Singapore

Daniel PS Goh and Tim Bunnell

Sage Journal, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

Dec 25, 2025

Overcrowding, congestion and environmental degradation are often the reasons cited for the building of new administrative and business cities to locations away from existing metropolitan centers. In Asia, the planning of right urban densities has become the dominant paradigm for designing these new cities and selling these cities to investors and citizens. Following the wave of building eco-cities in Asia, framing and dressing this paradigm is the ecotopian imagination of a future of humanity living in harmony, with nature and each other, the right densities secured by technological progress in the age of climate crises. We see this imagination at its height in the ongoing planning and construction of Nusantara, the new capital of Indonesia in Kalimantan, heralded as a sustainable forest city sited in the Borneo rainforests. Using a genealogical analysis, we show that the ecotopian imagination began to take hold in Southeast Asia in the reviewing of urban densities and greening of planning and design in Putrajaya (Malaysia) and Singapore from the 1990’s to today, and that these are exercises in producing ecotopian densities to right-size urban societies. Analyses of these cities tend to focus on the postcolonial aspect of civilizational representation through spatial design to create nationalistic affects. We argue instead that these cities are sites of utopian futures constructed to disperse affects stemming from discontent regarding urbanization and globalization concentrated in capital cities. However, the ecotopian imaginations may not be potent or persuasive enough to disperse the affects, yet the state cannot afford for the projects to fail. Thus, the state is left with only the temporal fixes of delays and revisions pushing back eco-density targets.

Dec 25, 2025

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