Publications

In recent years, China has pivoted towards a global leadership role in mitigating and adapting to climate change. Notwithstanding the complex political economic reasons underlying China's global leadership aspirations, we are interested in seeing whether the associated national discourse championed by the state increases domestic support for climate policy. That is, do China's international leadership aspirations foster a unifying sense of national pride among the domestic population, thereby lending support to the legitimacy of the state and expediting the implementation of costly domestic climate policies? To test our hypothesis, we enumerated a vignette experiment embedded with conjoint analysis to a nationally representative sample (n = 4788). We found no evidence that exposure to China's global leadership aspirations increased domestic support for national-level climate policy, as proxied by a carbon tax. Indeed, we found that exposure to China's global climate leadership aspirations decreased domestic support for a carbon tax under certain scenarios. Our findings demonstrate a potential disconnect between global and local climate policy discourses and suggest that China's policymakers need to exercise caution in ensuring that their global climate leadership aspirations do not come at the expense of decreased domestic support for the national-level policies required to meet China's goal of carbon neutrality by 2060.
 

The idea of right-sizing, or the process of adjusting the size of a city to maximise the efficient use of resources, has traditionally been used in strategic management and the resizing of shrinking cities to promote efficient urban development. Concurrently, in contemporary discourse, the sizing of smart cities has emerged as a critical topic, as size impacts the implementation of smart initiatives. Smaller cities offer the advantage of serving as cost- effective testing grounds for innovative solutions; however, they also need to be sizeable enough to attract private investments and build a robust smart city ecosystem. In this paper we demonstrate how in the context of smart city planning and governance in Southeast Asia, different actors are adopting new spatial strategies to address the sizing question. The idea of right-sizing requires rethinking in the context of smart city because it captures how effectively cities are scaled to balance technological innovations with socio-economic and administrative demands. Through three case studies from Southeast Asia, we analyse three distinct smart city right-sizing strategies: dispersal, zoning, and merging. By examining these, the paper highlights the complexities and nuances in determining the right size of a smart city across discrete contexts.

This article considers the ways in which the material infrastructures of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) intersect with other infrastructural formations, and how the resulting overlaps can trigger processes of what I call “infrastructural splintering”. These processes cause infrastructure to be experienced in differentiating ways, creating divisive politics where there might once have been unity. Embracing these politics as an analytical starting point undermines the techno-material stability of the BRI, and reveals its more-than-material affects. I illustrate these ideas by developing a case study of the effects of the China-backed Colombo Port City project on Catholic fishing communities that are dependent upon the aquatic commons for survival. The construction of the Port City has brought about significant aquatic pollution and ecosystem destruction, and public erasure by Colombo’s political elites. Complicating matters is the dominance of the Catholic Church in Sri Lanka’s littoral spaces, which has become divided by a universalist politico-ecological consciousness imposed by the Vatican, a corruptible local hierarchy, and environmental activists that engage communities by working through the Church’s sacred infrastructures. By working through these processes of infrastructural splintering, I consider how the BRI has caused Sri Lanka’s littoral spaces to face increasingly fractious futures.
 

Ageing in place is the ability to remain in one’s community, where living conditions foster a sense of attachment that enhances holistic well-being. To facilitate this, both the built and social environments within which the home is nested must be conducive to successful ageing. This paper deconstructs the merits of ageing in place, specifically how attachment to the lived environment contributes to holistic well-being. We analysed data from 6020 participants in the Singapore Life Panel® using path models, where we examined three dimensions of ageing in place: place identity, continuity, and social inclusion. Five path analyses show that two dimensions of ageing in place mediated the relationship between well-being and factors such as social isolation, number of close neighbours, social support, and satisfaction with amenities, but not living arrangements. Social inclusion consistently showed no significant relationship with well-being across all models. These findings suggest that the quality of social connections, rather than physical living arrangements, is important for well-being, and that social inclusion needs to be more appropriately contextualised. Our study contributes to policy discussions on how supporting older adults to age in place can enhance their overall well-being.

