Feeding Singapore Sand and Food: Explorations in the City-Hinterland

Abstract

Singapore, an island city and a state ostensibly conceived in the mainstream political imagination as being “without a hinterland,” actually mobilises a vast network of resource extraction, manufacturing and trade agents, across Asia and other parts of the world. It’s vital resources are increasingly found at large distances beyond the national border. Politics of incorporating productive territories in neighbouring Malaysia, Indonesia and elsewhere, has been indispensable to Singapore’s success. Carried out at the ETH Architecture of Territory, the study of Singapore’s hinterland’s starts from a conceptual manoeuvre of eclipsing the centre, opening up alternative perspectives on Singapore’s model of high-density urbanisation. Exploratory analysis of concomitant geographies of sand and food (alongside water, labour, energy), involving ethnographic fieldwork and novel cartographies, was conducted as a way to rethink and reassemble, in qualitative terms, Singapore’s hinterlands as specific historic, material and social configurations at various scales. A comparative approach—here to sand and food hinterlands—sets up a possibility of conversation between and learning from very different cases, thus allowing a formulation of a critical agenda for urban scholars and spatial practitioners. Among the highlighted agendas are rescaling conceptions of the urban, ethics of visibility, and the values of self-sufficiency versus interconnectedness.