SEAC hosted this talk by Dr. Junjia Ye (NTU; SEAC Visiting Fellow) on migration diversity and belonging in east Singapore. An informal Author Meets Early Career Researchers session was held with Dr. Ye and a group of PhD students afterwards.
Arrival cities, many of which are located outside of European and North American contexts, are experiencing urban growth because of migrants coming from an ever heterogeneous array of backgrounds. The management of migrants at both the level of the state and the everyday is also changing as a response to these shifts. How difference has been conceived, regulataed and experienced through encounters in everyday spaces of these arrival cities has been well-documented (Amin, 2012; Watson, 2009; Wilson, 2011). Building upon this body of work, this paper examines the co-production of urban space through managerial practices by the state and the diverse users of the space. I analyse how migrant-driven diversity is produced through pastoral discourses of care and control. Drawing upon qualitative data conducted before regulations at City Plaza, in a neighbourhood in the east side of Singapore, I locate the sites of co-production at the level of policy regulation and at the levels of everyday surveillance in shared spaces where branches of the state such as surveillance technologies, explicit rules on signboards, auxiliary police officers and different groups of new arrivals (ie.“new migrants”) encounter one another regularly on weekends. I demonstrate that this production of difference from various stakeholders reinforces boundaries of civility through encounters, re-producing the desirable/non-desirable migrant. The arrival city is therefore marked by these diffuse generative forces that both subvert and reinforce dominant modes of belonging.
A video recording of the event is available here.
Speaker and Chair Biographies
Dr. Junjia Ye is Assistant Professor in Geography at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. She completed her PhD in Geography at the University of British Columbia. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersections of migration studies, cultural diversity, and the political-economic development of urban Southeast Asia. Her work has been published in journals such as Progress in Human Geography, Antipode andTransactions of the Institute of British Geographers. Her first monograph entitled Class inequality in the global city: migrants, workers and cosmopolitanism in Singapore (2016, Palgrave Macmillan) won Labour History’s annual book prize.
Prof. Hyun Bang Shin (@urbancommune) is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science and directs the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre. His research centres on the critical analysis of the political economy of speculative urbanisation, gentrification and displacement, urban spectacles, and urbanism with particular attention to Asian cities. His books include Planetary Gentrification (Polity, 2016), Neoliberal Urbanism, Contested Cities and Housing in Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Exporting Urban Korea? Reconsidering the Korean Urban Development Experience (Routledge, 2021), and The Political Economy of Mega Projects in Asia: Globalization and Urban Transformation (Routledge, forthcoming). He is Editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and is also a trustee of the Urban Studies Foundation.