Events

This international workshop is organized by the Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore. It is funded by the Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 2 grant (MOE-T2EP40222-0001) on Capitals of the Future: Place, Power and Possibility in Southeast Asia.  

The workshop forms part of ongoing efforts to theorize cities as sites of futuring, where specific techniques of presentation, exhibition, immersion, designing, piloting, inter-referencing, and so on are deployed to create imaginations, possibilities, and actualizations of urban futures. While research on sites of memory and history are very well established (Nora, 1989), recent scholarship has taken a more forward-facing approach in examining how “some places are imagined as instantiations of the future” (Bunnell et al., 2022, p. 1083). Such approaches include consideration of ways in which sites of futuring are rendered and render each other as “truth spots” (Gieryn, 2018) in the contradictory age of thoroughgoing urbanization (Jones, 1997) and adaptation to the climate crisis. Related approaches not only consider cities as material and discursive environments that entail subjection to new regimes of everyday life and identity but also in relation to recurring events, digital hotspots, extended infrastructures, and other representational techniques of re/making futures and un/doing futures (Chakkalakal & Ren, 2022).

In our Capitals of the Future research project, the workshop organizers are examining greenfield urban sites of futuring in Southeast Asia that are rising as new capital cities (Nusantara), administrative centers (Putrajaya), and business and cultural hubs (Marina Bay, Jurong Industrial Estate, and Jurong Lake District in Singapore). We are also interested in similar cities and districts that have been built, or are planned, in Asia and beyond. Examples include Dholera, Neom, Songdo, Takanawa Gateway City, Xiong’an, as well as others that are expansions of metropolitan areas, connecting hubs between primary cities, and reclaimed industrial land. We invite expressions of interest from scholars examining such spaces and cities in relation to futuring in ways that include (but are not limited to):

• The framing of smartness, invocation of innovation, and deployment of futuristic technologies in the techniques of futuring
• Spiritual aspects of futuring visions that take on religious/pseudo-religious forms or secularized manifestations of cultural vibrancy and creativity
• The deployment and practice of visual and performing arts in the aesthetic politics of futuring
• Ecological expressions of human-nature relationships and green techniques of futuring in the making of the new cities
• Rearticulations of gentrification and the good life in geographies of futuring stretched across different scales from neighborhoods to mega-urban regions
• The reimagining of ways of living and working together, including governance institutions, spatial communities, and the social contract
• The futures past that new cities and districts have inherited and the times to come that they anticipate and seek to bring into being

SUBMISSION OF PROPOSALS

Authors of selected proposals will be notified by end-February 2025. Presenters will have to submit a draft of their papers (about 4,000-6,000 words) by 31 July 2025.

WORKSHOP CONVENORS

A/P Daniel P.S. GOH | Department of Sociology and Anthropology, National University of Singapore
Prof Tim BUNNELL | Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore
A/P Kah Wee LEE | Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore
Dr Priza MARENDRAPUTRA | Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore
Mr Zhan Jie HOW | Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore