Publications

Many forms of irreversible loss structure urban form and processes under conditions of climate change. But unplanned, often inconvenient forms of proliferation and abundance are also characteristic of contemporary urban settings and help shape such arrangements. Considering a largely unwanted species that has flourished in cities across the globe in recent decades, this commentary examines how such forms of multispecies abundance further trouble the “open, malleable horizon” of urban thinking that Savannah Cox critiques in her essay.

Remote work has become increasingly accessible due to the growing acceptance of remote work arrangements following the COVID-19 pandemic. Some state actors, especially in countries which face a shortage of digital talent and have reputations as leisure-tourism destinations, have begun considering the opportunities for digital transformation or workforce upskilling that highly skilled remote workers may offer. This paper develops the case of remote workers in Thailand to argue that infrastructural stickiness is a critical determinant for effective knowledge transfer to occur. By infrastructural stickiness we refer to the regulatory and sociomaterial infrastructures that both attract and retain international remote workers to a particular place, while also attempting to extract and ‘fix’ their skills and knowledge in place. The challenge of generating the right amount of stickiness emerges as people can be fixed in place relatively easily, but the human relationships necessary for knowledge transfer are more resistant to infrastructural machinations. Integrating perspectives gained from interviews with both state agencies and remote workers, we illustrate the difficulties in facilitating successful knowledge transfer from remote workers amidst their positioning as embedded tourists who nonetheless remain separate from the local population.

Singapore aims to achieve 30% food self-sufficiency by 2030, known as the 30-by-30 target, and this chapter reviews Singapore’s changing landscape for urban agriculture and its recent progress towards the 30-by-30 goal, highlighting key challenges such as land constraints, high production costs, and resource limitations. Building-integrated agriculture (BIA), which utilizes building surfaces such as rooftops, façades, and balconies for food production within urban environments, is examined as a potential way to increase self-sufficiency through a simulation. Despite the BIA’s potential, practical issues – including regulatory concerns and infrastructure limitations – must be addressed before it can be implemented at scale. Insights from Singapore’s experience offer valuable lessons for other dense, land-scarce cities around the globe in seeking to enhance local food and sustainable production and strengthen resilience against supply shocks and disruptions.

This paper examines how rapidly urbanising Southeast Asian cities are reshaping relationships with urban nature through experimental governance approaches. It highlights how governance involves contested interactions across public, private, and community actors, and how non-human agency disrupts linear policy outcomes. The study contributes to debates in urban political ecology and multispecies urbanism using regional case studies

This paper advances an understanding of Sikh temples (gurdwaras) in Singapore as ‘sensory contact zones’, where co-ethnic encounters are negotiated through the sensory body. By foregrounding the sensory within the notion of contact zones, we show how minor acts—such as how one smells, sounds, or moves—can trigger subtle yet consequential forms of social sorting. Rather than focusing on inter-ethnic difference or visible markers of diversity, our analysis draws attention to how inclusion and differentiation within shared ethno-religious communities are shaped less by discursive labels than by sensory judgements—of smell, speech, comportment, and proximity. Based on ethnographic research with 27 long-term residents comprising of Singapore citizens and permanent residents, we examine how they interpret, manage, and sometimes contest the presence of temporary migrant co-ethnics. Distance is sustained not through exclusion, but through sensory regulation, which renders migrant workers’ bodies ‘out of place’. These everyday encounters actively reproduce social boundaries by shaping who is sensed as belonging. In attending to the sensory politics of co-ethnic encounters, we offer a framework for analysing migration-led diversity and integration beyond binaries of inclusion or exclusion by reframing inclusion as contingent and stratified, enacted through embodied moral judgements of who belongs where.

This monograph commentary offers the first comprehensive, clause-by-clause analysis of Singapore’s Land Titles Act since John Baalman’s seminal 1961 commentary. Drawing on over six decades of legislative developments and case law, it provides a rigorous and contemporary examination of key doctrines, including indefeasibility, registration, caveats, priorities, and fraud, alongside the evolving statutory powers affecting land title.

Integrating historical context, comparative perspectives, and close engagement with leading authorities, the commentary traces how successive amendments have shaped Singapore’s present-day land-title framework. Assoc Prof Ti also systematically engages with Baalman’s original insights, highlighting their continued relevance while addressing areas where legal developments have refined or departed from earlier foundations.

Designed for practitioners, academics, policymakers, and advanced students, this publication stands as a significant contribution to Singapore’s property law scholarship and serves as a definitive reference on the registered land regime.

This book provides a comprehensive assessment of the current state of greening the housing sector in five East Asian cities, namely, Tokyo, Beijing, Seoul, Hong Kong and Singapore. For each city, an overview of the housing sector is presented, followed by detailed analysis of green building schemes, as well as regulations and incentives that have been implemented. In addition, challenges that the city's government faced in driving retrofitting and redevelopment of the housing sector are highlighted since they are critical in meeting the net-zero targets as well as increasing new housing supply in these cities. Each chapter also provides examples of successful green residential projects and the role that green finance plays in the transition. The findings and lessons that are drawn from the case studies will allow for identification of obstacles, proposals for new policies and/or the redesign of existing policies and urban regeneration frameworks for each city. These findings and lessons will also inform other cities facing similar challenges either currently or in the future.

Data-driven solutions and innovations have been extended to various industries, including agriculture, to increase efficiency. With the emergence of smart farming and agriculture 4.0, advanced technologies such as IoT, big data, machine learning, and cloud computing are increasingly integrated into farming. Among these, technologies such as digital models, digital twins and the metaverse are now used to control various farming activities remotely based on real-time data. However agricultural ecosystems, involving uncertain nature-based factors and complex human-nature interactions cannot always be accurately represented or predicted by digital models. Digital models aim to reduce natural environments into controllable game-like situations and undermine the multifaceted human and natural intelligences at play in agricultural ecosystems. This paper critically examines this reductionist view of the digital modelling of nature within the context of smart farming. We approach digital twinning not only as a technical tool but also as a conceptual lens that reflects a broader epistemological shift; one that assumes complex agro-ecological systems can be fully rendered calculable. By engaging with the idea of untwinning, we argue that this approach fails to account for the context-sensitive, dynamic dimensions of farming, particularly those rooted in traditional farming knowledge. Using the case of smart farming initiatives in Chiang Mai, Thailand, we show how digital modelling technologies, while offering certain efficiencies, face challenges as some factors in agro-ecological systems cannot be fully captured or controlled by technological solutions.

This article explores how mosquito management in cities operates not just technically but affectively, through sensory governance and ecological intelligence. It shows how urban pest control is shaped by emotions, perceptions, and embodied experiences, revealing the performative and political nature of managing “toxic” urban atmospheres.

This article examines how autonomous vehicle testing encounters nature-based constraints, highlighting frictions between AI systems and environmental conditions. It shows how natural elements disrupt technological systems, complicating smart mobility deployment.