Publications

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.
 

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.

Moving between shower drains, aqueducts, rain gardens, and even kitchen sinks, Replumbing the City traces the enormous urban waterscape of Los Angeles in a state of flux. For more than a century, the city of Los Angeles has relied on faraway water for the vast majority of its municipal supply, but climate change is making these distant sources much less dependable. To adapt, Angelenos—including city engineers, advocates at NGOs, and residents—are developing new water supplies within the space of the city. Sayd Randle’s ethnography examines the labor of replumbing LA’s sprawling water system, detailing how a desire to sustain unlimited and uninterrupted water provision for paying customers is reshaping the urban environment and its management. Tracking how such projects redistribute the work of water management, the book explores thorny questions of how the labor of climate adaptation should be mobilized and valued.

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.

A lease is created by carving out a smaller estate from a larger estate, while a subdivision of land is often synonymous with a physical partition. However, where the term of a lease exceeds certain statutorily prescribed periods of time, the demise may amount to a subdivision of land, even without physical partitioning or tangible changes to the land. This article seeks primarily to clarify doubts surrounding when temporal subdivision of this nature occurs, given the amendments to the Land Titles Act 1993 following the Singapore Court of Appeal’s pronouncements in Golden Village Multiplex Pte Ltd v Marina Centre Holdings Pte. This involves an analysis of matters cutting across property law principles, land registration, and planning law. Additionally, this article compares the subdivision framework in New South Wales, Australia, and British Columbia, Canada, with Singapore, exploring how the compared jurisdictions treat the underlying lease where there is a lack of subdivision permission in situations so requiring.

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 theorizes ‘state capitalist landscapes’ as a unique spatial form shaped by state-owned developers that reconcile economic goals with national development imperatives and symbolic national imaginaries. State capitalist landscapes, I argue, integrate economically productive spaces with natural spaces to symbolize imaginaries of the nation. Through an inductive case study methodology, this article surveys three industrial zones developed and/or under development by state owned developers: Singapore's Jurong, China's Xiong’an New Area, and Thailand's Wangchan Valley. In each of these cases, natural landscapes are integrated into new economic zones in order to construct specific symbolic and/or political imaginaries of the nation: Singapore's ‘garden city’, China's ‘ecological civilization’, and in Thailand the ‘sufficiency economy’. By bringing together work on ‘infrastructural landscapes’ and ‘state capitalism’ this paper provides a concrete material perspective to contemporary discussions of state capitalism, while also bringing more grounded, political and institutional perspectives to landscape infrastructure studies, which has tended to set aside discussions of institutional forms or national political dynamics in a focus on form and materiality of infrastructure landscapes worldwide.

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.