On the Ground: Land, Sovereignty, and Terraformation in Singapore
Date of Award
Fall 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Anthropology
First Advisor
Dove, Michael
Abstract
This dissertation is an ethnographic study of land reclamation that probes what it means to make both land and environmental claims in an epoch marked by increasing environmental precarity and anxiety. It explores a central research question: how does terraformation animate anxieties around the political survival of Singapore and reveal the ways in which people understand and live with an environment in flux? Facing scarce land and resources, Singapore has reclaimed land by levelling its hills, dredging its waters, and importing millions of cubic metres of sand from its neighbours. In considering governance in Singapore to be a matter of geophysical and geopolitical entanglement, I reveal how the (re)making of landscapes moves across porous registers of territory, governance, geoengineering, nature(s), and contested claims. By attending to the cultural, political, material, and temporal dimensions of environmental transformation, this work illustrates the ways in which land is always socially claimed, mediated, and contested. Framed around current debates in resource frontiers, political ecology, environmental governance, and the anthropology of infrastructure, this dissertation contributes to our understandings of the built environment by paying attention to how different forms of matter—e.g. sand and soil—emerge as mediums through which contestations around sovereign claims, ecological practices, and the politics of environmental advocacy are articulated. It contends that the stability of land ought not to be taken for granted but should instead be understood in processual terms. Land is more than the creation of real estate value, or the implementation of public housing programs, as it is often said in Singapore. As different actors strive to remake land—be it through the insertion of sand into the sea, the cultivation of certain plants to regenerate soil, or the restoration of mangrove forests—they reveal the tensions that lie in competing values and discourses around what a modern, sustainable city ought to resemble. I assert that the ground grounds the very forms, possibilities, and limits of Singapore’s emerging, fraught environmental politics. As a concept, the ground plays off two observations alive in the practice of land reclamation: 1) the treatment of land as geophysical formations and 2) the basis for sociopolitical claims that contest the conditions of urban environmental governance. In its examination of environmental state-making in Singapore, this dissertation reveals how ideas of nature and nation crystallise in particular moments, but never succeed in becoming static. Technocratic assumptions about the manipulation of the physical environment are insufficient in grappling with current environmental transformations. Through attention to the actions and claims articulated by everyday citizens, in addition to anthropogenic disruptions that confound experts (e.g. eroding riverbanks, ground settlement that creates sinkholes), a new and necessary politics is urgent are at stake.
Recommended Citation
Koh, Vanessa, "On the Ground: Land, Sovereignty, and Terraformation in Singapore" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1214.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1214
