Publications

Identifying gaps in urban climate change assessment is crucial for developing the new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report on cities. To bridge the gap between the understanding of local interventions and global climate goals, we call for the strengthening of assessment tools such as urban typologies, case study synthesis and big geospatial data studies. We sort research gaps into five overarching themes: (1) urban form, (2) data and artificial intelligence, (3) policies and governance, (4) system transformation and (5) potentials, costs and losses. Using these methods for categorizing and analyzing cities based on shared characteristics will enable the tailoring and scaling of local climate solutions to global contexts.

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.

Review of criteria and analysis for the Climate Delegated Act • Usability improvements for the generic climate change adaptation criteria • Consistency and usability improvements for selected activities under the Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation objectives, including through harmonising activity titles and descriptions • Adjustment to scientific results and technological developments of selected substantial contribution and DNSH criteria under the Climate Change Mitigation objective • general recommendations for updating substantial contribution and DNSH criteria under the Climate Change Mitigation objective • Mapping of activities with inconsistent or insufficiently considered DNSH criteria New activities mandated by the European Commission • Refining substantially contributing to Climate Change Mitigation • Mining substantially contributing to Climate Change Mitigation • Close to Market Research, Development and Innovation substantially contributing to all four objectives of the Environmental Delegated Act. • Digital Solutions and Services substantially contributing to all four objectives of the Environmental Delegated Act. New activities mandated by the European Commission, but not completed • Manufacture of emergency aircraft substantially contributing to Climate Change Adaptation • Maintenance of tunnels and bridges substantially contributing to Transition to Circular Economy • Manufacture of tyres substantially contributing to Pollution Prevention and Control • Telecommunication networks substantially contributing to Climate Change Adaptation • Energy efficiency equipment in industry substantially contributing to Climate Change Mitigation. The report includes progress reports for each of the above-mentioned activities except for Telecommunication networks where no progress has been made due to a lack of resources in the Platform.

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.

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.
 

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.