” has long been a mantra to rally improvement throughout various domains of life. Perhaps this is also the case for existing work on social cohesion, whereby much of its conceptual and operational elements have received interest in both academic and policy research aiming for practical improvement with regard to the cohesiveness of communities and societies. We contend, however, that not everything that matters for social cohesion may be measurable, and not everything that has been measured for social cohesion may matter. This is not to suggest that not measuring any indicators is better than measuring them, but to caution that existing measures of social cohesion, as well-developed as they may currently be, might still be lacking in their ability to accurately assess the state of social cohesion in a given society. This paper sets out to question when and why measurements may fail. It seeks to critique current indicators of social cohesion by recognising what and who are missing from existing measures. To this end, we also call for discussion of alternative approaches to measuring social cohesion for areas where data is restricted or not easily accessible.

This article explores how the volumetric characteristics of cloud computing can create new expressions of territoriality, which in turn can reveal new axes of vulnerability and threat. Whilst recent work in political geography has sought to “locate” the cloud through analyses of data centre geographies and data-driven processes of smart urbanism, we look beyond the material plane and consider the amorphous territorialities of voluminous data instead. As much as these data are acted on by the legal-regulatory mechanics of the state in a bid to territorialise them, so too do these data volumes serve to cloud, and thus obscure, territory. Processes of territorialising and clouding exist in a state of dialectical tension with each other, and reveal the volumetric vulnerabilities of cloud computing. We validate these theoretical claims through an analysis of in-depth interviews with senior stakeholders in Singapore's Smart Nation initiative. In Singapore, defending the city is equivalent to defending the nation, which causes the military to play an outsized role in securing the city-state. We consider how the attack surface of the city becomes a more voluminous construct with cloud computing, how strategies of geofencing attempt to secure the cloud, and how these processes reveal the increasingly militarised conjunctures of everyday life. Overall, these insights reveal a need for political geography to continually evolve its theoretical premises in line with the rapid digitalisation of the world.

Future urban planning requires context-specific integration of spatial design and microclimate especially for tropical cities with extreme weather conditions. Thus, we propose a Combined Spatial-Climatic Design approach to assess impact of urban densification on annual outdoor thermal comfort performance employing ENVI-met simulations for Singapore. We first consider building bylaws and residential site guidelines to develop eight urban-density site options for a target population range. We further classify annual weather data into seven weather-types and use them as boundary conditions for the simulations. Comparing such fifty-six combined spatial-climatic simulation outputs by analyzing Outdoor Thermal Comfort Autonomy, we report the influence of site geometry is nominal on air temperatures but significant for Mean Radiant Temperatures and Physiological Equivalent Temperatures. Neighborhoods with taller (20 % increase in mean height) buildings and narrower footprints exhibit better thermal performance compared to short and wider (12–58 % decrease in mean width) buildings, due to less radiative heat gain during solar noon. For a high density tropical urban context, like Singapore with high sun angle and solar radiation, mutual shading and presence of wind enhances thermal comfort. Results provide useful and actionable recommendations on ideal building profile for heat responsive neighborhoods in low-latitude hot-humid cities similar to Singapore.

This paper advances the idea of ‘educational infrastructures’ to explore the slippages created by national education frameworks and the everyday ways in which citizen-subjects learn to be part of an ethno-cultural community. In doing so, we tease apart the differences between education as a top-down process of citizen-making and learning as a poly-directional assemblage of behaviours and influences that permeate the socio-spatial landscapes of ethnic belonging. We illustrate these theoretical arguments through an analysis of Singapore’s diasporic Indian community and the collapse of linguistically and culturally complex community backgrounds under the Mother Tongue policy. This leads to a pluralisation of learning and negotiation of identity for young people as they attempt to forge their own identities amidst a homogenising sense of ‘Indianness.’ By tracing the evolution of Singapore’s language policies, this paper demonstrates how educational infrastructures come to fill the gaps created by a state-wide commitment to multiculturalism.

In 2019, the Singapore Management University (SMU) inaugurated a series of engaged discussions involving business, government and experts from academia, on topics that matter to the city. “City Dialogues” aims to bring together invited delegates for frank and open discussions under Chatham House rules, to share ideas and best practices, at the end of which a White Paper is produced to summarise the key discussions and ideas arising that can create societal and community benefits. The second “City Dialogues” session was held from 17 to 18 January 2024 and coincided with the launch of SMU’s Urban Institute, a new research institute dedicated to multi- and inter-disciplinary research on cities in Asia. Given the urgent task of addressing the climate crisis, and the inevitable challenge that developing sustainable cities demands large initial investments, while the benefits often only materialise many years later, the theme of this “City Dialogues” session was “Reconciling the Costs of Sustainable Cities”.
 

A burgeoning literature on ‘left behind’ places has emerged that captures the backlash against globalisation and highlights the locales that lag world cities. This paper integrates the ‘left behind’ and world cities literatures through the lens of discontent in the context of Singapore, using sentiment analysis and topic modelling as well as interviews with local professionals to unpack the multidimensional aspects of discontent. Focusing on the Singapore–India Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement that spurred discontent directed at foreign Indian professionals, we show that the worlding generated by transnational flows has accentuated intra-urban inequality through racialisation and spatialisation of financial business and suburban residential hubs. Discontent from intra-urban inequality unsettles years of efforts by the state to cultivate cosmopolitan spaces aimed at reducing social exclusion and difference in the world city of Singapore.