Negotiating digital urban futures: The limits and possibilities of future‐making in Singapore

Abstract

This paper brings into dialogue recent critical scholarship on smart cities and geographies of the future by examining how city dwellers encounter normative visions of the future supplied by government actors under smart urbanisation. I focus specifically on the prosaic but significant ways in which people (re)interpret and (re)produce urban futures in and through their everyday affective and material engagements with digital technologies. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and semi‐structured interviews, I discuss the extent to which state‐promulgated imaginings of digital urban futures projected by electronic payment infrastructures are negotiated by urban inhabitants in Singapore, at both the levels of the individual and the collective. Although there is a tendency in Urban Studies to read the smart city as depoliticising, the findings in this paper suggest that urban dwellers' lived encounters with digital urban futures are characterised and bound up with politics. Furthermore, this paper casts attention on forms of negotiation that emerge not from grassroots movements and/or democratic activism that have so far attracted social and cultural geographers working on the future, but everyday lived practice around the digital. Such a fine‐grained, practice‐based approach productively foregrounds emancipatory potential for reworking and reimagining normative digital urban futures. Equally importantly, it takes seriously the diverse and uneven future‐making capacities of urban inhabitants in the digitally mediated city, contributing to ongoing projects that seek to develop a globally oriented alternative smart urban agenda for cities and urban spaces in the 21st century.