Events

Speaker
Tim Bunnell | Department of Geography, National University of Singapore

Discussants
Jane M. Jacobs | Yale-NUS College, Singapore
Julia Lossau | Institute of Geography, University of Bremen, Germany
Chitra Venkataramani | Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore

Chairperson
James D. Sidaway | Department of Geography, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

In work on historical connections between the British port city of Liverpool and Southeast Asia, I have argued that dockside places articulated precocious “transnational” and “transregional” social relations. Long before social scientists even began to use such terms, for example, a clubhouse established by Malay seafarers in Liverpool plugged its members into long distance maritime social networks. These extended not merely back to the seafarers’ homeland region of (what we today call) Southeast Asia, but also to port town places around the world, most notably across the “Malay Atlantic” to New York City. In this presentation, I will use relational historical geographies of Malay Liverpool to engage with the three key terms that frame this Transregional Academy: infrastructures, regions and urbanizations. First, I map the rantau of seafaring Malays not as an areally-delimited “region” but as a globally-dispersed and interconnected sailortown. Second, I examine seafaring labour as a constituent part of global sailortown – Malay sailors contributing to but also exceeding commercial infrastructures of connectivity. Third, I consider the extent to which such infrastructures may be cast as evidence of extended urbanization. Challenging the conventional terracentricity of urban studies, recent work on planetary urbanization invites consideration of maritime infrastructure – sealanes and oceanic highways – as urban phenomena. My research on Malay Liverpool in turn begs an important geohistorical question of the burgeoning planetary urbanization literature: when were the oceans urbanized?

ABOUT THE SPEAKER AND DISCUSSANTS

Tim Bunnell is Professor in the Department of Geography and Chair of the Global Urban Studies cluster in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at NUS. Tim’s research centres upon issues of urban development in Southeast Asia, and that region’s global connections. His latest books are From World City to the World in One City: Liverpool through Malay Lives (Wiley, 2016) and Urban Asias: Essays on Futurity Past and Present (Jovis, 2018 – co-edited with Daniel P.S. Goh).

Jane M. Jacobs is Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College, Singapore.  Before joining Yale-NUS she taught at The University of Melbourne and University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (Routledge, 1996), Cities of Difference (Guilford, 1998), Uncanny Australia (MUP, 1998), and Buildings Must Die: A Perverse View of Architecture (MIT Press, 2014), as well as numerous scholarly papers. Trained as a geographer, the enduring concern of her scholarship has been the relationship between society and space, including the social shaping of urban built environments, the politics of heritage, and the practices of everyday habitation at both the city and the domestic scale. Her current research is a socio-technical history design innovation in Singapore’s large-scale housing provision system, 1960-1995.

Julia Lossau is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Bremen. The special focus of her professorship is urban geography, but she is also interested in cultural and political geographical approaches. Epistemologically speaking, her work is driven by a general interest in contradictions and, more specifically, in postcolonial theories. Her current research project explores the connections between places through materialities, technologies and social practice, focusing on Singapore and Bremen as case studies. She has recently co-edited a book on urban infrastructures (Infrastrukturen der Stadt, 2017, Springer VS). Her own contribution to this book explores the uncanny qualities of urban underground infrastructures, arguing for a perspective which is more sensitive to infrastructural aesthetics.

Chitra Venkataramani is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore. Chitra obtained her PhD in anthropology from Johns Hopkins University and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute at Harvard University. She has a background in architecture and visual design and is currently working on a book manuscript titled, “As the Plan Unfolds: Drawing, Time, and Ecological Politics in Mumbai,” which traces how fisher communities in Mumbai secure their right to housing and coastal infrastructure through the production of maps and plans. Her work intersects urban studies, visual culture, ecology, and science and technology studies.

This plenary lecture is held in conjunction with the closed-door forum by Transregional Academy on the theme “Infrastructures, Regions and Urbanizations” to be held from 29 September to 7 October 2018.

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