Singapore

Yeo, S.J.I.

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 49, e12632

Aug 3, 2023

This paper brings into dialogue recent critical scholarship on smart cities and geographies of the future by examining how city dwellers encounter normative visions of the future supplied by government actors under smart urbanisation. I focus specifically on the prosaic but significant ways in which people (re)interpret and (re)produce urban futures in and through their everyday affective and material engagements with digital technologies. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews, I discuss the extent to which state-promulgated imaginings of digital urban futures projected by electronic payment infrastructures are negotiated by urban inhabitants in Singapore, at both the levels of the individual and the collective. Although there is a tendency in Urban Studies to read the smart city as depoliticising, the findings in this paper suggest that urban dwellers' lived encounters with digital urban futures are characterised and bound up with politics. Furthermore, this paper casts attention on forms of negotiation that emerge not from grassroots movements and/or democratic activism that have so far attracted social and cultural geographers working on the future, but everyday lived practice around the digital. Such a fine-grained, practice-based approach productively foregrounds emancipatory potential for reworking and reimagining normative digital urban futures. Equally importantly, it takes seriously the diverse and uneven future-making capacities of urban inhabitants in the digitally mediated city, contributing to ongoing projects that seek to develop a globally oriented alternative smart urban agenda for cities and urban spaces in the 21st century.

Aug 3, 2023

Chib, A., Alvarez, K., & Todorovic, T.

Journal of Urban Technology, 29(4), 83–99

Dec 16, 2021

Smart city rhetoric stresses both citizens’ well-being and urban efficiency; however, critical perspectives suggest a worsening of existing societal inequalities for less-productive citizens, posing implications for how urban planners should incorporate smart technology. We examine the perceptions of elderly residents regarding Singapore’s Smart Nation implementation in their communities. The elderly find that technological advancements deepen existing divides and suggest that true participation and social relationships are required for successful adoption of urban smart systems. We provide commentary on the tensions created between (1) productivity and efficiency as goals of the smart nation and (2) the inclusion and participation of older citizens in urban planning decisions.

Dec 16, 2021

Shamsuzzoha, A., Nieminen, J., Piya, S., & Rutledge, K.

Cities, 114, 103194

Mar 26, 2021

The objective of this study is to critically review the smart city research paradigm and to find possible pitfalls, conflicting results and topics for further study and improvement. A qualitative comparison of the smart city initiatives in selected target countries and cities were done. The research strategy in this study approximates the grounded theory, utilising inductive reasoning to generate arguments and conclusions about the form, validity and future of the smart city. Various actors responsible to convert a traditional city to a smart city are defined and analysed within the context of this study. The main conclusion of this study was that the current research on smart city does not fully address the complex nature, conflicts and interdependencies of the smart city objectives. Moreover, the study found that the smart city initiatives form complex and multidisciplinary platforms that require holistic evaluation as the current evaluation methods and rankings of the smart cities vary considerably, making the evaluation of the success of the smart cities difficult.

Mar 26, 2021

Götsch, B.

Archiv Orientalni, 79-109

Dec 4, 2020

Today, cities the world over are entangled in aspirational future visions, as regions compete with others in different parts of the world for investment, tourists, and talent to guarantee economic growth. This paper approaches the cities of Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Vienna via their self-presentations and projections of the future. It sees cities as learning assemblages and pays attention to the narrative construction of imaginaries and future trajectories, as depicted in the respective city galleries and planning museums. All cities are found to be entangled in international policy trends and, in their unique ways, strive for recognition, competitiveness, and conviviality. Singapore emerges as torn between ambition, transparency, and control, while wanting to foster creativity and revive its cultural heritage; Kuala Lumpur appears simultaneously geared by boosterism and at home in opacity and multiplicity, privileging Malays while trying not to alienate other ethnic groups; and Vienna ambivalently projects a future that reconciles nostalgia for monarchic splendor and the social-democratic heritage of egalitarian urbanism with ambitions for international recognition and newly popular trends for citizen participation and “rights to the city.”

Dec 4, 2020