Making space for the future : imagining the Smart Nation in Singapore

• Main Author: Hassoun, Amelia
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: University of Oxford 2021
• Subjects: Anthropology; Geography; urban studies

People imagine futures through sensory and affective engagements with materials like the smart city's smart urban infrastructures. Through an ethnography of two "Smart Nation" smart home projects in Singapore, I detail how state planners project and replicate future imaginaries through the smart city by repeatedly materialising them in smart urban infrastructure. These historically-rooted planning practices project some residents as representing and productive of national futures while excluding others. Residents repeatedly and materially engage with these imaginaries, sometimes replicating and sometimes reimagining them, through everyday embodied engagement with smart urban infrastructures. Drawing upon the rich literature on imagining futures through sociotechnical projects of city and nation building in Singapore, I deepen the science and technology studies (STS)-informed theory of co- production using the feminist posthumanist concept of differentiated repetition to detail the specific, differentiated forms of "technical agency" afforded by the Smart Nation (Neff et al. 2012). I engage scholarship on refusal and resistance in quotidian practice with critical data studies of racialising surveillance to detail how residents disrupt and create un-accounted for data flows in their daily lives. Differences in ease of refusal make a difference for racial minorities, queer residents, and non- citizens for whom data flows mean continued exclusion from national futures. Overemphasis on visible protest in public space neglects the impacts of these quotidian acts of political resistance, particularly in highly surveilled contexts. I complicate existing smart citizenship research in which a sovereign republican subject engages in either wholesale acceptance of or resistance to the smart city. Analysing instead how differentiated residents navigate their "technological everyday" (Amin 2007) by spatialising "geographic counter-stories" (Kobayashi 2005), I argue, shows how state power is expressed and experienced through smart urban infrastructure. It also illuminates residents' agency in co-producing smart city futures, constructing their senses of self and nation, and practicing (smart) citizenship.