Schools play a pivotal role in guiding students to become certain types of people. International schools strive to educate global citizens who are adaptable and culturally curious. As part of this mission, international schools encourage the celebration of religious diversity through institutional accommodation and school celebrations. The eclectic mix of belonging and becoming encountered in international schools can lead to the creation of a more-than-national sense of identity. For Indian expatriates in Singapore, this becomes particularly complex due to degrees of attachment to India, feelings of belonging within Singapore, and the pursuit of a transnational ‘Global Indian’ identity. Drawing on 53 interviews with students, teachers, and school administrators from international schools in Singapore, we explore how the teaching and performance of Indian culture, specifically religious festivals, can shape the formation of more-than-Indian citizenship pathways.

Every year the list lengthens of cities with some sort of ‘smart city’ public policy. In some, it emerges as the latest in a long line of urban digital and information communication policies. In others, the introduction of the notion of the ‘smart city’ marks a departure from past approaches to public policy. Additionally, the more studies emerge of actual smart city policies, then the less definitional agreement there seems to be. Nevertheless, that we have witnessed in the last two decades the ‘repeated instance’ of smart cities emerging in cities around the world seems incontrovertible. Like so much urban public policy in the current era, how a city arrives at, and makes up, its own version of the ‘smart policy’ often involves comparison and referencing. This is the work of actually existing urban comparisons, those comparisons performed by urban policy makers. This paper draws upon an international comparative research project involving the cases of Barcelona, Calgary, Singapore, Seoul, Taipei, and Toronto. It argues that it is hard to over-estimate the place of cities in the world and the world in cities when understood through the lens of smart city public policymaking. In the cases of the six cities, comparison and referencing of other smart city policies constituted a mode of governance and shaped each city’s policies, as informational infrastructures promoted inter-urban comparisons. This demands we attend to both the routes (their journeys)-and the the roots (their origins) dialectically present in any particular city’s smart city public policy.
 

Governance inefficiencies threaten the potential of smart city projects to deliver equitable urban transformations. Current strategies often hinder implementation, and risk harmful technological effects on communities. Tackling this challenge demands urgent reforms to better integrate scientific insights into smarter governance practices.
 

This paper explores how ecological responsibility becomes distributed across the surfaces and volumes of the city. Our focus is urban mosquito management – specifically, the management of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, the vector by which dengue and several other diseases are transmitted to humans – and the governance strategies deployed in Singapore to manage breeding sites and mosquito outbreaks. Whilst the governance of nature in Singapore is usually undertaken by the state, the effective management of mosquitoes requires responsibility for ecological management to become distributed throughout the city. Residents are expected to assume responsibility for surficial cleanliness and the removal of stagnant water in which mosquitoes can breed, whilst pest management companies are contracted to conduct atmospheric fogging to control mosquitoes’ movement throughout volumetric space. Altogether, this distribution demands that residents and the private sector partner with the state to manage urban nature. The relative inefficacy of these efforts reveals a spatial politics of urban mosquito management. These politics raise questions about the relationality of ecological responsibility, and trouble the logic of distributed governance that defines the multispecies city.

Whilst the idea of infrastructure has animated scholarship for the past twenty years at least, there remains a need for more expansive understandings of what infrastructure is, and what it can be. The speed, scale and material disruptiveness with which many of the infrastructural megaprojects that constitute China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) have been developed both underpin and validate this need. Whilst the effects of the BRI are both manifold and diffuse, all of them expose situations of infrastructural complexity. Rather than considering the BRI simply as the imposition of new material infrastructures on a landscape, we posit the value of recognising the BRI as an infrastructural layer that comes into contact, competition and collision with pre-existing infrastructural formations. The BRI is an infrastructural vortex that causes the “infrastructural commons” to come to the forefront of analysis. As a heuristic, the infrastructural commons captures the processes by which once shared resources and public or common goods become infrastructuralised in ways that bring about the (re)negotiation of meaning and value. These processes are acutely felt in South and Southeast Asia, where sedimented patterns of religion and belief shape the ways in which the BRI is engaged with and understood. Surprisingly, the sacred dimensions of these infrastructural commons remain unstudied, despite there being evidence to suggest that it is the transformative power of the sacred, rather than of secular modernity, that shapes and structures everyday lives. In this vein, the articles that constitute this special issue explore the sacred dimensions of the BRI’s infrastructural commons through a series of case studies from South and Southeast Asia.

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.