ORCID Profile
0000-0001-9564-0008
Current Organisations
University of Sydney
,
The Education University of Hong Kong Faculty of Humanities
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Publisher: MDPI AG
Date: 03-02-2021
DOI: 10.3390/H10010027
Abstract: In 2017, the Singaporean government unveiled the Farm Transformation Map, a highly technology-driven initiative that intends to change its current, near-total dependence on imported food. The plan focuses on the prospect of high-productivity farming—in particular, integrated vertical, indoor, and intensive urban farming—as a possible solution to geopolitical uncertainty, intense urbanisation, and environmental degradation. What to farm (or not) and how to farm has long mediated social, cultural, political, and environmental relations. Following the stories of a few small- to medium-scale urban farms, including rooftop gardens, community farms, and organic farms, in this future-oriented city polis, this article explores the rise of urban farming through the politics of localism and the notion of care. How has localism, in some contexts, been reduced to a narrow sense of geographic location? What is being cared for in and through farming in urban locales? How might this type of farming transform and shape bio-cultural, social-technological relations within humans, and between humans and non-humans? More importantly, this article explores how urban agriculture might forge a kind of thick localism rooted in situated care as it carries out social missions, experimenting with and subverting the dominant imaginary of industrial farming.
Publisher: University of Technology, Sydney (UTS)
Date: 23-12-2019
Abstract: In 2013, the Singapore government announced a plan to build the Cross Island Line (CRL), the country’s eighth Mass Rapid Transit train line. Since its release, the proposal has caused ongoing heated debate as it involves going underneath Singapore’s largest remaining reserve: the Central Catchment Nature Reserve. Following extended discussions with environmental groups, the transport authority later stated that they would now consider two route options: a direct alignment running underneath the Central Reserve, and an alternative route that skirts the reserve boundary. The authority warned that the skirting option could increase the construction cost significantly and cost commuters an extra few minutes of travel time. Intriguingly, in contrast to the underground rail project that threatens to further fragment the Central Reserve, another, more visible, repair work is taking place at the edge of the same reserve, aiming to reconnect fragmented habitat through an eco-bridge. Through these two seemingly contrasting yet intimately related case studies in a highly developed city-state, this article explores the complexity and ambivalence of urban movement and its entanglement with development, techonology and urban natures. How are the discourses of urban mobility directed by the desire for ‘velocity’, the politics of invisibility, and a fixation on certainty? What might it mean to reconfigure contemporary practices and ethics towards multispecies movements in an increasingly urbanised environment? Amid the growing expansions of infrastructure and public transportation in Singapore and around the world, often in the name of sustainability and liveability, this article unsettles some taken-for-granted, velocity-charged and human-centred approaches to urban movement and explores the serious need to craft new possibilities for a more inclusive and flourishing urban movement.
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Location: Hong Kong
No related grants have been discovered for Jamie Wang.