Publications

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.

“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.

This paper advances the idea of ‘educational infrastructures’ to explore the slippages created by national education frameworks and the everyday ways in which citizen-subjects learn to be part of an ethno-cultural community. In doing so, we tease apart the differences between education as a top-down process of citizen-making and learning as a poly-directional assemblage of behaviours and influences that permeate the socio-spatial landscapes of ethnic belonging. We illustrate these theoretical arguments through an analysis of Singapore’s diasporic Indian community and the collapse of linguistically and culturally complex community backgrounds under the Mother Tongue policy. This leads to a pluralisation of learning and negotiation of identity for young people as they attempt to forge their own identities amidst a homogenising sense of ‘Indianness.’ By tracing the evolution of Singapore’s language policies, this paper demonstrates how educational infrastructures come to fill the gaps created by a state-wide commitment to multiculturalism.

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.

In the literature on policy design, the topic of citizen or policy-taker compliance, or the lack thereof, has been understood mainly in terms of economistic motivations responding to incentives and deterrents. That is, until recently. A pronounced turn toward behavioral public policy over the last two decades has diversified the set of possible propositions that are available for policy design scholars to study policy-takers. Consequently, how the diversity of policy-taker motivations and behavioral responses can be considered in the design of policy mixes and their implementation is an emerging area of study. Here, we contribute to this research effort by conceptualizing how the motivations of policy-takers affect their compliance response to the calibration of different types of policy instruments. We first elaborate on the inter-relationships between heterogenous policy-taker motivations, policy instrument calibrations, and heterogenous behavioral responses. Next, we use the example of Singapore’s approach to the management of a cyclical environmental disease (dengue) to illustrate the mix of motivations on the part of policy-takers. We then offer some thoughts on how policy instrument calibrations can be deployed to target heterogenous policy-taker motivations and induce greater policy participation.

We structurally estimate the firm-level frictions across prefectures in China and quantify their aggregate and distributional implications. Based on a general equilibrium model with input and output distortions and migration, we show that the firm-level frictions are less dispersed and less correlated with firm productivity in richer prefectures. Counterfactual exercises show that reducing the within-prefecture misallocation increases aggregate welfare, discourages migration toward large prefectures, and reduces spatial inequality. Moreover, internal migration alleviates micro-frictions’ impacts on aggregate welfare and worsens their effects on spatial inequality.