Publications

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.

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.

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 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.

This article identifies five key lessons for developing enduring smart city initiatives by examining what smart city development looks like across Southeast Asia – from primate cities all the way to secondary or tertiary cities. The cases and lessons explored in this article emerged from a three-year project led by Professor Orlando Woods and Professor Lily Kong titled Technocratic Regionalism in Southeast Asia: The Translational Politics of Smart City Knowledge Transfer. We demonstrate that to avoid failures, smart solutions must first be sensitive solutions: responsive to local contexts, grounded in available resources, and attuned to community needs. Despite many challenges on the ground, realising the utopic ideal of smart cities is possible, but only through a collective commitment to identify and address the right problems with right-sized solutions. 

As computing power becomes central to geopolitical rivalry, cloud infrastructure is increasingly framed as critical to national security, economic resilience and technological sovereignty. Current debates often focus on global competition – especially between the U.S. and China – highlighting strategic investments, export controls and infrastructure diplomacy abroad. Yet far less attention has been paid to the domestic territorial transformations that make such geopolitical projection possible. This paper argues that national strategies for AI and cloud dominance depend on the reorganization of land, energy and regulatory systems to sustain large-scale computation. Using a geopolitical ecology framework, we examine how the U.S. and China build national computing power as a strategic economic and military resource. In the U.S., cloud firms operate as state-aligned actors, drawing on fragmented regulatory authority, public subsidies and national security discourse to expand into rural and peri-urban regions. China pursues a more centralized strategy through its East Data, West Computing initiative, redistributing infrastructure to inland provinces under state-led development goals. Through comparative regional analysis, we show how domestic infrastructural expansion underpins geopolitical rivalry, producing new forms of territorial governance and socio-environmental inequality. Far from immaterial, the cloud is grounded in enclosure, extraction and the spatial foundations of techno-industrial power.

Despite the rising number of green finance policies, the socioeconomic determinants shaping them remain largely unexamined. Drawing from the literature analysing the relationship between regulation, market development and institutional economics, we contend that green finance policy adoption is driven by both market-based and institutional factors. Using a survival analysis approach to understand the levers influencing green finance policy adoption across 188 countries from 2000 to 2019, we find that exposure to the fossil fuel industry predominantly drives the initial issuance of green finance policies. The positive effect of fossil fuel commercial financing on the adoption of green finance policies exists in countries with high and medium climate change awareness levels. Meanwhile, in countries with a low climate change awareness level, fossil fuel government subsidies drive green finance policy adoption. Our study also highlights the role of the financial industry as one of the key actors in the policy cycle of green finance policies via two pathways: (i) affecting financial stability through financing oil and gas companies on primary financial markets and (ii) developing a market for sustainable finance products.

1. Cities are on the frontline of climate and urban challenges, and must lead efforts to build resilience in housing, services, and infrastructure in the wake of growing climate risks and post- pandemic vulnerabilities.

2. Five key areas for action – affordable housing, reliable municipal services, collaborative governance, equitable energy transitions, and resilient water management – have been identified, with real-life examples of solutions offered. 

3. Urban resilience depends on inclusive policies, local innovation, and global partnerships. By sharing knowledge and acting collectively, cities can drive sustainable change and build a more equitable and climate-resilient future. 

In Singapore, most land is state-owned, with the state generally issuing leasehold estates via state leases of not more than 99 years , depending on the intended land use. Naturally, the value of a leasehold estate, which erodes over time as the lease approaches the end of its term, is a key component of the premium charged for lease renewals, or the tax imposed for permission given in relation to a development that would increase the value of the land. By law, the state valuation of leasehold land is prescribed by a leasehold relativity table colloquially known as ‘Bala’s Curve’ or ‘Bala’s Table’. Since its adoption in 1948, however, the underlying assumptions and discount rate inherent to the curve have not been disclosed. This paper aims to deconstruct or reverse engineer Bala’s Table to derive the best fit model of the curve. Doing so allows policymakers to evaluate whether the model parameters align with prevailing economic realities, and if not, modify them to reflect the market and more accurately value leasehold estates for calculating taxes and premiums.
 

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.