Publications

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.

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.

“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.

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”.
 

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”.
 

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.

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 foregrounds the importance of underlying territorial formations in realising a vision of the smart city. It argues that as a political technology of the state, territory should be understood as a platform upon which data works and the smart city unfolds. In this view, island territories – of which bordered city-states like Singapore provide paradigmatic examples – provide an integral, yet hitherto unexplored, component in the realisation of urban ‘smartness’. We illustrate these theoretical arguments through an analysis of how the territorial constraints that characterise Singapore’s island platform enable the state to accurately and effectively realise its vision of a smart city. As both an island city and a city-state, Singapore’s territory is a political technology that is just as important in realising the state’s vision of smartness as the adoption of digital technologies and the management of data. Drawing on 27 interviews with 31 architects of Singapore’s Smart Nation, we empirically explore the integration of data, city and territory through the platform; the ‘hardness’ of data and the ‘softness’ of the city; and the hyper-terrestrialisation of ‘smartness’ in Singapore. Overall, we demonstrate how the idea of territory as a platform provides a generative counterpoint to critiques of platform urbanism.